July 2007 Archives

Welcome to BlogHer 2007 attendees and other visitors. This post is an add-on for a presentation I'm giving this afternoon with Virginia DeBolt covering web standards, accessibility, optimizing your blog for mobile devices, and microformats.

Materials:

• Our Presentation: Why do bloggers care about web standards? (PDF)
• My Handout: Everyone Should Be Reading Your Blog, Right? (Word document)

Here are the topics covered in the handout and my part of the presentation, with links to the posts on All Access Blogging that give more details and instructions for how to make them happen with the different blogging tools. This blog is definitely a work in progress, so for a few topics, I haven't yet created tutorials. To receive updates as I add topics to the blog, sign up for the All Access Blogging feed or subscribe by email. It's a low volume blog, but I hope the materials I am putting together are helpful and practical.

• Break Up Your Post Into Paragraphs
• Make Your Link Text Meaningful
• Headings are Headings, Lists are Lists, Quotes are Quotes - coming soon
• Background, Text, and Links - some of this is covered in Check Your Link Colors, You May Need to Redecorate
• Don't Open New Windows Without Warning People - coming soon
• Label Your Images
• Resist Visual CAPTCHAs
• Make Your Content Easy To Find - coming soon
• Check Those Widgets - coming soon, but in the meantime see Rate Your Blog, but Don't Forget Accessibility for an example of a widget that needs a little work before it's accessible.

I always welcome advice, feedback, corrections, and questions. Especially if the instructions given don't actually work for your blogging software, I'd really like to know so I can update or correct the tips. Please feel free to comment on the post in question or send me an email at skyekilaen@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Tag: blogher07

I'm off to the BlogHer conference today, both to enjoy the conference and to give a presentation about making your blog more accessible. I met law blogger J. Craig Williams after I gave a similar presentation last year. Craig is a blogger with some serious technical muscle behind his law blog, May It Please The Court. He also stands out as a blogger who has given serious thought to accessibility as his blog has developed.

Thanks to Craig for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer some of my questions about his blog's target audience, why he has made accessibility a priority, and what features have been incorporated into his blog to make it more accessible.

Here we go.

Craig, how would you describe your blog?

May It Please The Court (MIPTC) focuses mainly on current legal cases of interest to the firm's clients and potential clients - especially cases within the areas where our firm practices law. I also cover the occasional oddball case or legal event that seems interesting. I find if the subject interests me, it seems to likewise interest my readers, at least so far.

MIPTC also includes a weekly, half-hour podcast of "Lawyer 2 Lawyer," an Internet radio show I do on the Legal Talk Network with another lawyer in Massachusetts, Bob Ambrogi. We cover current legal news and usually have three or so guests on the show.

Can you tell me a little bit about how your blogging intersects with your law practice? (Aside from not leaving you a lot of spare time!)

Blogging about legal cases requires that I read those decisions as they come out, which has the effect of making me better informed about current legal developments than I was before I started blogging. It's been a real boon to my continuing education, and I'm more tuned in to current events, as well, given all the reading I do on the Internet.

How much do you know about who reads your blog? Who do you imagine as your audience?

I have poured over the stats, which report a significant amount of information, even allowing me to drill down to the identity of an individual computer accessing the site. MIPTC surprisingly has readers from all over the world, with many from European countries, Russia, Asia, South America and Australia, although the great majority are from the United States. As just one example of its reach, on a recent trip to Australia, I was surprised to run into one of my readers who spotted me from having seen my photo on MIPTC. My readers include many business owners, other lawyers, judges, justices, law clerks, legislators, law professors and students and even Supreme Court law clerks.

I'm heading off to the BlogHer conference in a couple of days to introduce more bloggers to the basics of accessibility. In honor of this occasion, I thought I would share a couple of interviews with folks I had the pleasure to meet in connection with last year's BlogHer.

Nickie of the blog Nickie's Nook was not at BlogHer last year, but she commented on a post I had created to document the accessibility presentation I gave at that conference. This year, she was gracious enough to fit in an email interview around her classes, finals, and self-publishing a book called Nickie's Nook: Sharing the Journey that contains her essays and blog posts. (Coincidentally, Nickie chose to publish with Lulu.com, which had a table at BlogHer last year. See, the world is really very small.)

Thanks to Nickie for answering my questions about her blog, the assistive technology she uses, and website accessibility in general.

Let's get started.

Nickie, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I am a junior at a private women's college, majoring in social work. My interests include medicine, psychology, dogs, reading, blindness issues and, of course, blogging. I travel with Julio, a male yellow lab from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

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