Developers of free accessibility testing tools have joined forces in the Web Accessibility Tool Consortium. Being a user of a lot of these tools, I welcome this as it means that instead of working against each other we can have a nice, integrated approach and brain-picking from a pool of good people.

The consortium includes some well-known accessibility players from all over the globe, as Gez Lemon put it:

WAT-C is a collaboration of some of the world’s leading accessibility practitioners. These developers of free web accessibility testing software & services include:

• Accessible Information Solutions [Australia]
• Infoaxia [Japan]
• Juicy Studio [UK]
• The Paciello Group [USA]
• Wrong HTML [Japan]

The consortium will promote and pursue software development goals including:

• Free web accessibility testing software
• Enhanced development of existing web accessibility testing tools
• The internationalization of web accessibility testing software

Now, if only screen reader development companies would catch that drift and come up with a developer edition that does not time out after 30 minutes or has other limitations…

My company is currently asking me once again to create an HTML newsletter. And once again, the content is not quite finished. Now, I do so not want to create an HTML newsletter, because:

• email is flooded as it is
• I have yet to encounter an HTML newsletter that is not bloated or works in all my email clients in use (Gmail, Squirrelmail, Firefox, Outlook)
• I would like our emails to reach the recipents, not end up in spam filters.

Personally, I want my company to support RSS, as we all know the benefits:

• You can easily create it from an interface like WordPress
• It is a Pull and not a Push technology, meaning I invite people to learn about us, not force them to
• It is much more versatile and supported by more readers / platforms

The issue I have now is how to tell business stake holders about this. They heard of successful email campaigns and of course they have read newsletters they love (in Outlook). Are there any success stories about RSS out there?

This morning Digital Web finally released the article I have been promising people at @media in July this year: 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility.

The article describes reasonable facts that prevent us from reaching our goal to sell and maintain accessible web sites. I collected these from client interaction in the last three years with clients reaching from Blue Chip down to internal products.

Apart from the normal reaction whenever one of my articles gets released – groupies storming my flat, people offering their firstborn and donating thousands of dollars via paypal – I was also very happy to get lots of good comments.

Being yet another vain web publisher, I also checked who is linking to the article and to me, and found out about a phenomenon I had encountered earlier with other articles (insert thunder and lightning effect here):

Remote Commenting

What that is – and yes, I just made that term up – is the phenomenon that great comments about a certain publication tend to be made anywhere but where the publication lives. In this case, Roger Johannson’s blog got some really good feedback which would have been more beneficial at Digital Web itself.

It is not about the poor writer hunting for other feedback – or even accusations she cannot justify – it also is about the quality of the discussion.

Many a times an A List Apart article had the better solutions to the problem it discussed in the comments, and they are still available years later. If your valuable input was published somewhere remotely, nobody will ever find it once the article became old news.

I just had to deactivate Mint on the CSS table gallery as it maxed out the server resources due to too many database connects per minute. I posted on the help forum and see if there is a way around that. A shame, I like the product a lot.

The beep has a nice new test for you to find out what kind of personality you are.

Allegedly I am a big thinker