Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network.

- http://bitcoin.org/

Bitcoin has the potential to be a hugely disruption technology – changing business, commerce and politics. Here are some hand-picked articles about BitCoin:

• We Use Coins – An introduction to Bitcoin
• Bitcoin – Obligatory Wikipedia Entry
• Online Cash Bitcoin Could Challenge Governments, Banks
• Is The World Crazy For Bitcoin, Or Has The Bitcoin World Gone Crazy?
• Bitcoin Mining: The Free Lottery
• Senator Schumer Says Bitcoin Is Money Laundering

And, thus, I present Drupal Club:

Without having specialized technical knowledge tied to accessibility, do managers have the skills required to assess if their sites are accessible?  In my experience most managers lack the resources to do any accessibility reviews of their sites and so fall back at best reviewing a vendor’s accessibility statement.

Mike makes a very important point here, that we in the Accessibility community need to do a better job of providing information in a broader way and for a more inclusive audience. So in the spirit of moving away from technical information about accessibility, I’d like to provide something of a response or a compliment to Mike’s article, looking at the answer to the question “What is the cost of accessibility?”

Accessibility Is Cheap

The good news about web accessibility is that there are a number of things that limit its cost. Mike’s article lists a number of free, automated tools to provide accessibility testing of websites – auditing your website and comparing it to an accessibility checklist. In addition to these tools, web development best practices can deliver accessibility wins and they don’t cost anything to use, and there are entire organizations dedicated to helping your project identify and implement these types of practices, such as the Web Standards Group.  Examples of these practices, to share with your developers, include separating content from display, using semantic code – such as avoiding the use of tables for layout, and using options such as “alt” tags .  No only will these practices improve your accessibility, but it will also improve your website’s code quality and Search Engine Optimization. Don’t forget, Google is basically a screen reader; what is good for web accessibility is usually good for search engines as well.

Using Content Management System tools such as WordPress or Drupal can provide significant support for web accessibility. By automating code generation and providing workflow elements such as asking for an alt tag each time an image is uploaded to the website, CMS tools can take on much of the heavy lifting for content developers, allowing them to focus on great content and not getting bogged down in the minutia of accessibility coding. Using a CMS provides many other benefits, making websites less expensive to maintain and easier to manage. Keeping in mind the opportunities to support accessibility when selecting a CMS tool is an important accessibility strategy for management.

The most significant way these practices make accessibility cheap is because they “bake in” accessibility into the foundation of all your web projects. Ensuring accessibility is a core value of your organization and your developers, which means planning for accessibility and measuring for accessibility, is essential to manage the cost of accessibility.

Accessibility is Expensive

Ultimately web accessibility is not about validation checklists. Checklists don’t have experiences; People have experiences. This doesn’t mean that checklist tools aren’t useful – they are; I use them in every web development project I work on. However, checklists can provide a false positive – that is to say, just because a website passes a checklist, it doesn’t mean the site is accessible. In fact, even if a website can demonstrate that it meets every requirement set out by every accessibility standard, it might still not be accessible, because if someone can’t access the content…then the site isn’t accessible. This makes accessibility a very demanding element of web development and design.

Building accessibility expertise in your team is not simple, fast or cheap. Web develop and design have matured from a task to give as a side-task to a sysadmin or programmer into full, professional disciplines. Building professional websites is now a craft and one of the skills of crafting a website is accessibility, something which wasn’t even a consideration in the early days of the web. Indeed, accessibility itself is discipline rich enough to fill entire books, conferences and careers. This doesn’t mean everyone who builds your website needs to be an accessibility expert. However, proven accessibility expertise is a valuable skill and takes time and energy to cultivate. And, as recommended by Mike, it may make sense for you to engage an external accessibility consultant, such as Ottawa based Further Ahead.

The most common way accessibility is expensive is when it is a project afterthought. Much like security or information architecture, accessibility is a fundamental part of a high-quality, successful website. As work on the website progresses, it will become progressively more and more expensive to include effective and thorough accessibility. Building the value of and expertise in accessibility in your team, through training, hiring and engaging consultants when necessary, all work to help manage the cost of accessibility.

Planning for the Cost of Accessibility

Bill Graham of Wind River, a subsidary of Intel, write this about the cost of fixing bugs:

We intuitively know that defects in the field are much more expensive than those found in development. In fact, the difference is bigger than you think. If you find a bug in-house you save orders of magnitude in time and money…Take a look at this diagram (from www.agitar.com). Cost to fix bugs rises exponentially as you move down the development timeline. After you’re shipping your product, the cost per defect has increased 640 times!

