Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community (Video Documentary)

Who is Jeffrey Zeldman? The "Miles Davis of web design"? "Godfather of the web"? Or simply "your friend on the Internet"? For people who make websites, Zeldman is all of these and more. He's been a guiding voice in web design since the earliest days of the Internet, leading the charge in the fight for web standards. He's an educator whose businesses—A List Apart, An Event Apart, and A Book Apart—are extensions of his basic instinct to share his best ideas. He's also a community leader that other designers look to for inspiration. This film is an intimate portrait of a man who has helped shape the web but isn't recognized by most of the people who use it everyday. Learn how he evolved his influential mailing list, how he convinced Netscape and Internet Explorer to support HTML and CSS, and what he's doing to pass the torch to the next generation.

Watch more documentaries like this at lynda.com/vimeo.

Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community from lynda.com on Vimeo

BlindLead.org HTML5 accessible wordpress website

Few weeks ago I received a email from Ted Moallem, we collaborated on Blind Lead project in August this year. The BlindLead.org project website seems to be inaccessible to screen readers users. Ted used the latest version Wordpress 3.0 content management system (CMS), but Black Letterhead wordpress theme and the page structure were creating some problems.

Decided to attempt redesign the website using HTML5. HTML5 offers many accessibility improvements with new elements, ARIA landmark roles etc. Initially I thought of building with Starkers HTML5 theme. However Wordpress ships with a HTML5 complaint theme Twenty Ten so I decided to stick with it. Added some rounded corners, little bit of typographical changes, disabled the sidebar widgets for now. And the site looks better already.

Next I set about cleaning up the inline styles in the page content. Some of the styles were introduced by the wordpress editor and other external editors.The pages structure needed some re-organizing as well. Added headers instead of just bold text. The Web Developer Document Outline feature comes in handy here. You can access it from Web Developer > Information > View Document Outline menu item.

Right now we have only few pages, blog posts, photo gallery and accessible widgets would be added to the site soon. This is my first HTML5 website, there is lots of things to be fixed. So give me your feedback and share your experiences working with HTML5 accessibility.