Editor's Notes

I rolled in some changes today so that most images and links should have ALT and TITLE text. Also, text-only browser users will notice that every YakJive site now has "skip to" links at the top of each page. If anyone has any further suggestions for us, please let us know.

Unfortunately, much of the admin site is still not completely text-only browser friendly. We'll be working on that as soon as we can. We are also still working on making the restricted entry part of YakJive sites more friendly to disabled users. At YakJive and News Community, LLC, we're committed to making all of our websites as user-friendly to everyone as possible.

I attended a talk today on making websites more accessible. I've been interested in this topic for a while, not only because I want to help disabled users use YakJive websites, but also because many of the tips and tricks for making websites accessible are also good for search engine optimization.

After the talk, I downloaded the Lynx browser and looked at the YakJive homepage and some of the YakJive sample sites. I'm happy to say that the generated YakJive sites are not too bad on Lynx and possibly better on the page (speech) readers. I did find some things to work on and I'll be looking at the following items in the next couple of months:

• Adding 'skip to' links to allow visitors to skip the menus and get to the content on the site
• Adding a mechanism to allow impaired visitors to submit comments while still preventing spam
• Making sure that all the right ALT and TITLE tags are present

I'll be adding those changes as soon as possible.