Whew... After 13 months, 300 pages (that's Finished pages.. All told, it was probably closer to 400-450 counting all revisions) and I don't remember how many titles, the book is finished. We've decided to call it Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms and it should be shipping and in bookstores in December (though PDF and PDF/Paper pre-order versions have already been available since May).

The whole process, while exhausting at times, has also been a fantastic process for refining my thoughts about teaching, communicating, and about accessibility itself. The old cliche, "If you want to truly understand something, write a book about it" really does have something to it—to really write something well, you have to understand everything you believe the reader needs to know, why you're certain that it is important for them to know it, and why you believe it's worth saying. This process took me more than the first five months of writing to really develop.

For this reason, I actually cut loose and dropped almost all of the existing content back in March and started back to the outlining phase. It's a frightening prospect to take the longest thing you've ever written and decide to start over, and I'm sure it was a little upsetting for my editor, Susannah Davidson Pfalzer as well. One of the things that has been great about working with Susannah is that she got it and stepped back for most of March to allow me to reformulate the concept. In the end, it was the right thing to do and, because of it, I can confidently tell you that this is the book that I wanted it to be.

Now, it's time to spend some normal evening time with Kate and Aidan and then get started on getting my long displaced masters thesis out the door