Testing and correcting accessibility problems throughout the development process is all about tools. Here are tips I've collected:

• Support the fewest back versions of JAWS you can: just as with browsers, supporting earlier versions makes development infinitely harder. Current version is 11.
• Fangs is a free screen-reader emulator, a Firefox plugin: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs/
• Study Juicy Studio (http://juicystudio.com/) for Javascript accessibility fixes: they've figured out tons.
• Use Juicy Studio accessibility plugins and toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/320.
• WebAIM now has an accessibility toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6720.
• There's also a free Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Finding more tools:

October 29, 2009 is the 6th annual InnoTech Austin event, held at the Austin Convention Center. It's a one-day blast of talks, demonstrations, summits, and expo, which is a steal at $35.

With its focus on innovation, this conference is a handy barometer for business and technology trends. This year, there is new attention being paid to start-ups ("Austin Startup Row"), and the Beta Summit will present live demos of six of the hottest technologies being developed in Austin. The Software track this year is emphasizing social networking and cost-savings, and there are sessions on Windows 7 and Google Wave.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines summarizes research findings that have a practical impact on how we design interfaces. The article includes visual examples for these findings:

• Form labels work best above the field
• Users focus on faces
• Quality of design indicates credibility
• Most users do not scroll (but more and more do)
• Blue is the best color for links
• The ideal search box is 27 characters wide
• White space improves comprehension
• Effective user testing can be very cheap
• Informative product pages win
• Most users are blind to advertising

In addition, the article includes case study findings about typography (line height, space, length), blogs, forms, and portfolios. Worth a read!

Last night Alan Porter explained to STC Austin "Why Tech Writers Shouldn't Be Writers". Much of it focused on the use of comics for technical communication, but not comics in the sense of  "humorous drawings" -- rather, comics as sequential images that tell a story. Most tech writers are painfully aware that their users would rather have a few annotated screenshots than written descriptions and procedures, but that's not a problem so much as a brain-based reality, he argues. Alan pointed out:

A long-time wish for many of us building and using online documentation is how to grab only the portions we want and have it lay out well for print production, handouts, quick references. A new tool, Zinepal ("magazine pal"), attempts just that: it lets you create your own PDFs -- and even schedule daily rebuilds -- from online content. In an email, Zinepal staff claimed that 1-column layouts would be a quick enhancement, that the easiest way to leverage this tool for documentation is to set up RSS feeds exactly the way you want content to be grouped, and that more integration options are in the works. But as it stands today, it's a compelling example of how to give documentation producers and end users the power to build exactly what they need from online content.

I've just installed Firefox's wildly popular IE Tab add-on, which promises to make my life easier! The problems:

• remembering to always open certain applications and sites in IE
• doing without functionality (such as Window Resizer) I have in Firefox only
• needing to quickly toggle a given URL between both browsers, for testing

The solution is this add-on that hosts Internet Explorer inside of Firefox and allows you to control which browser context is used for which site. (That is, open the site via FF, and it launches in the right browser; one right-click lets me toggle between browsers.) Sites I run in IE include Sonexis (web conferencing), Outlook Web Access, and the iMIS Full view (.../imis15/admin). Some tips:

http://bigdesignconference.com/

$50 ($20 w/ student ID), 9:00 to 6:00, May 30, 2009, SMU campus

The Big (D)esign conference is a 1-day blast in Dallas, TX, focusing on convergence among social media, user experience, and code development. It's jointly sponsored by Dallas chapters of the Usability Professional Association, Refresh, and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Keynoting will be Norm Cox, one of the UX stars of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Another strong theme running through the Software User Assistance 2009 conference was that any Help and documentation not embedded into the interface itself is moving into wikis, as much for their new media support (particularly RSS) as for the compelling efficiencies and benefits of collaborative authoring.

Matthew Smith (CorVel) presented on "Using SharePoint as a User Assistance Platform". SharePoint (aka MOSS) is becoming a platform for portal-based community and collaboration, with its built-in support for fast site development, including custom lists, blogs, wikis, surveys, search, and document version control. He was able to easily publish content from RoboHelp and Captivate directly into SharePoint, and SharePoint's security model was granular enough for him to control who sees what, down to the document and item level. SharePoint became their wiki-plus one-stop-shopping for content, unifying all documentation and support access. His recommendations:

Very exciting for me was the chance to hear April Reagan, a Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation, make the first public announcement about the release of Help 3, the ground-up redevelopment of Microsoft's Help format that she championed and won Bill Gate's backing for in 2007.

Microsoft Help, of course, has been foundering for years, and the 2.x versions devolved into problematic (slow, spotty, irrelevant, click-intensive, complicated, inefficient, confusing) Visual Studio-only formats. Once April won resources for the project to fix it, she did intensive data mining to research how Help needed to change, arriving at this UX vision: "Help is so quick and easy I can find the right answer on the first try." Her internal goals broke out into four areas:

Another central message of the Software User Assistance 2009 conference was that DITA (created and donated by IBM) offers a useful open-source standard for structuring and managing documentation, perhaps more for its tool support than for its inherent merits. Several presenters who had issues with its information typing nevertheless used it because of tool support.