Category: Business

There’s a lot of writing advice on the web, and it can be hard to find out which advice is best for your situation. If you’re looking for a place to start, I would recommend the following from Copyblogger on writing with power and authority.

I would also recommend studying their archives. There’s a lot of free, actional content you can use to build your own content library, and you can use all of this material regardless of how successful you are right now, or regardless of how you measure success. All it takes is a serious time investment on your part, but if you’re trying to run a business and make sales, you already knew that you have to invest a lot of time and hard work.

This article was originally posted at A List Apart, and generated a lot of very thoughtful and insightful comments. It has since been taken down, and re-posted at Heather Burns’ site. It’s always a sad thing when big-name web publications sensor in order to avoid or deflect controversy.

Digital legislation is confusing and outdated—Heather Burns shows how professionalizing the web industry can help.

Source: The Perfect Storm in Digital Law

This entire article is worth a thoughtful read, and I think it has implications for not only those of us who work as web professionals generally, but accessibility professionals in particular as well.

Specifically, the accessibility profession is going to have to join the greater web profession in working towards a solution to the problems outlined here, and in order to do that, it’s going to have to become a lot less insular. It’s going to have to learn to play well with the greater web community, regardless of whether or not that community as a whole has signed onto accessibility as a right and obligation.

In other words, every one of us is going to have to shelve our pride in whatever we work on and learn to play ball professionally witheach other and other communities who are going to have to come under our umbrella, because we’re up the creek if we don’t get it together.

Back in the bad old days, before the WordPress Accessibility Team really got off the ground and came into its own as a well-loved and respected part of the WordPress project, I used to see a lot of claims from theme vendors, page builder vendors, and plugin authors, (both free and premium), that their products were accessible, or sec. 508 compliant, or the like. Thanks to the work of the accessibility team, and its individual members, that is no longer the case. Not only are plugin and theme authors less likely to declare their products accessible without asking someone to check it, (or paying for work in some cases to ensure that their products are in fact accessible), the term accessible has been more or less swopped out for accessibility-ready, meaning that you can create an accessible site with it, but there’s also room to make your site less accessible by not following the author’s recommendations for settings. All of this makes me very proud. We’re making progress towards full inclusion for everybody, regardless of ability or language spoken, and we’re also making sure we point out where we still have room to grow.

Some of Adrian’s techniques from the linked post above will work in this ecosystem, and some won’t. But either way, this is a great roadmap for users who are either downloading or purchasing premium products to test claims of accessibility if any are made. The testing technique, and the filing issues technique, are also great ways for users or other developers to help the process of “make accessible all the things” move forward. Just make sure you’re polite and respectful when filing reports. The difference here, as with other open source projects, is that the majority of the time, these developers are putting their free time into these projects, and do not have dollars to spend on proper accessibility consulting or remediation.

Don’t believe me? there’s a lot of data to back up that claim.

The short version is, if you want your message to have an impact, don’t use more than two of them per social media message. Three or more and your message starts to become diluted, and your intended audience will ignore it. This is especially true on Twitter, though less so on other social networks like Instagram or Google Plus. On Facebook, hashtags are pretty much useless.

This is also worth keeping in mind if you’re posting the same content to multiple social networks. Don’t cram your content with hashtags on Twitter just because it’s going to Instagram, for example.

And of course, when using hashtags, make sure they’re relevant. Nothing will kill a message faster than its being tagged with an inappropriate hashtag, or tagged with something that happens to be trending or that has a lot of followers.

So the next time you want to strangle one of your friends for using too many hashtags, now you can do it politely, and explain that there are data to back you up.

This post is in response to this one, and you should go read it first before reading the rest of this one.

We’ve probably all heard a phrase that goes something along these lines.

Keep your personal life and problems private and out of your business dealings.

That’s not an exact quote, but it’s definitely a skill that you learn as you go into business. Never show your weaknesses, because they erode client trust. If your clients see that you’re having problems, and that you’re public about them, they’re less likely to work with you. If your clients know that you have any kind of mental illness, or physical illness, they’re afraid it’s going to effect your work, and they’re less likely to hire you.

This is a mindset that has become ingrained within just about every type of business community, and until I became a part of the WordPress community, I thought it was just the rules of the road. Since I joined the WordPress community, I have come to view it as dangerous, destructive, and the ultimate killer of productivity.

