Category: Tools

Accessible Writing Links

All the technology in the world won’t matter if your web content is hard to read. This can be a particular problem for anyone who uses “insider” talk, like research institutes, colleges, and nonprofits. This isn’t a complete list, but I recently found two sites that might help.

Crawford Killian’s “Writing for the Web” blog — Discussion and resources from someone who stays informed.

The Poynter online-writing listserv — Low-traffic list for the web-writing community. A couple of people post writing seminar announcements.

Readability.info — Analyzes web text for reading level, like the function on Microsoft Word. The site won’t write good web content for you, but it might be a useful tool.


Oh, a note– I’m ICI’s communications specialist, so I spent a lot of time editing material for the web.

Firefox is here!

I’ve used Firefox as my primary browser for development for the past year and it has performed great. I highly recommend it for you and your organization. From mozilla.org:

The wait is over. Firefox 1.0 empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser. Join more than 8 million others and make the switch today � Firefox imports your Favorites, settings and other information, so you have nothing to lose.

Accessible Search Engine

Without a doubt, my favorite online learning tool is Google where I can generally find answers to just about whatever real world problem I happen to be facing at any given time. I’m not sure how accessible Google and other major search engines are (or aren’t) but I just came across YouSearched which bills itself as The Accessible Search. I would doubt that the quality of search results is as high as the big players, but some of the features may be nice for certain situations.