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A business built on accessibility

In this month’s issue of Inc. Magazine (which I read religiously), you’ll find a feature article on Anna Bradley, who runs a business called Criterion 508 Solutions. (Unfortunately, the full article isn’t available online until later this month, but you can see the abstract here.)

My interest in the article is personal — one of the Criterion contractors featured in the article is Brian Walker, who I know from his presentations on accessibility at WritersUA. Congratulations, Brian!

Web site accessibility has been in the news recently because of the Target.com lawsuit. (Target’s web site has major accessibility problems.) Ms. Bradley points out that making web sites accessible is inexpensive — certainly cheaper than litigation and horrid publicity (i.e. “Target doesn’t care about blind people”) — and furthermore, an accessible web site allows an organization to increase the number of customers that use the site. In other words, from a business standpoint, it’s pretty easy to justify spending money to ensure that more people will be able to buy things from you.

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Ten for ten: training discounts until January 31

In 2007, we’re celebrating our tenth anniversary at Scriptorium. As part of this milestone, we’re going to offer discounts and giveaways throughout the year.

Our first special is 10 percent off any public training class on FrameMaker, XML, XSL, InDesign, or Photoshop. To get the discount, use the following coupon code during the checkout process in our online store:

10for10training

The code is valid through January 31, so register soon! For class dates, go to our online calendar.

Fine print on the discount: You can use the discount code only one time, so if you want to take multiple classes, register for all of them in one order.

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Party Time!

Here at Scriptorium, the party is just getting started. 2007 is our tenth anniversary year, and since we’re always looking an excuse to celebrate, we plan to have an anniversary announcement every month. Or perhaps the first ten months.

Or when we get around to it.

Look for our January anniversary announcement later this week.

And if you have any suggestion on celebratory goodies for customers, please let us know in the comments.

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Holiday slowdown…if only!

Most years, we slide into the holidays gracefully. Around Thanksgiving, we are busy, but by mid-December, we’ve delivered our end-of-year projects and are beginning to kick back for the holidays.

Not this year.

I’m not sure exactly what happened, but we have several projects due in January, and there is no slowdown in sight.

(Over the years, I’ve come to count on a slow couple of weeks around the end of the year during which I can finish up some long-term planning. This year, I will apparently be going to Plan B…when I figure out what that is.)

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A fresh coat of paint for the front door, er, page

Finally, FINALLY we have found some time to update our web site’s front page. We simplified the layout (no more nested nested nested tables), added a live feed from our blog, and did some general housekeeping. Please let us know what you think of the new look.

For the most part, it’s standard HTML/CSS, but we did use XSL to process our blog’s RSS feed.

We are particular interested in getting feedback from those of you running non-Windows, non-Firefox, non-Internet Explorer systems.

A new calendar is also on the way. More on that later this week or next.

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New York Times covers Target accessibility lawsuit

This is the first mention that I’ve spotted in major media (my scans of said media are pretty spotty, though).

Again, the reporting seems to break down to, “What [censored] was Target thinking?”

Most online stores go to great lengths to make sure that their sites are accessible to people with disabilities, simply because it is good business to allow as many people as possible to shop. And online-shopping technology specialists say it is not so difficult or costly a task.

About halfway through the article, it suddenly switches over to discussing accessibility in online education programs:

The issue has become critical because many online-only schools became eligible this summer to receive federal student aid. But to get such funds, organizations must adhere to regulations in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which has been updated to say that all Web sites of groups receiving federal money must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Lots of interesting new information in the article. Read the whole thing.

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I’m not alone in my obsession…

This blog features occasional digressions in ancient manuscripts, printing, and the like. So I’m delighted to find a similar tangent on words / myth / ampers & virgule:

“The Museum Plantin-Moretus (Moretus was Plantin’s son-in-law) houses the oldest extant printing press (amid several other presses that are not much newer), punches cut by Claude Garamond himself, over six hundred manuscripts dating back to the ninth century, the company’s nearly complete business archives, and other treasures that earned the museum the designation of a world heritage site.”

Yes, Garamond was a person before he was a font name.

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Get heard by Adobe

[updated to strip nasty Word HTML “tags”]

I received a request from Adobe today to distribute a questionnaire:

The Product Management team at Adobe is working towards defining the future roadmap of its leading Technical Communication products.

For this purpose we are trying to collect ideas, feedback and inputs from the technical communication community. This is to request your help in tapping your network to collect some responses to the attached questionnaire. It would be very helpful for us, if you could make this questionnaire available to your clients, users and network.

It should take around 15 minutes to fill the questionnaire. The respondents can fill up either the PDF form (compatible with Adobe Reader 7) or type their responses in the MsWord document. The responses can be sent to me at [email protected] or [email protected]

Do you have feature requests for FrameMaker or RoboHelp? Here’s your chance to send your complaints to someone who can do something about it:

Word version of survey
PDF version of survey

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Closed captioning in online video

The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a detailed article about online video and the lack of closed captioning.

Though television networks and movie studios are rapidly expanding into Internet distribution, few online videos offer the closed captioning that companies are required by law to offer to TV viewers. (link, will expire in about seven days)

Unlike TV broadcasts, closed captions are not mandatory for online video, and the major broadcasters are currently choosing not to provide them for the shows they are putting online.

As a result, online video represents a step backward for hearing-impaired viewers–it’s essentially unusable.

I expect that this loophole will be closed rather swiftly.

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Project Mars — not chocolate?

The announcements just keep coming from Adobe today:

Mars is the code name for technology being developed by Adobe that provides an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based representation of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. (Mars page at Adobe Labs)

In the long term, I think this means the Death of Distiller. Other than that, I think my brain has gone into information overload.

Any thoughts on where this is going?

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Rethinking the periodic table of elements

[heavy blogging. I must be trying to avoid some unpleasant task.]

Most of you probably don’t know that I spent the first two years of my college career as a chemistry major. When push came to shove, I decided that I would rather serve as editor of the science magazine than take analytical chemistry (which was notorious for an all-consuming laboratory component). And really, who could find working in Gross Chemistry Laboratory appealing? (To add insult to injury, the approach to the chemistry building was a set of steps that were completely unusable by humans, as each stair required about one-and-a-half strides. The joke on campus was that the civil engineering department had designed the stairs. “But Duke doesn’t have a civil engineering program.” “Not any more.”)

In any event, here is a fascinating new look at the periodic table, as a spiral. (h/t New York Times via Feld Thoughts)

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Accessibility suddenly moves up the priority list

Most web designers are aware of Section 508 requirements, which in essence require web sites to be accessible to persons with disabilities. However, Section 508 applies only to companies that sell to the United States government. Provided you’re willing to give up the U.S. government as a potential customer, your web site could be completely inaccessible.

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Making Friends with XSL

I have a pattern of learning things The Hard Way. That is, get a book, dive in, and just do it. Eventually, some order emerges from the chaos, and one day, it all starts to make sense. This approach has failed once or twice — my ill-fated attempts to learn Perl come to mind.

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