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Officially the law only requires government agency web sites to be accessible, but, if you have a web site, why would you not want those who need assistive technology to be able to use your website.  Even if the only thing on your website is your name, phone number and address, you still want the blind guy across town to spend money at your place of business, right?  Imagine if all your competitors don’t have the forethought to do the work on their website and yours is the only one the aforementioned blind guy across town can read…

Anyway, here’s some official stuff about Section 508.

In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities. Inaccessible technology interferes with an ability to obtain and use information quickly and easily. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, open new opportunities for people with disabilities, and encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ‘794 d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to access available to others. It is recommended that you review the laws and regulations listed below to further your understanding about Section 508 and how you can support implementation.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. ’794 d), as amended by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (P.L. 105 – 220), August 7, 1998

(original source in uscode.house.gov)

If you would like an audit done on your website, and a quote on making sure those with disabilities can use it, shoot me an email.  I’m happy to spend a little time.

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In my new day job, I came across a problem today that I had never seen.  The application I’m working on requires an inordinate amount of JavaScript (in the form of jQuery).  Basically I’m display large amounts of data from a database in a graphical form using jQuery Spidergraphs.  The problem I ran into is that large institutions, such as LCC, are still using Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP machines because of other software limitations.  The particular jQuery that I’m using needs the <canvas> HTML5 tag in order to display the data, and IE8 doesn’t even know what the <canvas> tag is about.  

After a couple hours of beating my head against the wall and trying different DOCTYPE declarations, I finally figured out that it was in fact the lack of <canvas> that was my problem.  A co-working pointed me to ChromeFrame.  This nifty little script looks at the browser that’s loading a page and, if it’s IE that doesn’t support <canvas> (and other things) it throws up a warning and offers to install a little utility to help you out.  Once you say ok, everything works just like it’s supposed to.  Pretty good time saver.  Not sure why everyone doesn’t just install it.

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The DQP Project in Oregon is a joint effort of all seven Oregon University System (OUS) institutions and the state’s seventeen independent community colleges to develop the Degree Qualifications Profile for Oregon. The DQP Project in Oregon will provide a descriptive curricular framework for describing institutions’ degree outcomes across the state, both in their unique characters and in their shared aspects. The project relates directly to the missions of each institution to support their students’ success during college, upon graduation, and in transitions within the Oregon educational system. This statewide partnership of educational institutions has the active support from both the Oregon University System (OUS) Chancellor and the Oregon Community Colleges and Workforce Development (CCWD) Commissioner.”

Now that we have the “official explanation”, here’s why I’m talking about it.  I have been hired for the duration of the DQP grant to act as DQP Web Applications Developer working on-site at Lane Community College.  The project is pretty cool.  Lots of technology and lots of awesome people in the IT department at Lane.  

I started full time with them early in December 2012 and will be there until sometime mid-2015 working on this and other related projects.  The DQP is my core responsibility, so that’s what I’ll talk about here.  I’m going to break it up by section though.  Otherwise this would be one really long post.  

The website itself is set up so that member institutions have one place to go to get and store information on the DQP program.  There is a public side (with public data for everyone to see) and a secure side (where the institutions go to input data that feeds the public side).  

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The design of the site is pretty basic.  Logo, mega-menu, breadcrumbs, custom PHP stuff, footer menu…  The entire site layout is CSS with tables being used ONLY for tabular data.  Just the way it’s supposed to be.  I took a lot of time to make sure it loads properly in recent browsers (back to IE 8) and loads quickly considering how much “stuff” is going on behind the scenes.  

Stay tuned for posts about specific areas of the website.  It’s pretty cool stuff.  

If you want, you can check out the DQP at http://www.oregondqp.org

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Mercy Hospital in Nampa Idaho is a client of BBG Marketing.  Mercy wanted a calendar created for their website so they could input events and have them come up in order with certain details, like time, duration and location.  At the time there just weren’t any open source applications to install, so I wrote them custom application to suit their needs.  It was pretty cool.  They could add, edit and duplicate events with a few clicks and they would display through the day of the event, then disappear.  

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For the events that recurred every week, the calendar would display the single event with multiple dates, but as the date passed, it would disappear leaving the rest of the dates for that month.  Seems simple, but it was quite the ordeal.

