When designing a site for a person who is so empathic we deemed it consequential not to exclude any users. After a little debate with our designers we settled on a color scheme that fulfills most requirements for color contrast. Furthermore text is resizable, forms are labeled, the structure is semantic: in the German accessibility test we got 98 out of 100 points.

There are little mashups including Google Maps and a journey planner for public transport. You can get decent print results, a customized error page, the site is language negotiated and thus loads your preferred language version automatically. Loading is extremely fast since we’ve learned our performance lessons, and of course everything is microformatted.

I must admit it’s difficult to microformat “Dalai Lama,” because it is a role, not a name. fn is required, but the text only refers to the title and role “His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.” His monastic name is of course Tenzin Gyatso, his family name is Lhamo, and his given name Thondup, but the text doesn’t mention any of these. I’m afraid microformats do not properly reflect this. How do you markup “the Pope?”

We used WordPress as a simple content management system with a self-written plug-in to clean up the comments template — the default error messages were so unacceptable. Alas we ended up with one installation for each language because the existing internationalization plug-ins were immature. Special credits to Jessica Spengler for the excellent and sensitive text translation!

I don’t think that modern technology and something ancient as Tibetan buddhism really contradict each other. In fact topics like sustainability, responsibility and empathy become more important in our work environment. Whenever the Science meets Dharma project would call for experienced web developers I’m sure we would find many willing to share their knowledge with Tibetan monks and get an insight into their wisdom and philosophy in return.

What enthralls me more (and is the reason to write about here) is the technical progress of the anti-fascist movement. Some are still stuck in the 1990s while others have embraced the wonders of web 2.0. To my surprise the website of the Anti-Fascist Coordination Frankfurt features a clean design with a tag cloud-like navigation, sliding animations with jQuery, YouTube videos, and a very basic microsite for mobile access. What rocks most is the creative use of twitter to keep protesters informed via mobile phone. Brilliant!

That said this approach comes with a few drawbacks, for example pages are not bookmarkable. I cannot link to the mobile page because it’s just an invisible layer with display:none on the main page. Their JavaScript is obtrusive, and the site is inaccessible for people with disabilities. Although these issues could be fixed, I suppose it was not their main priority. However, it would be suitable for politically correct organizations to enable participation for all, regardless of disabilities. Especially when their protest is supported by disability organizations like the CeBeeF.

The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. It provides new ways of communicating meaning, importance, and relationships, and it fills gaps in the (X)HTML specifications and increases usability for all users by enabling navigation models familiar from desktop applications. Best of all, you can start using ARIA right away to enhance the accessibility of your websites.

I held talks about the upcoming standards in Cologne and Frankfurt, which resulted in writing a blog entry about the topic that eventually became an article for A List Apart.

Update: there’s also a German translation of the article at Barrierekompass.

If you’d like to learn more I’ll be speaking at the BarCamp in Frankfurt on April 21-22, and the Infopark Internet Congress in Berlin on May 11th.