Mitroff, Dana wrote: >Sean, > >Is the Brooklyn Museum of Art redesign to standards-compliant XHTML and >CSS being done in-house, or are you outsourcing to a web firm? > We hired a firm to do it, and I have keep them on the straight and narrow of standards-compliance -- which they're enthusiastic about though they hadn't faced it as a requirement before.
>If you are doing it in-house, how did you train your team > Well, since I am the team I found myself very easy to train :-) > to get >up-to-speed with the newest standards, besides reading Zeldman's book? > > I actually haven't read Zeldman's book though I am a long-time reader of zeldman.com and another site that he is involved in, alistapart.com, so I figure that it's about the same thing. On my desk I have /Constructing Accessible Web Sites/ by Jim Thatcher, et al. which is a pretty good introduction to accessibility issues, both in terms of policy and programming. Everything else was mentioned in another post by Andrew MacDonald. I would only add the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative <http://www.w3.org/WAI/>, and perhaps Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox columns <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/> (since good design, useability, and accessibility often intersect). >Do you have any recommendations for the list? > One thing people can do is to stop using Internet Explorer exclusively. Look at your site with Opera, Mozilla, or Lynx. Turn javascript off and see if everything still works. A lot of cellphones have web browsers -- give that a try. Download a demo copy of a screen-reader like JAWS to hear how your site sounds to a blind person. The dominance of IE and Microsoft monoculture tends to distort how (X)HTML has been designed to work in many different media. When you start to appreciate the multiplicity of contexts in which your web pages might be viewed, it's easier to rethink how your pages are built and your site structured. >And if you are >outsourcing, how did you select the firm? > > I wrote a very strict RFP with a lot of injunctions (e.g. No tables for page layout, No invisible spacing GIFs, No frames, etc.) We had hoped obviously to hire someone with experience in this area, but the firm we eventually hired hadn't created such a site before even though they understood the principles. Therefore, part of my job during this project is to educate them a bit. In some cases I've just told them how some feature must be structured and left it up to them to make it look good. >I look forward to seeing your redesigned site, and I'm sure others do, >too! > > Thanks! We're very excited about it here as well. Good Luck, SR -- Sean Redmond <[email protected]> Brooklyn Museum of Art Information Systems 718.501.6571
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