Welcome to the new Web Axe website, WebAxe.org! The RSS feed has also changed. It is now: http://www.webaxe.org/feed/
After over 7 years on Blogger, the website has moved to WordPress. It uses a fairly customized version of the Blaskan theme. Two important plug-ins used are WP Accessibility and WP-Accessible Twitter feed.
Reasons for the change include a fresh responsive design; a shorter and more accurate domain name; and, of course, to get off Blogger (which itself has many reasons, too many to list!)
What do you think of the new site?
Web Axe was founded in September of 2005. Web Axe was nominated for “Podcast of the Year” in .net magazine’s 2008, 2009 and 2010 Best of the Web awards.
Dennis Lembree is the founder, author, and main host of Web Axe. Dennis also is the founder of Easy Chirp, an award-winning web-accessible Twitter app. He owns the web development company Web Overhauls, which specializes in web usability, standards, and accessibility. Follow Dennis on Twitter: @dennisl
Co-host Ross Johnson runs a web design company (3.7 Designs) that takes a wholistic view on the web and art of constructing pages. They strive to be creative and unique. Follow Ross on Twitter: @3pointross
The website originally used Blogger and is now based in WordPress. It uses a customized version of the Blaskan theme. Two important plug-ins used are WP Accessibility and WP-Accessible Twitter feed.
My email address is: web axe at gmail dot com
Web Axe is now on Facebook! If you’re on Facebook, please give me a “like”! I plan to post the best of the best there fairly regularly, but not too often (maybe every other day). I may even do a poll or two.
Yea, I know it’s somewhat ironic, maybe even a bit hypocritical, that I’m on Facebook since it has major web accessibility issues (with no captioning support, just one of many Facebook issues). But nonetheless, I’m there. All things considered, it’s the biggest social network in the world; it’d be silly not to take advantage of that in spreading the word about web accessibility.
If you haven’t noticed yet, the web hosting account which stores all of Web Axe’s CSS, images, and podcasts (EchoEchoPlus) has been down all day today and is still down. The CSS and most images have been restored by me a few minutes ago by moving them to another host. The podcasts are still unavailable. Big apologies for the inconvenience. And believe me, I’m more bummed (and pissed off) than you. -Dennis
Update:
Two days later, services restored. Fully functional now.
ARIA Landmark Roles were recently added to the Web Axe web site. It’s a great and easy way to add better accessibility to your site, start learning ARIA, and future-proof your site. And it only takes a few minutes, so why not add it into your site? (If you haven’t already!)
An ARIA landmark role is simple an attribute added to a (probably) already existing tag in your site. For example, to add a search role, simple add the attribute role="search" to the tag which contains the search content (the div, fieldset, etc).
Here are some basic landmark roles with links to the W3C definitions:
- banner – usually the main header of your site; the area with logo, slogan, etc.
- complementary – supporting section of page, separate from the main content, like a sidebar.
- contentinfo – area that contains information about the site such as copyright lines and links to privacy notices (i.e. page footer).
- main – the main content; area with central topic of the web page.
- navigation – a section for navigating the site.
- search – a section with a any type of search tool.
In the following example, four landmark roles are used to create a basic page structure.
[header content]
[nav content]
[main content]
[footer content]
Addendum
If more than one type of role is implemented, use the aria-labelledby attribute to give each a unique name. Here’s an example from this web page which has two navigation role attributes.
