I've been blown away by the reviews that the book has been giving. It's not that I'm entirely surprised—I mean I know it's a good book, but it's very humbling to hear that others feel the same way.

• SDTimes listed DAWS as one of ten titles “to expand one's view of IT”
• Cyber Aspect's Julie Smyth says “I'm happy to give this book a double thumbs up. It is well written, enjoyable to read and contains so much helpful information, it's hard to list it all here.”
• Ask Felgall's Stephen Chapman says “This Book provides both an ideal introduction to accessibility as well as a central reference to all of the different aspects of accessibility that you need to take into account when designing a web site.”
• Weblabor's Török Gábor gives DAWS a 9/10, but I can't tell you much more than that because I can't read Hungarian— If you can, and would be willing to translate, please let me know!
• Roger Johannsson at 456 Berea St gives DAWS a high recommendation, saying “There is not a lot of pedantery and preaching and ‘you must follow these guidelines exactly, or else’. Instead, the author focuses on the end result - if doing this or that actually makes the site more accessible. And in the end that is a lot more important than ticking boxes in a checklist.”
• NosillaCast #135 is a full half hour discussion between Allison Sheridan and Paige Eissinger about DAWS. I don't know where to start with this one—Paige and Allison's praise of the book was enough to make me turn pink for most of the afternoon!
• Paige also discusses the book briefly with Dr. Kathleen King in Transformation Ed Episode 11 I didn't know about this podcast until recently, but it syncs up with a few of my major interest areas and I want to listen in on the old episodes and keep up with the new ones.

Thanks to each one of you for your wonderful comments about DAWS!

A few weeks ago, I sat down and did a podcast over Skype with my editor, Susannah and Daniel Steinberg. I don't think Susannah and I did too badly for our first podcast and Daniel edited it together nicely. The podcast is available from the Pragmatic Bookshelf site and, if you can't or don't want to listen to the MP3, we also have a transcript of the podcast available (thanks to Kate for getting this out for me).

I've had a bunch of projects at work and in class that have kept me pretty busy the last few weeks, but in the meantime, the book has been slowly moving out into the world. Along the way, we've already gotten a few nice reviews:

• Techtalk Radio mentioned DAWS in their 11/25 podcast.
• Web Teacher gave the book a 4 of 5, saying they particularly like the ten principles for web accessibility.
• KnowProSE gives me a 9/10—“Jeremy Sydik did his time in the accessibility mines of the web and came up with a mother lode for the rest of us to enjoy.”
• CMS Wire says “The book intentionally avoids the nitty gritty details of W3C guidelines and rather lets the reader discover that making accessible sites need not be an ugly mandate, but rather a very humanistic approach to design. After all, no matter our ability, we all want a positive experience on the web.”
• James Pyles says at Tech Unity—“Sydik uses his writing style as well as his considerable experience in both computer science and cognitive psychology to present a unique perspective on this classic design issue and present it in an interesting and fun way. In an ideal sense, learning should be fun. Many times it's not, usually due to how the information is presented more than the information itself. This book teaches a topic all serious web designers should be well versed in and lets you enjoy the learning at the same time.”

Thanks to all of the reviewers!

In the midst of all of the confusion earlier today I never got a chance to take a look at the fresh new copy of the book that arrived in the mail earlier. I'm actually looking at the copy Kate received for doing the cover art—in a typical event for me, my copy is somewhere lost in the mail ;) It's really eerie to see the project that I've been working on for the last year finalized and in my hands.

Being a software developer, most of the final products of my technical work are kind of ephemeral in nature, so actually holding the product is something that I normally only get from my artwork (in fact, this is one of the things that specifically draws me to textile art). I know that I said previously that the book would be a December release, and it still kind of is—it'll take a few weeks for the book to move through the production channels and make it into stores, though it'll probably still happen before the end of the month.

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

We’ve been going through a lot of rounds of discussion about my book title lately. In the beginning, picking “The Accessible Web: Creating Content for Everyone” seemed pretty clear and to the point, but it hasn’t necessarily gotten the idea of the book out there very well for some potential readers.

I think part of the problem is that the title might not be explaining where we’re going well enough. When I say “creating content for everyone”, that’s exactly what I mean. The techniques that I cover in the book are targeted toward serving the audience of users with disabilities (and this is an important growing audience), but that’s not all they’re good for. If you want to reach audiences that use cell phones, PDAs, game consoles, or other “alternative” browsers, you need the same eye toward semantics, alternate access paths, and progressive enhancement that assistive technologies rely on.

I’m a little concerned that it might be more than missing the “for everyone” idea though. It could be the issue of writing about accessibility in general. Accessibility has a pretty bad reputation of being dull, dry, and unfriendly toward design and, if you listen to many “accessibility experts” this reputation seems well deserved. There is a better way though, and that is what I’m writing about. Well styled semantic markup lets us keep the doors open for more users and look good doing it. The question that remains is, how can we get past the stigma of accessibility in the title. My in-book titles like “Stoplights and Poison Apples”, “It’s Not Polite to Flash the Audience”, and “Layout and Other Bad Table Manners” better capture the spirit of the book that separates us from all of the bad things you’ve heard about accessibility in the past. The question is: how do we bring that up front in the book title.

Right now, we’ve been looking at “Designing Web Content for Users with Disabilities—36 Keys for Unlocking the Accessible Web”. If you like this new title, prefer the old one, or have a fantastic idea for the One True Title that is eluding us, hop onto the message board at Dave Thomas’ blog and give us some feedback.

Thanks,
Jeremy

This is the other reason I haven’t posted much recently.

One of my biggest frustrations when I talk to other developers about accessibility is the inevitable question “What book should I look at?” I’ve never had a response that I’m completely comfortable giving, so I’ve been writing one. The Accessible Web: Creating Content for Everyone is a different type of accessibility book, written for real web developers with real projects.

In this book, we’re not going to spend all of our time looking at reams of guidelines that are written for accessibility experts instead of for developers. Instead, I’ll introduce some basic principles for accessible development and we’ll look at how you can put them into action. Because a lot of people out there talk in terms of the guidelines, we’ll look at them enough to be comfortable using them for testing and talking about them when they come up.

I’m also not going to tell you that you’re an evil person if you like pages that aren’t black and white with blue links. This page should be proof of that. I’m not about making the world worse for the non-disabled—I want the best possible results for all of our users and we’re going to look at how we can provide images, video, Flash and PDF in an accessible way that still looks good to our sighted users.

The book isn’t finished yet, and won’t be on the shelves until late fall of this year, but starting today, Pragmatic Bookshelf is making the current version of the book available as a beta book. This means that you can get the parts of the book that are already finished and we’ll send you updates as soon as they’re written and edited. This also gives me the opportunity to let you ask questions before we go into print and make sure that the book is everything you want to know about building accessible web pages—and you can tell me if I’ve made any mistakes ;)

And thanks to Kate for the fantastic cover design!