What if we consider accessibility problems in our websites the same as bugs in our software? If we take this perspective, then we see accessibility problems as something that is a requirement to fix. Data on the cost of fixing bugs shows us the key variable in managing these costs is doing this work as early in the project as possible. The later in the project a bug is identified, that is to say an accessibility problem is identified, the more expensive it will be to fix it. Now, accessibility fixes may not follow this exact pattern – I’m not saying the cost per defect for accessibility issues is 640 times higher after you ship a website. But I do think the general principle we see here holds true for accessibility issues. It is tempting to thing of functional bugs as something different from accessibility bugs, but keep in mind that if someone on your website can’t access a function, it’s no different than that function being broken.

To plan for the cost of accessibility in web project, it is critical to include accessibility in the project plan from the very beginning.

To plan for the cost of accessibility as a competency on your team, it is critical to include it in your talent development and retention strategies. With legislation such as ADA in the US, AODA in Ontario and other laws in other jurisdictions, it is clear that the legal requirements for accessibility are not going anywhere and will become more strict over time. Adding the accessibility dimension of expertise to your organization will take investment, commitment and time.

I hope this article provides a useful and accessible summary of some of the key issues about the cost web accessibility for managers. What insights do you have? What are the most important things managers need to consider when costing web accessibility?

Below is a list of (mostly) online resource from Quickstarts to Tutorials to Videos and Cheatsheets.

Articles

Quickstart

• Ultra Quick Start in Vim
• Unix 101: Vi Editor
• Extremely Quick and Simple Intro to Vi
• Getting Started Chapter from Prof. David B. Dahl’s vim Tutorial

Tutorials

• An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi
  • Written by William Joy, the creator of Vi
• Vim Kata
• Prof. David B Dahl’s Vim Tutorial
• Learning Vi: The Cheatsheet Technique
• Beginner’s Guide to the Vi Editor – UC San Diego
• IRC Based Vim Tutorial
• Vi For Smarties

Books

• Introduction to the Vi Editor – Rice University
• The Vim Book by Steve Oualline
• A Byte of Vim
• List of Vi/Vim Books at Vim.Org

Advanced

• A Slightly Advanced Introduction to Vim
• Mastering the Vi Editor
• Use Vim Like A Pro
• How I Boosted By Vim
• Configuring Vim Right
• Efficient Editing with Vim

Reference

• UNIX Manuals Vi Reference
• The Vim Tips Wiki

Videos

• 7 Habits of Effective Text Editing
  • Great talk by Bram Moolenaar, the author of Vim, at a Google TechTalk in 2007
• Learning Vi(m)
  • My playlist of vi tutorial videos on YouTube
• Derek Wyatt: Certified Vim Junkie
  • Amazing series of videos on learning and mastering Vim
• Lullabot Vi/Vim Tutorials
  • Command Line Basics: Intro to Vi/Vim
  • Command Line Basics: Editing with Vi/Vim
  • Command Line Basics: More Editing with Vi/Vim

Cheatsheets

• Graphical Vi/Vim Cheat Sheet & Tutorial
• Vim Quick Reference
• Vim Quick Reference Card
• Bash Vi Editing Mode Cheat Sheet
• Mac Cheat Widgets for Vi and other Unix Tools

Image Source: http://dribbble.com/system/users/2086/screenshots/121306/shot_1298917103.png?1303485086

The information is clearly in the context of web design, for the most part. However there is quite a bit of information here that is just about visual design in general.  I’ve added a few books to the list that I find useful and continue to refer to, a couple of links that I like; in particular I added some links about wireframing.

If you have some links to share, please let me know.  I’m think about how this might evolve into a resource page as opposed to a post.

Many thanks to avogadrospimp for asking the question and to materialdesigner and Luchian for the awesome answers.

Typography

Typography Intro
Typographic History
Typographic Terminology
Typographic Hierarchy
Mixing Fonts
The Elements of Typographic Style (Book)
Thinking With Type Revised Edition (Book)
Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works (Book)

Typography on the Web

Web Typography
Web Typographic Guidelines and Techniques
Choosing the Right Font
On Web Typography

Design Theory

Web Design Theory
Principles of Design
The Lost Principles of Design
Principles of Good Web Design
Design Principles
50 Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory
Teach Yourself Graphic Design
Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated (Book)
The Design of Everyday Things (Book)

Gestalt Design Theory

“I believe Andy Rutledge’s Gestalt series is the best way to grasp the fundamental principles of design. Reading these articles, and many others found on his site, helped me focus on the important aspects in a design and provided a clear understanding as to why elements on a webpage should, look, be positioned and behave in a certain way.” - Luchian

Figure Ground Relationships
Similarity
Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Good Continuation
Common Fate
Closure

