The AIR-Austin winners were announced this evening, and our site won second place in the Formula One category. Sweet! The list of Formula One winners follows.
I don’t have the full list of winners in the other categories, so I’ll verify it and post those tomorrow. Congratulations to all the winners in all categories! Also, congratulations to the non-profit organizations; I hope you like your new sites!
The 2003 AIR sites have been posted for public viewing. There are a few that are obviously still unfinished, and some are less accessible than they should be, but most of them turned out really well. Our contribution, For The Children, is listed in the Formula One category along with some very well-designed sites. We didn’t have as much time to work on the design — we changed non-profits two days before the event — but we had the same amount of time to complete the coding. If design was the main criteria, our site definately wouldn’t place, but I think we still have a shot based on technical accessibility issues.
I haven’t completed a thorough examination of the other sites’ code, but I’ve spotted two in particular that look to be strong contenders for first place in the Formula One category:
The site was developed by RampWEB, a local web accessibility consulting firm. CASA provides court advocates for abused and neglected children in Travis County.
Update (2003/11/06): Wildwood, Inc. also helped build this site. Apparently, the team was made up of employees from both companies. Sorry, CJ. :p
The site was developed by previous AIR winners, Coefficient Designs, and serves an organization that provides a unique experience to those who need it most. President Chase Bearden and other AASC staff members give disabled kids and adults the opportunity to participate in sports such as horseback riding, kayaking, and even skydiving.
Both sites are visually appealling and appropriate, and both have a much larger amount of content than our site. The Austin Adaptive Sports Center site even has accessible video. Nice.
I’ve spotted a few minor issues on each of the sites that aren’t a high priority, but that may give our site a chance to catch up some of the points they’ll gain for better design. Then again, those issues don’t affect the accessibility of the sites very much, so the judges may not notice or count off for them. Either way, I wouldn’t be sorry or surprised to lose to either of these sites. We’ll know the results on Thursday evening. Wish us luck.
PS. SBC Global’s site for the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities also deserves positive mention in our category, but I don’t think it’s in the running for first place.
In an article fit for The Onion, Dr. Richard Paley exposes Macintosh’s ties to evolutionism and the forces of darkness. Some friends and I have been debating whether or not this site could possibly be real. Just when I’m convinced it’s real, some subtle comment will convince me it’s a parody. I guess that’s why it’s so funny: because I just don’t know. What do you think?
Here are some of my favorite comments from the article:
Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an “Open Source” license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, “lickable” buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism...
Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness...
According to one of our readers, the new Mac OS X contains another Satanic holdover from the “BSD Unix” OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: chmod 666. What other horrors lurk in this thing?
That’s it, I’m tossing my G4 in the trash and getting a Windows machine... because Microsoft is so much better.
In seemingly unrelated news, Pat Robertson of CBN’s 700 Club shares the recipe for Age-Defying Protein Pancakes, but amazingly left out key replication steps: At midnight on the Winter Solstice, add a pinch of ground bat wing and a teaspoon of calf’s blood. Simmer slowly in a regulation-sized cauldron while chanting in the tongue of your choice.
I never dreamed I’d use a torn paper or spiral notebook motif on a site, much less both on the same site, but I did. I think it’s appropriate, too. As I was describing the idea (pre-mockup) to Mike, I realized how cheesy it sounded, but I think it turned out well. We had two nights to plan and one day to develop the site, For The Children, to replace the original, inaccessible site. For the time spent, I think we did a good job.
Designing with CSS is strange sometimes. I know it well enough now that I can do mockups in my head. Because of the time constraint, I visualized the idea and cut the graphics without even making a full mockup. As a designer, I wouldn’t recommend this practice, though. Sometime on Friday night, I realized how foolish it was to have pre-cut graphics with no mockup, so I threw together a comp to double-check my idea.
Mike Cravey, James Giroux, Charles Valentine, and I developed the site as part of the AIR-Austin event this past Saturday in an eight-hour binge. There are still a few issues that will need updating after the judging, but I believe the accessibility problems are quite minor.
For The Children organizes fund-raising to provide discounted school supplies to needy children in the Central Texas area.
Thanks to the original posting by Ian Lloyd on the WaSP, traffic is coming in from all over:
Ok, ok. No more cheesy puns from me. Thanks for all the kind remarks and traffic. Please let me know how I can make it better. I plan to finish the material after the actual rally day.
...Our team is currently paired up with the St. David’s Foundation, though it looks like we may not be able to get that site accessible in a day. Usually the volunteer developer teams build a new web site, though St. David’s already has a medium-sized site utilizing the CommonSpot CMS by PaperThin. While we’re very impressed with the functionality of CommonSpot, it doesn’t appear that we’ll be able to retrofit the site with the level of granularity we need to make it accessible, at least not in one day.
Our client contact has been very understanding and offered to help us gather materials to build a site for a different organization. I love charity work. You’d never get a client like that in the professional market.
Ian Lloyd’s latest post to the Web Standards Project gives a favorable review to the AIR-Austin training materials. Thanks Ian, and congratulations on your engagement. Also, because it’s not obvious from the post, I want to point out that some of the material was written by the other trainers: Rob Sartin and WAI-member, Jim Allan.
If you’re in or near Austin, Texas and haven’t yet signed up for AIR-Austin, do it today. The last two developer training sessions are tomorrow and the kick-off party is this Tuesday.
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