Planet Kurz

Today, I came across the story of Capt. Scott Smiley , a soldier who was seriously injured by a car bomb in Iraq. He was rushed to a medical center for help, and for a moment, flatlined. He came back though, and somehow pulled through the ordeal. The blast left him blind in both eyes. I won't try to re-tell his story, but his experience is one that everyone should know about. His story is one of courage - courage to serve his country, and courage to overcome and rise above his injuries. He still continues to serve this country on active duty, because he realized that he still had a lot to give, and he still had a lot of fight left in him. His family also deserves our gratitude, because they had to deal with the situation as well. In the churn of daily news, it seems that all we hear about are the misdeeds of the rich and famous, instead of talking about men like Capt. Smiley. It seems like we expect to hear all the bad, all the time. We should never forget that there are men...

In the pecking order of most website projects, the actual coding part gets top priority, then architecture, followed by testing, then usability, then lastly is documentation. There might be differences in the order of all those, as long as the actual coding part comes first. Oh, and there was one more piece - accessibility. That is something so low on the list of priorities that if it is ever mentioned, usually gets a response of, "What is accessibility? If I don't know what it is, it can't be important, and therefore we don't need it." I can't tell you how many requirements meetings I've been in where I am the lone voice of introducing accessibility concerns as a business requirement. Don't even get me started on multi-language capabilities. That's one for another day. I find it very odd that it is so difficult to even get people talking seriously about making websites easily accessible to those who are visually impaired. It isn't rocke...