It struck me that hav­ing web stan­dards group meet­ings is all very well, but really, you are preach­ing to the converted.

Web stan­dards group peo­ple are there because they believe in stan­dards and want to learn as much as pos­si­ble about stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity. They might bring peo­ple along who they want to “show the light” to, so I guess there’s value in that.

But at our Cold­Fu­sion User Group meet­ing last night, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to acces­si­bil­ity and I was sur­prised to find people’s atti­tudes — some of them hon­estly believed that acces­si­bil­ity was some kind of mys­ti­cal, unknow­able topic and not some­thing that applied to every­day web sites. Derek Featherstone’s first stage of acces­si­bil­ity — Denial — also sur­faced, as in “those acces­si­bil­ity guys aren’t talk­ing about web appli­ca­tions”. Derek’s pre­sen­ta­tion itself is not online — I don’t know if he’s plan­ning to do that — but you can down­load the Web Essen­tials pod­cast, it’s very infor­ma­tive AND enter­tain­ing. And there’s some pho­tos taken dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion on flickr, includ­ing one show­ing the funny denial slide.

So any­way, I might have to do a talk on that topic for my CFUG bud­dies some time soon. Cos basic acces­si­bil­ity is easy, really!

Speak­ing of Mr Feath­er­stone — who I made sure was well versed in the basics of “Aus­tralian Shout Eti­quette” — how great is SimplyAccessible.org? Awe­some exam­ples, and now with one of those star shapes :)

Tech­no­rati: WE05