.Clans
5.Date and time stamps, current dating of content and or graphics and other visual inspections reveal whether the web site is being maintained on a regular basis. This method usually requires a review of the entire web site, while if the author maintains a history section it is usually quicker and easier to verify.
We have made changes to our CSS which should render uniform resizing of pages with various resolutions and browsers. For those who may also experience "tiny" print, our approach was to make all fonts display as relative and we selected the "small" display which is approximately equal to 12 points.
October 2004.
November 2004.
December 2004 Through January 2005.
February Through October-2005.
November 2005 Through January 8, 2006.
January 9 Through May 31, 2006.
June 2006.
July Through August, 2006.
September 2006 Through March 2007.
April 2007 Through September 2007.
November 2007 Through December 2007.
Completed the following in the month of October, 2004.
Various "return to" pages have been corrected and clarification where required when a particular page if referenced by more than one parent page.
The navigation is now uniform throughout the "Talking Hands Section" of our web site with a return to the "entry page" and the "resource section" has been reordered.
Our honoree's section's still have a "parent to parent" return and "off site" returns, so undecided at the time of this post is whether make all links either or the other, or clearly identify "off site" returns in the title attribute. With over 6,000 links you can imagine my thoughts on this area of the excellent review and assessment.
The gold edition awards which apply to honoree's who achieve both WAI and W3C or WDG validation have been clearly marked in their respective laudations. Under the teaching element in which the website excels only the WAI is noted for our disABLED visitors.
A reference to DCA (Disability Compliance Alliance) which Bernie Howe hosted on his web site after both of us decided to render our mark ups in XHTML no longer exists since our good friend is plowing forward to XML 1.1 validation. The effort in this area is now thankfully hosted by Webmates under the careful hand and warm heart of another dear friend - Carlos. Webmates is now closed too.
Started the following in November, 2004. As the pages conform to both Cynthia Says and Bobby for AAA validation we are placing a this link at the bottom of each page-XHTML~CSS~Accessibility. All other pages which do not have the new link are section 508 or better. Below are notes to myself and others who may be interested.
Reconciling AAA Errors Cynthia Says and Bobby I am quite sure all of you have found the following by now, but just in case the information and really a note to myself as well
A major difference between Cynthia Says and Bobby 5.10.2.3 used on the local computer are the following
Bobby with catch a H nesting problem and the hard stop or a period after multiple consecutive links, but Cynthia Says will not. Perhaps this has to do with my settings for either or both. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
In addition, we use the H3 settings for our right hand navigation and a H1 for titles, so when there is no H2 in the page, Bobby will indicate a nesting problem. We have then changed the header to H2 and the error is eliminated.
But Bobby does not catch the following and Cynthia Says Does for XHTML pages
In addition Bobby reads the primary link and not sub pages, so even though the links would be different, they are treated as using the same link for two sources.
All of this with certainty tells me what virtually everyone else has found, that using more than one machine Validator is absolutely necessary. Of course there are the manual checks.
None of this diminishes either or both validators or any others for that matter. But if we wish to continue this wonderful journey, we should exercise due diligence and use all of the tools at our disposal.
Conversion to XHTML
Finished converting all pages to XHTML with Tidy, which was augmented with the addition of the html code lines below. Will make the change over to UTF-8 within the next few months.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">.
Accessibility and Fixes
Several helpers were needed to render the pages valid and accessible. First there was the blue border on some graphics and the elimination of "graphic" in the alt descriptions. I opted for the inline CSS.
<style type="text/css">
img {border: 0}
</style>
place this above the </head>
Or in the CSS as below
img
border: 0px none;
Cynthia Says and Bobby were used for WAI validation on our local computer. The lines of code below were inserted for the Cynthia Says validation, which Bobby does not require.
<meta name="language" content="en-US" />
<meta name="country" content="USA" />
Image Maps
See the image maps contained in the following pages for compliant coding:
Finished the conversion of award honorees for 2003 through 2005 to conform with a CSS driven table layout, which proves much easier to update, adds some color to break the present black and white presentation and reduces the horizontal space and is easier for a screen reader to "read."
An accessible map of the teaching and
learning elements by year which had been put on the back burner for several years was finally completed.
I consolidated TSF section, which was a major effort. The resulting link checking and updating should be streamlined and result in a significant time saving.
Graphic images were optimized using PSP6, additional poetry was published, my web search engines were updated, new 2006 pages were created and all pages were checked on my local machine for W3C and WAI conformance prior to uploading.
Several white papers were added to the resource section; RSS was established; Two white papers were published on EZines; completed revisions indicated by our association with SiteMorse and we have achieved an 8 out of 10 on all 632 pages. Additional improvements like fetch and broken links have also been fixed, so the overall score should be higher, but no revised scores are available at this writing.
A clearer presentation is now available by quarter starting with the establishment of a second level of the Talking Hands Award (gold) on June 18, 2004. WAI, W3C or WAI and W3C are uniformly presented in the honorees laudation and at the beginning of each quarter a notation as to whether there are no honorees for the gold edition or none for our basic edition.
A task to be completed in July is to work with Aiko Timmer in the syndication of RSS feeds and a way to update those feeds in real time.
A new outline was completed which served as the basis for material organization and rewrites. The outline was rendered as a color coded site map where the topic is (no color), the subtopic is (brown), the subtopic detail is (yellow) and the subtopic detail division is (green). The title attribute was used to identify the outline and provide an alternative when color is used to convey meaning. Several techniques were used to tidy up the website included the following:
The ever present problem of separating adjacent links with more than white space as a period, was hidden from the browser by adding a class to the CSS of dot.
Another problem in WAI validation is the improper nesting of headings was to change the CSS where both H1 and H2 were the same font and both as relative, rather than an absolute size.
A family centered activity in which we have participated for the past seven years as of this writing is undergoing a reorganization and downtime to complete the process in September 2006. This gave us the opportunity to completely rewrite research and resource material completed over the years into a separate section to be included in our Resources Section. We also moved other resource material like copyright, citations, and white papers into this section.
Minor tuning was completed in the latter part of 2006. During 2007 I worked off and on completing title attributes for "Opens in new window offsite"; implementing new designs which Jo Phillips graciously provided for our backgrounds and quarterly awards; as time permitted also took the suggestions from SiteMorse which included better key words. The reorganization with header elements will be started after tax season.
Our clans section was completely revamped. Descriptions were included and a survey was conducted to be sure all the major sections of our web site included kindred souls were included.
Finished quarterly background CSS for the four quarters.
Completed over two hundred informational pages for the Faerie Festival Calendar. Publication of a celebration for the Faerie, which is the theme of Lancasters Laughing Place, accomplishes a dream this author has had since 1996 when a Faerie theme was adopted. Now at long last there is a major section which is much more than just interesting facts, rather essays which are thoroughly researched and give cause for a celebration according to a day in the year.
Copyright:1986-2008