According to this dig_ref post, the wonderful Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center will be running a trial of virtual reference service for the visually impaired by implementing OCLC's QuestionPoint with the Enhanced capabilities, featuring the use of audio chat (VoIP) and co-browsing. Kudos to the MITBC for consistently being on the forefront of accessibilty pursuits. The service can be accessed here. If you're interested in helping them put it through its paces, details are in the dig_ref post.

As an aside, I was perusing the QuestionPoint site and saw that they offer an interesting (although clearly self-serving) partnership opportunity for LIS programs to help students (and faculty) gain practical experience with virtual reference. Sounds like fun.

Henk Ellerman posted a worthwhile commentary on why governments should promote Open Access:

The realization that accessible knowledge, and not just knowledge, is a vital part of our economy, can give the Open Access movement more momentum then it does seem to have now. The Open Access movement needs to make it's relevance for society as a whole very, very explicit. It should ask for more political and financial support.

If you actually come to my site, rather than viewing this in your aggregator, you may have noticed I've been toying with certain elements of the style. Since these may not appear to be substantial changes, you may be wondering why. And the answer is accessibility. I have been very negligent in designing for people with lower screen resolutions than mine (1280x1074) and my server stats tell me that means just about everybody.

I haven't intentionally viewed a page in 800x600 in years, but when I did, I was stunned to see the whole layout essentially broken with the sidebar disapperaing into the netherworld and a single post taking up well over a screen. So towards remedying those issues, I've made some changes that are somewhat less appealing on my screen, but hopefully more comfortable on yours. Any comments?

Sorry for the disappearing act, but I was having IP address conflicts on my broadband connection for the past 40+ hours.

I wanted to provide a somewhat more authoritative opinion than my own regarding screen readers and the order of content on websites. Fortunately, Phil Bradley came through with a link to this Pandia article offering 14 tips and techniques for making your site accessible. It not only speaks to the "content on top" principle, but some other really good ideas that I hadn't considered.

Given the recent discussion on making your website accessible, I thought I should direct you to a new service that I discovered via Ben Hammersley today. BrowserCam is a web design tool that will provide a screen capture of the URL's of your choice in a wide variety of browsers and operating systems. This is great if you don't happen to have a Mac or Linux box to test out your coding on. It's frightening to see how your CSS is 'handled' by old versions of Netscape. BrowserCam is offering a free 8 hour trial, which should be enough time to see what kind of accessibility nightmares you have on your hands, but not enough time to fix them.

Continuing in the Web Words vein, Steph over at Technobiblio, a great new collaborative blog, posted some interesting new developments on the accessibility front: Accessibility options becoming more accessible.

She asks "Can I just state how cool it is to see accessibility issues being addressed in creative ways?" Yes, please do and let's hope it doesn't stop here. There is so much to be done. Virtually every library home page and catalog interface could use a redesign with accessibility standards in mind.

Consider a visually impaired person who surfs by having pages electronically read aloud. Now imagine what happens when that person visits a site which has an extensive menu bar on the left and the regularly updated content on the right. Typically, given the way e-readers are programmed, to hear the new content, they will have to sit through a reading of the entire menu bar each and every time they visit.

This is unacceptably negligent. You'll notice that the well-designed LIS blogs (for example, Library Stuff, LISNews.com and of course, TechnoBiblio) are conscientious of this potential problem, providing content first, sidebar second. This is more about ignorance than design, so it's crucial that we continue to talk about accessibility and keep these issues in the forefront. Kudos, Steph.

Peter Scott links to a new UK project called Web Words. The concept is to provide a higher level of audiobook browsablility by providing links from catalog entries to mp3s containing samples of the actual reading. Nothing particularly complicated is required to integrate these links as MARC format provides the 856 field specifically for that purpose. Although Web Words is geared toward the visually impaired, I imagine that it will prove useful to others who want to "sample the goods" before investing their time in an potentially inferior product.