Design History

Design Is History
Design History

Layout

Whitespace
Designing With The Grid
Outside the Grid
Rhythm
Visual Hierarchy

Wireframing

The Importance of Wireframes In Web Design
Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing
The Importance of Wireframing
Get Wireframing: The All-In-One Guide
35 Excellent Wireframing Resources

Colour

Colour Theory in Web Design
The Meaning of Colour
Colour Contrast
Colour Lovers
Kuler Theme Generator
0 to 255 Colour Variations for Web Designers

Art Direction

Art Direction and Design
Print Design
Logo Design
Branding

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/3307873748 Some rights reserved

• 2032 concurrent wireless users
• 3842 active dhcp leases
• 4373 unique devices – please keep in mind there are 3000 people at Drupalcon
• 70M down the 100M pipe available
• 2.4 ghz frequency range was complete saturated.
• 5 ghz frequency range had lots of room

So it turns out, the problem is old wireless hardware…and almost 1.5 wifi devices per person

The thing I love most, is that they took five minutes to explain this to us today.  These…these are my people

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkannenberg/3678423649/sizes/s/in/photostream/

I have found Dries’ State of The Drupal keynotes to be great both times I’ve seen them.  It is fantastic that these presentations, along with all the sessions from DrupalCon are available on Archive.Org.  If you want to skip the intro material, Dries starts his talk at

Below are some notes I made summarizing Dries’ keynote address.

Drupal 7 Highlights

• Drupal is 10 years old
• 1 million+ sites use Drupal
  • Governments, Fortune 500, Universities and Non-Profits
  • 1.7% of all sites on the web
• D7 took 3 years from Feb 08 – Jan 11
• Lead – Dries, Co-Maintainer – Webchick
• Major Initiatives: Fields, Overlay, DB, Registry
• 1000 contributors – 30% more than D6
• Contributions match a long tail curve
• 30 Contributors responsible for 50% of D7 core patches
• 7925 modules, 947 themes, 4322 developers
• Drupal.org relaunch
• In Feb 2011: 5 million visits, 25 million page views, 130k unique visitors/day
• Migrated to Git
• 1 million+ sites use Drupal, Governments, Fortune 500, Universities and Non-Profits
• 1.7% of all sites on the web
• Community of 551 392 people in 228 countries using 186 languages
• 3000 delegates at DrupalCon 2011

•

D7 Successes

• Test Driven Development
• Updated Development Documentation
• Usability Team
• Development Snapshots – Including during Code Freeze
• Accessibility Team

•

D7 Problems

• Empowerment
• Release Cycle Predictability
• High Bandwidth Communication
• Better Priorites
• Too Many Critical Bugs
• Performance First

•

Drupal 8 Process

• Move from CVS to Git
  • incremental work in Git sandboxes
  • Bigger changes moved into core
• 5 Gates to pass to move into core
  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • Usability
  • Documentation
  • Testing
  • No Critical Bugs
• Larger initiatives will be phased to break into chunks
  • Each chunk must pass the gates
• No more than 15 Critical Bugs in Core
• Move from Co-Maintainer to Initiative Owner
  • May still appoint a Co-Maintainer
  • Initiative Owner is like a Mini Co-Maintainer
  • Dries will work with IO and others – not just IO
  • Designed to provide regular High-Bandwidth meetings with IOs
  • First IOs will be appointed in a few months

Drupal 8 Initiatives

• What is the world Drupal 8 will need to live in?  ”The Future is being anywhere at any time, reaching any information or people needed on any device”
• Clear shift from fixed devices to mobile devices
• “If we were to start Drupal scratch, we would design for mobile first and desktop second”
• Drupal 8 need to output content to a wide range of devices
  • Desktop – HTML
  • Laptop – XML driven Flash
  • TV – XML
  • Tablet – HTML5 & CSS 3
  • Phones – Native App
• 5 Strategic Initiatives for Drupal 8
  1. Multi-Device Publishing will be key – Markup Free Core
  2. Interoperability - Mail, ID, Commerce, Docs, CRM
  3. Drupal needs to deliver a Delightful Experience – Simplicity and Power are Increasing
  4. Configuration Management – Exportables, UUID
  5. Content Staging

• Ecosystem
  • Be careful – The future is not just about features
    • “The battle devices has now become a war of ecosystems.  Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market with an entire ecosystem”  - Stephen Elop, CEO Nokia
  • Between equal platforms, the one with the better ecosystem will win
  • We need to continue to invest in the ecosystem around Drupal
  • Ecosystem is what will matter the most

One of the key rules of building an audience for a blog is to have a clear topic to attract readers. I am not interested in that rule. I have tried that sort of blogging, but to be honest I’m not good at it.