Accessible collaborative documents

Despite the pooh-poohing of the for­mat, I am still back­ing the idea of a uni­ver­sal acces­si­ble web pol­icy for devel­op­ers. But lets take a step back and take care of the for­mat issue first. I chose to pub­lish this in a Word Doc, because every­body I know uses word to edit and write con­tent (includ­ing those with screen read­ers). It also has some fea­tures for track­ing changes, which we have already used on this doc­u­ment within my office.

So lets hear some con­struc­tive ideas on what for­mat we should all be work­ing in, as I am going to try and drag more peo­ple into this. I looked into Wikis a lit­tle bit, but it didn’t seem like a great fit for this project. Using and XML or HTML doc­u­ment seems like it might exclude peo­ple who don’t work with those formats.

Go.

Lets create an open source web accessibility policy

Recently I’ve come accross a prob­lem. Man­agers are often unable to con­vey what the acces­si­bil­ity requirments are for a prod­uct to their devel­op­ers, out­side of “it needs to be acces­si­ble.” I’ve been work­ing on a doc­u­ment that serves as both our acces­si­bil­ity pol­icy and as guide­lines for us and the devel­op­ers and con­trac­tors who work on our sites. Now I would like to release the first ver­sion of this doc­u­ment to any­body who would like to read it, and encourge any­body to make sug­ges­tions and changes [that are clearly marked] and send it back to me and I will look at inter­grat­ing the changes.

So Down­load the doc­u­ment and then email me back the doc­u­ment at ici.webmaster@gmail.com with your revi­sions. No guar­an­tees that your change will make it in every­time, but if we all are work­ing together, I think we can ceate a pretty use­ful document.