Posted in government, social media, uncategorized, Web 2.0, tagged addthis, bookmarking, examples, Finance, LAC, linking, PHAC, sharing, tagging, tools on 14 August 2009 | 5 Comments »
I like love this trend. Increasingly, GoC web sites are facilitating link sharing via the social web. Recognition that today’s web is participatory!
Here’s three examples.
Public Health Agency of Canada
PHAC has implemented a “page tools” type bar across the their site with text size, email, print and share options. Clicking on the share option brings up a box that allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and several other services with a single click. While the box is open, it pushes the rest of the page content down, rather than overlaying it. Looks like it’s Javascript powered.
Click to see full size
This is the one one of the three examples here to place it’s sharing tool at the top rather than the bottom of the page.
Department of Finance Canada
Finance has implemented the AddThis share button, and placed it at the bottom of each page on their site. You have to squint a bit to see it – it’s very unobtrusive. This one is interesting because it’s a third party widget service. No reinventing the wheel here!
click to see full size
And for those of you wondering – there is a French version that reads Partager.
Library and Archives Canada
LAC has implemented a “social tagging” bar at the bottom of pages across their site. This one’s the most limited – it only provides options for sharing on Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Facebook and Technorati (no Twitter?). This is implemented straight in the XHTML code, presumably as part of the website’s page templates. Points for simplicity!
click to see full size
In terms of CLF compliance, my guess is that the LAC example comes out on top since it doesn’t depend on javascript and uses standard text links. Although all three of these examples use the social services’ brand icons, which, depending on who you ask, goes against CLF’s “third-party symbols” standard. It’s OK though, because that’s a “risk” I’m comfortable living with too.
Posted in usability, tagged accessibility, aDesigner, tools, web building, web design on 15 September 2008 |
Just stumbled across a great listing of tools for evaluating and testing website accessibility over at Six Revisions. Some of the tools I’ve used before, but many I haven’t.
For example, aDesigner from IBM looks like a winner for sure. It simulates the experience of a blind or visually impaired person using your site and provides a report listing potential problems. Apparently it’s been around for a while too. Where have I been?
Why am I geeking out about website accessibility tools? Well, us government types are bound by law or by policy to make our web offerings as accessible as possible, so that all our citizens can get at the content on our sites, regardless of their level of vision or hearing or whatnot.
Which is great. & even more importantly, it’s just a good practice. Accessible web sites also are well coded websites, and this provides all kinds of benefits for everyone — such as better search indexing and improved user experience. Not to mention accessible sites render better on my Blackberry!
But it’s often painstaking work to test and evaluate accessibility, so any kind of tool that can make life a little easier gets me excited. Props to Six Revisions for putting this list together!
Occasional thoughts on web and government communications. Everything here by Peter Smith.
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