I always liked working for Mercy Nampa.  A couple years ago their parent corporation, or whatever you call the big group a hospital belongs to, changed hands and the new company had internal web guys.  They had me help with the transition and even had me take care of a few things before the final change, but I haven’t worked on their stuff in a while now.  I’ll have to check out the current site.  See if it’s as good as the work I did.  :)

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Brent is a musician from the Portland area.  He spends a big chunk of the year traveling around doing concerts and needed a way to sell tickets on his website.  He already had the website, but had no idea how to integrate PayPal and a shopping cart.  He called me and I took care of him.  Not a huge project, but it was a pleasure listening to his CD while I worked.

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He also had an email list he needed to be able to manage through his website.  Pretty easy stuff these days, but it used to require some javascript editing to get those list managers to look like your site.  I think it came out really well.

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This was a singing group my mom belonged to.  As you can probably imagine, I didn’t have to try real hard to get the job working on this site.  Of course, I also didn’t get paid much for it.  I think it was a pretty nice design though.  At the time, the circles and stuff were really in.  

I figured the site needed to look as good as the group sounded.  I came close.

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Hire A Daughter was  a cool idea an ex-eldercare provider had.  She had worked in memory care facilities and just didn’t like the lack of attention she was able to give the residents.  She decided to go out on her own and do in-home visits and respite care.  Unfortunately, the business never took off.  Maybe a little ahead of its time.  The website was really cute though.  :)

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Morning Glory Inn was a bed and breakfast way out in the country near Roseburg.  Right on the Coos Bay Wagon Trail, actually.  You could sit on the porch and practically hear the horse drawn wagons going  by full of kids with cholera and stuff.  (Just kidding on the cholera thing, but it was right on the Coos Bay Wagon Trail.)

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The site was a pretty early one in my career, but the design was really good.  It had a small MySQL database for local activities that the owner took care of and another one for the Quilter’s Nook where she scheduled quilting parties.  Not really my cup of tea, but it was a cool little database.

The “Tour our beautiful Inn” link took you to a page with descriptions of the different rooms for rent and each room’s page had a full 360 degree virtual tour when those were really hard to do.  I know, any dummy with an iPhone can do them now, but back in the day it took expensive equipment and a lot of know how.

All in all, it was a fun little site.  I wouldn’t mind doing more of them, or even a hotel/motel website.  If you need one of those, definitely give me a call.  I can help.  Even if you have one of those funky corporate ones from your franchise.  They work great for some things, but they never capture the local flavor.

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Goin’ Postal and Copy Copy Shop is a locally owned franchise that does everything shipping related, like packing your packages, sending it by the best carrier, holding your mail, renting post office boxes…  All that stuff.  Copy Copy Shop, obviously, is a copy shop.  Color copies, zillions of them?  No problem.

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One pretty cool thing I did custom for them was adding a Google search bar that you can paste any tracking number from any carrier into and Google will sort out who the carrier is and show you where it’s at.  Oh, two cool things.  The icons on the bottom of the picture have a hover over action.  When your mouse goes over them, a tool-tip-like window pops up telling you about the service you’re hovering over.  Pretty slick.

I also gave them custom email addresses that customers can send documents to be printed.  Nothing amazing there, but some of those documents can be HUGE.  My server handles it no problem and I was able to give him a disk quota big enough to not run out of space after a few of those HUGE files.

If you need to ship your Christmas gifts, or anything really, I highly recommend Dave at Goin’ Postal.  He’s local and he’ll do a good job for you at a fair price.  Much better than the UPS Store.  None of the money you give them stays local.  That’s bad.

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Herbert Lumber had recently lost their website to a server crash.  Scary.  Especially since their host didn’t have a backup.  When I talked to them they were trying to figure out how to get a website back up that they could back up and maintain themselves.  Hmmmm.  What do I have that would work for that?  Yep.  WordPress.

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It came out pretty well.  They had some of the original photos that they had used on the original site and even some of the content from the pages.  I was able to get a custom WordPress theme set up for them in a couple days and moved all their photos and content over in a few hours.  Now they have a site they can maintain, update and, most importantly, back up on their own.

Unfortunately, Herbert Lumber wasn’t the first client I had talked to that week who had lost their website to a server crash with no backups.  I decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a way to back up a full WordPress installation with a single click from the Dashboard in WordPress.  I wrote a plugin that is available from WordPress that makes a backup of your entire database as well as your entire web root folder.  That means that if you have information on your website that’s not in WordPress, my plugin backs that up too.  Pretty cool, really.  One click makes the backup file, then shows you a link to it so you can download it to your local computer.  Then you just delete the backup file from the server and you’re good to go.  You can run the backup as often as you like.

If you have lost your website, or you’re not happy with the one you have, give me a call.  I’m sure I can help you put something together that will fit your needs, look great and be under budget.

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