A good read from the latest ALA:

“The Inclusion Principle”

What does your website sound like? Turn off your style sheet and look at what you’ve got. Suddenly the person listening to a website with a screen reader is no longer different from you—your needs are the same. Achieving the highest level of accessibility makes a lot of sense and should be part of your design efforts for reasons you no longer need others to justify for you.

…accessibility is often assigned a low priority for the following reasons:

1. We would like to create accessible content, but we only have a small team.
2. Nobody ever really complains about inaccessibility, anyway.
3. Accessible sites are less aesthetically pleasing and they limit our design options.
4. We really don’t know what it takes to make our website/web application accessible.
5. Our target user group doesn’t include users with disabilities.

Of all the arguments, number four is really the only valid reason why a website or web application should have accessibility issues. You can resolve this issue—provide your web designers and developers with some minimal and gradual accessibility training, and keep the discussion alive. As for the rest…they merely require a small, but powerful shift in mindset

In the next few years I predict a glut of University Advancement jobs going to new-media types who are masters of their tools and not much else.  With the prevalence of content management, web-templates, and social media tools, the recurring weakness of most any web project is content creation.

Writers.  Communicators. Storytellers.

Without these people, the designers, the developers, the usability experts, and the webmaster server types are useless. In the absence of substance, our tools mean nothing.  It’s packaging without product; A concert without music.

So don’t hire a web designer.  Don’t hire a “Social Media Expert”.  First and foremost, hire a communicator who also happens to specialize in one of those areas.  Your decision will pay dividends.

(saw that great little cartoon in IABC’s latest CW magazine) It struck a nerve.

It sings to the same tune as “The Discipline of Content Strategy” from A List Apart:

until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about. Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.