I have come to believe that wellness, (shlemah, completeness or complete personal well-being), makes up at least half of what we would consider productivity, and is the first priority over everything else, including skillset or the amount of tasks you complete in a day for a project or projects.

This is hard to admit, because it means that I’ve had to unlearn a whole lot. I’m still not done unlearning, and I’m definitely not done implementing what I’ve relearned. I’m still working on that and trying to figure out the logistics.

But at this point, I believe that nothing is more important than wellness. Not personal glory, not deadlines, not accessibility, not good code, nothing.

It has become a key factor in picking clients or projects. Whether or not a client cares about their own wellness enough isn’t something I have control over. Whether or not I make room in my busy schedule for my own wellness is something I do have control over.

I’m not posting this to preach at anyone so much as for personal accountability. I’m going to need the help of the WordPress community to figure all this out beyond the first step. There will be financial implications to this. To be honest, there’s not enough money to go around in the first place, and I’m pretty certain this is going to effect at least one of my off and on client relationships negatively, and it’s the one that usually pays the most to boot.

Also, I’m going to have to start charging for every piece of accessibility advice I give. As much as I love helping the community achieve accessibility goodness, that comes at a cost to me, and if I help with your theme or plugin, even if you’re giving it away for free, I’ll still have to charge for that help. I’m pretty sure most of you can’t afford my ideal hourly rate of $200 per hour, so I’ll be testing out some lower rates to see what works, as well as testing out some sort of pay-by-the-minute setup. Clarity won’t work for this, as the interface is almost completely unusable for both myself and any other clients who are visually impaired and use a screen reader. So I’ll be building something with Gravity Forms and charging a minimum amount for a minimum amount of minutes.

I’d like to hope that no one in the WordPress community takes this personally. Because trust me, it’s not. And we’re going to need to work together to figure out a rate that this particular market will bear. Most of the money that’s made in the accessibility community is made from Fortune 50 or Fortune 500 companies, and the rates are determined accordingly. This community is obviously not the Fortune 50 or Fortune 500, and yet there needs to be a solution for the little guy or little business who cares deeply about doing the right thing and making their products and software accessible, and yet can’t afford Fortune 50 or Fortune 500 rates for practical advice.

So all of this, I hope, will be a journey we can go on together, hopefully creating something that works for the little guy, gets the right thing done, and makes the world a better place for millions of people.

Now to publish this and see what the fall-out is.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t go completely wrong. 🙂

I was browsing through Twitter, and came upon an article I thought might be interesting and thought-provoking reading. Ironically, it’s an article about the moral failure of the computer science community. So I open the page, and I’m reminded of why I have no sympathy for, nor can I empathize much with, online advertisers.

It comes down to the fact that almost all of you aggressively scrolljack.

This goes for ads, as well as those trendy newsletter sign-ups that steal cursor focus away from the content you’re promoting and drop it in your sign-up form or advertisement, like I’m suddenly going to want to stop what I’m doing and do what you want me to do: Buy whatever you’re advertising or sign up for your newsletter.

In order to get back to what I was doing in the first place, (reading your content), I have to resort to the following process.

1. Open the page, press “H” to jump to the headline. Maybe read a couple of lines.
2. Page refreshes, or some other scrolljacking event happens. Get dropped back to the top of the page.
3. Press ctrl+f to bring up the find dialog.
4. Think of a word or phrase which hasn’t occurred multiple times within the content, in order to hit my target on the first shot, and beat the next page refresh or scrolljack.
5. Read the next couple lines.
6. Repeat steps 1 through 5 until I either get to the end of the content, or, depending on how long the content is, quit at some point because I’m tired of repeating myself and I’m frustrated and don’t want to fight with the keyboard, the screen reader, and the browser any longer.

It’s stuff like this that makes people install adblockers. Or turn off JavaScript. Or just not visit your sites and read your content at all, and hence, not buy what you’re selling.

I might be able to empathize with online advertisers if I weren’t trading my own sanity in the process.

The worst part of all this is that it has nothing to do with accessibility, but extremely basic user experience. I’d really like to think it comes down to lack of awareness, but I’d have to engage in a hell of a lot of mental gymnastics to do that. So I have no choice but to chalk it up to a lack of concern for users.

And if I can plainly see that you don’t care about the experience of your users when it comes to something as simple as reading your content, what makes you think I’m going to believe you’ll care more after I’ve purchased your product or signed up for your newsletter?