BSI British Standards is inviting all interested parties, and in particular marketing professionals and disabled web users, to review and comment on the draft of a new standard on accessible websites. DPC BS 8878 Web accessibility – Building accessible experiences for disabled people – Code of Practice is applicable to all public and private organizations wishing to offer accessible, usable websites to their customers. [...]

Based on PAS 78: 2006, Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites, DPC BS 8878 informs organizations of their legal responsibilities in relation to web accessibility, calling on them to appoint a specific person or department to oversee activity. [...]

The draft BS 8878 Web accessibility standard is available for viewing and commenting until 31 January 2009 – note that (free) registration and login is required.

Article via The Web Standards Project

Please RSVP via the website!

I’m totally excited. Now to find the money to book myself on to the course…..

The first speaker, Tom, spoke about the Sahana disaster management system, and how to design for mobile devices. Sahana is an open source web based disaster management system designed to help with the management of missing people, disaster victims, managing camps and other resources, and a range of other functions. In the case of the Sahana system, the application could be used on a PC or on a mobile device. Tom gave an overview of his suggestions of using the appropriate stylesheet and the benefits it brought about.

One of the examples that he provided stood out in my mind – imagine someone trying to use an old computer in some part of India, with a blurry 12 inch monitor, with a pirated copy of Windows, running on batteries (as the power has died). How would your website look on their browser? The key message from Tom’s presentation is that it is important to Important to think about the technology and the standards, but it is also important to keep the human elements of the process in mind.

John’s topic of Web Patterns has been on my “things to do” plate for some time. With some discussion happening around this similar issue at work (actually, this morning!) I was really keen to hear what John had to say. Web Patterns are not templates. They may not be the answer to all of life’s problems, but they’re are way of helping to define the problem, and possible solutions to the problems. In essence, it is about design patterns for web development.

John talked about Christopher Alexander et. al., who in 1977, published A Pattern Language. This brought up the idea of patterns in architecture, which can then be applied across multiple areas, such as the object oriented analysis and design (John mentioned the “gang of four” – Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides).

Having a common language for things was mentioned. John talked about the Semantic Web and the results from his earlier survey about the use of classes and ids. The results are interesting – there are over 5,000 class values and nearly 5,000 id values. So how do we go about creating a common language?

Also mentioned – the upcoming Web Directions web conference at the end of September. I can’t wait! The last two years (WE04 and WE05) were just fantastic, and from the topics lined up, it’s going to be another great one.

Since Amit Karmakar has written up a nice article about Richard Ishida’s talk on localisation and internationalisation, I don’t need to rehash what has been so nicely said.

Here are my flickr photos, along with Amit Karmakar, Russ Weakley, Peter Firminger, Ajay Ranipeta and Lachlan Hardy (coverage of Richard Ishida’s talk at the Melbourne WSG meeting).

When: Friday 10 February
Time: 3.00pm – 5.00pm
Topic: Internationalisation of web sites
Who: Ross Ackland and Richard Ishida
Where: CS&IT Building (Building 108). North Road, ANU Campus, Acton, ACT 2601
More information: http://webstandardsgroup.org/go/event53.cfm

If you would like to attend, please send an RSVP to canberra@webstandardsgroup.org.

See you there!

Canberra folks should be at the CS&IT Building (Building 108) at ANU on the 10th of February at 3.00pm. More details about the Canberra WSG meeting.

Richard Ishida of W3C will be talking about internationalisation at both meetings.

The speakers were Donna Maurer, who spoke about designing usable rich internet applications, and Dean Jackson, who spoke about the W3C. Donna’s presentation is available from her latest blog entry.

It’s always great having the opportunity to meet with fellow Canberrans who share a passion in the web standards/usability/accessibility field. Donna covered some interesting points about user expectations with rich internet applications. We’re still some time away until the state-like condition of this “newish” navigation model becomes more familiar to the user, but it’s definitely an interesting area to keep working away at.

As for Dean’s presentation, he asked some hairy questions about XHTML and HTML, and standards as a whole. He encouraged everyone to participate in reading the W3C specs, and providing feedback. On aside, I’m pretty keen on seeing his SVG demo ;)

Many thanks goes to Russ Weakley, Peter Firminger and Lisa Miller who drove up from Sydney to help us out with the first meeting. And many thanks of course to my fellow Canberra organisers, Michele Huston and Gavin Dispain.

Edit: Forgot to mention that WSG photos are available at Flickr, with more here and here!