Monday, April 7, 2008
Web 3.0
Accessibility. The term is creeping into the corners of mainstream software documentation and onto the agenda's of corporate steering committees. But the standards and practice haven't yet come into demand enough among the "deciders" to be prioritized into development schedules. On the open source Web and non-corporate Internet, developers and designers have long understood accessibility as a basic value and incorporated it into architecture and code. That has not been the case in the rest of the maintstream, corporate business world.
Even with litigation inching the topic into executive's weekend reading, the mandate is only for discussion -- by business managers far removed from technical application. I find this frustrating since, as a developer I've been coding accessible Web sites for years and I know how simple and basic it is.
As an employee of a large organization I was assigned to build the HTML template for a new online application to be hosted as part of the enterprize Web site. I mentioned to the business manager in charge of the project what a great opportunity it was to make at least this part of the Web site accessible. "We don't have time for that," she admonished. "But, that's the beauty of it," said I. "It won't take any extra time. Because we're starting from scratch we'll just code it for accessbililty as we go -- doing it right, from the beginning." "No. Don't do it. There's no time." She marched off in her stressed-out, ignorance. Ironically, her job and the purpose of this application were to provide support resources for Cancer patients -- a population especially suited to the need for barrier-free access.
Anyway, I've noticed a lot of support from business executives for blogs and wikis and anything referenced as Web 2.0. This makes me think that if we sex up accessibility by referring to it as Web 3.0, we might make some headway in mainstream business Web production environments.
Even with litigation inching the topic into executive's weekend reading, the mandate is only for discussion -- by business managers far removed from technical application. I find this frustrating since, as a developer I've been coding accessible Web sites for years and I know how simple and basic it is.
As an employee of a large organization I was assigned to build the HTML template for a new online application to be hosted as part of the enterprize Web site. I mentioned to the business manager in charge of the project what a great opportunity it was to make at least this part of the Web site accessible. "We don't have time for that," she admonished. "But, that's the beauty of it," said I. "It won't take any extra time. Because we're starting from scratch we'll just code it for accessbililty as we go -- doing it right, from the beginning." "No. Don't do it. There's no time." She marched off in her stressed-out, ignorance. Ironically, her job and the purpose of this application were to provide support resources for Cancer patients -- a population especially suited to the need for barrier-free access.
Anyway, I've noticed a lot of support from business executives for blogs and wikis and anything referenced as Web 2.0. This makes me think that if we sex up accessibility by referring to it as Web 3.0, we might make some headway in mainstream business Web production environments.
Labels: web accessibility
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