Accessible Folksonomies
2/27/2005
I’ve been working with web technology for over a decade now and I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an idea gain mindshare as rapidly as the Folksonomy has. It seems like everywhere I turn someone is discussing this new categorization system.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a folksonomy is basically a taxonomy created by the people and for the people. A community of users collaborates by “tagging” various types of content with user created keywords. This concept is flourishing on a handful of community driven sites that all seem to have a certain addictive quality. I think the best way to fully grasp how folksonomies work is to dive into one of the sites that makes use of the concept. Flickr, 43things, and del.icio.us are good places to start. Given the success of these early experiments in group tagging I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing folksonomies implemented on all sorts of sites in the very near future.
Lately I’ve been thinking about one particular artifact of the folksonomy phenomenon — the folksonomy menu that serves as a sort of buzz index providing users with a quick visualization of the most popular tags (technically I think it’s called a weighted list). Popular tags are displayed in a larger font and it’s relatively easy to identify hot topics at a glance. This visual representation of the popularity of any given tag is undeniably cool. However, once the coolness factor wears off it becomes fairly obvious that these menus are also not very accessible.
I realize these sites are currently trail-blazers and they deserve to be recognized as such. I have no intention of detracting from the innovative work that’s being done. My concern is that once folksonomies enter the mainstream, the next wave of sites implementing them will likely begin a wholesale copying of the work that’s being done by these innovators — markup and all.
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The Accessibility Challenge
2/2/2005
We recently completed a large website redevelopment project. The site, when launched, contained nearly 1,000 individual content items. Since launch, that number has grown. We expect it to continue to increase, especially as the departments who took a wait and see attitude start contributing content to the site. If past experience holds true, this site will have close to 5,000 content items within a year or two.
One of the stated goals for the site was accessibilty. Granted, this was not the term used, but as we went through the process of identifying the site’s customers, local senior citizens were mentioned. Because this is a city website, they do not have to comply with Section 508 — however, as many local government agencies choose to do, the city made compliance a goal. Throughout the design process, we kept this in mind, and, because the backend of the site is a content management system, we included “hooks” to ensure things like alt attributes weren’t forgotten.
Okay, fine. Mission accomplished.
Sort of. The day-to-management of the website is handled in a decentralized manner by non-technical staff. The final review before new content is published is done from an an editorial perspective — the webmaster doesn’t know HTML, and the chances of her learning it are slim. When we loaded the original batch of content on behalf of the client, we converted as much as possible to plain HTML. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, not everything could be converted, and there are many documents posted as PDF files.