New Togs for the STC AccessAbility Blog

Whoa! This site has a new look! What’s the story?

Well, we have been having some issues on the back-end. Despite the love for a WordPress theme that was accessible from Day 1 (Sea Beast by the talented Mike Cherim, we had to admit it was a bit old in the code, which required a bit too much tweaking. Tweaking can be fun and a great learning experience, but survival tweaking can be tiring, especially for volunteers.

Our most excellent Web Diva, Cynthia, found this theme. She told me there was a lot of potential here, including the fact that it was “X-UA-Compatible“. (Yes, I had to look that up.) There is more than that, of course. We will write up our adventures with making this site accessible so that others can learn from our experience. Cyn is the expert in all this. Don’t look at me! I am going to grab the CSS and find some nice colors that will make the color checkers at Juicy Studio and WebAIM proud.

This is a work-in-progress. Please bear with us.

Please do share your comments along the way. Go ahead and comment on issues you find now. The more checkers, the merrier. Tell us how you are reading this blog (screen reader, RSS feed, and so on) and what you experience there. You may reveal something we overlooked or put too far down on the to-do list.

Oh, the nice photos of flowers and plants in the header are included in the theme. There are three set to rotate, but Cyn changed it so that the pictures only change when you navigate to another page. If you have a nice photo or two with a clear technical communication or accessibility theme that you would like to share with us under Creative Commons, drop us a note in the comments and we’ll talk. We’re working out placement of the SIG logo and the STC logo, and they might be added to a layer of the photo. It depends. Time will tell.

Enjoy!