STC AccessAbility SIG
A Blog About Accessibility and Technical Communication

SIG member, Whitney Quesenbery shares this news:
The HFES 200 has been approved as an American National Standard (ANSI). HFES is the Human Factors and Engineering Society, which has authored several standards relating to usability, accessibility, and ergonomics.
HFES 200 covers Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interface, and has been carefully harmonised with other standards, notably [...]

Read: HFES 200 is now an ANSI standard »

Filtering visitors, or unwanted visitors, is a challenge to those who maintain websites. Unwanted visitors refers to those who want to post material unsuitable for children, grandparents - or even yourself! (I’m talking about spammers and their ilk.)
Unfortunately, one of the popular methods of filtering creates a barrier for other legitimate visitors. This method is [...]

Read: How inclusive is CAPTCHA? »

Did you know that the STC Technical Summit being held in Atlanta next May will be recorded? Tom Johnson interviewed Lloyd Tucker, STC’s Director of Education and Membership to learn more about this new service.
What did Tom ask Lloyd?

Why did the STC decide to record all the sessions this year?
Won’t the cost be astronomical?
Technically, how [...]

Read: The STC Technical Summit 2009 in Atlanta will be recorded! »

The SIG has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon.
We tweet at http://twitter.com/stcaccess.
Tweet? Twitter? Let’s take Twitter first. Twitter is often called micro-blogging. Entries posted to Twitter can only contain 140 characters. These postings, or messages, are called tweets.
We have mentioned tweets on this blog earlier in connection with the June 2008 Technical Summit. When the next [...]

Read: The AccessAbility SIG is now tweeting! »

Digital Inclusion: evolving accessibility and usability is the title of an interesting blog post that showed up this week. The author, Ian Crocombe, discusses what you can do to learn about the behavior of the users of public websites. As he reminds us, “when you’re trying to communicate with at risk groups, you can reduce [...]

Read: Digital Inclusion or Digital Disengagement and Social Exclusion? »

Did you know that Stanford University now has an Online Accessibility Program?  They call it “SOAP” for Stanford Online Accessibility Program. I came across this today and thought you might be interested to see it: http://soap.stanford.edu/. The site offers resources and information; tips, tricks, and tutorials; a developers toolbox; and special program services for the [...]

Read: Stanford University’s Online Accessibility Program »

We have exciting news about the 2009 Technical Communication Summit to be held 3–6 May 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia. The STC Board of Directors has just approved the purchase of conference management software that will give STC the capability to record the entire conference. The audio recording will be synchronized with the PowerPoint presentation and [...]

Read: STC to Record Entire Conference in Atlanta! »

In Digital Web Magazine last month, Leona Tomlinson of Agoo IT wrote a great article on understanding disabilities when designing a web site. While some of the information can be found in many places, Tomlinson distills a broad range of information in one article, making it ideal for sharing with those new to Web accessibility. [...]

Read: Understanding Disabilities When Designing a Web Site »

Share news about your local events that have accessibility on the menu! Here’s a tip from the Boston, Massachusetts area submitted by our SIG member, P.J. Gardner, Information Designer and Web Accessibility Consultant.
If you live in the greater Boston area, please consider attending the following event on the “New Section 508″!
I thought I would personally [...]

Read: Boston-IA Presents a Talk on Section 508 Refresh, October 22 »

Our Flickr account holds photos from conferences and meetings. These are collected in photo albums on the Photos page. In addition to the SIG’s photos, we are connected to several groups in Flickr that contain interesting images to use for your blogs and other writing related to accessibility and technical communication. Scroll to the section [...]

Read: Photo Group Collections to Illustrate Your Blogs and Other Writing »