The old debate has started again, Jason Kottke has fired another shot across the conference organiser’s bow. Pointing out that most conferences are not looking for an equal gender distribution (best as SXSWi – 28% women, hats of to WDN as well). A point to note on this its very US based. What about the rest of the world Jason? And Eric Meyer has come back swinging as an organiser of A Event Apart, pointing out that gender doesn’t matter. Or does it?

Are we all doing the right thing with respect to web standards, and accessibility?

Well, Nomensa recently released the full report on United Nations global audit of web accessibility. This report while only taking a very quick snap shot was damning on the application of web accessibility across the board.

The report, which has been only available as an Executive Summary since it was released on 5th December 2006, reveals that 97% of websites tested fail to achieve the minimum web accessibility level.

I was watching a young child play with one of those massage chairs the other day at a furniture store. Now they had never seen one of these before, but I was amazing to see how they responded. They sat down on the chair, and immediately began start pressing the buttons. Seeking out the largest buttons first, and then the green ones. A few attempts and they had the chair powered up. They then started to cycle through the options in order to find the settings that suited them, using the details on the LCD display. Now this child is not able to read yet, so the words on the buttons are meaningless. The amazing thing about this was that within a few minutes they had the chair configured the way they wanted it. They just muddled through it and with the use the graphics on the LCD to configured the chair. In some ways they had the chair operational in a shorter time period than some adults.

At Web Directions North today Joe Clark, during his session, presented his Open Letter to Tim Berners-Lee: Time to cancel WCAG 2. Even if Joe is just stirring the pot and aggravating the W3C, it still presents an interesting case. Are the W3C relevant anymore? Are they just a group of academics and policy makers that have lost touch with the reason they where setup in the first place. Are they relevant to the average web designer, standards based or not.