I was pleased (and rather surprised) to be nominated for “standards champion” in the .net awards. The thing is, the competition is, um, quite fierce! I’m up against the W3C, Mozilla, and some of the best known names in the business (like Zeldman). So I’m not picking out a suit for the ceremony, but bear with me a moment, there’s a couple of things to consider.
First of all, the award is for:
a site, individual or organisation promoting accessible design in 2008.
Accessible design, hmm. Well, the organisations don’t really promote accessible design really, so as nice as it is to be considered with the W3C and Mozilla, they wouldn’t get my vote.
Also, if the award were for standards champion of all time, or a lifetime award, then it would be very stiff competition between Zeldman, Shea, Molly, Meyer & Cederhome (in reverse alphabetical order). But I’m not sure any of them have been promoting accessible design this year?
.net is also a UK based magazine, and I’m hoping a little patriotism might bias people towards the UK based entries 😉
So that leaves:
- Me
- Christian Heilmann
- Julie Howell
Julie Howell is very well known in the accessibility world, campaigning for over a decade whilst at the RNIB, technically authoring the PAS 78 standard and is still right in the thick of things on an upcoming British Accessibility standard. I would assume that, like me, a lot of Julie’s work is for clients, helping them create accessible sites.
Christian Heilmann, “International Developer Evangelist” at Yahoo!, is the creator of accessible versions of Flickr, Easy-Youtube, a method of captioning youtube videos, and even injecting lang attributes into twitter via google!
Perhaps most importantly of all, he has organised the scripting enabled conference, a day of understanding the issues, followed by a day of trying to fix them! (I will be there.)
I’m one of the founders of Nomensa, we’ve been creating accessible sites since 2001. I post here quite a bit, on quite a wide spread of accessibility topics, and in .net magazine. Not incredibly inspiring stuff, but there is one thing that I haven’t mentioned yet. Recently we created the web accessibility and development guidelines (based on WCAG 2) for a well known multi-national, who will be enforcing this with their development agencies for around 500 websites. That should see quite a sea change at that level, as it will be part of the contract for all their new sites to test against and commit to meeting WCAG 2.
Getting that sort of initiative going took not only buy-in at quite a high level in the organisation, but a lot of work to educate the people involved, and willingness to fit accessibility into their current processes and troubleshooting to get past initial problems.
In terms of putting practical tools for accessibility into the hands of developers, Christian wins hands down. However, please do make your own choice at the .net awards.
Well, you’ve got my vote Alastair! Good luck 🙂
Like the Oscars, it’s the nomination that counts… but it’s the work that counts the most!
That said, I don’t think any one person’s efforts nor any one one piece of work makes a huge amount of difference in isolation. The combined efforts of everyone who cares about the future prosperity of older and disabled people will bring about the change we want to see (plus a little bit of luck in the form of social change).
Like you, I can look back over a decade and see positive change and greater understanding among those with the power to build a better web. Now the foundations have been laid it’s the turn of practitioners to take up the baton.
IMHO, it’s now time for the big software developers to step up to the plate. Wouldn’t it be cool to see some of their names on next year’s shortlist?
Way Cool AC you got my vote. Sorry Julie
Christian got through to the second round (against W3C and Zeldman), and got my vote.