Veerle's blog

I’ve discovered Web Standards around end 2003 and now we are almost 2 years further but I still feel a bit like the lone gunmen in Belgium when it comes to general usage of proper W3C guidelines. Ok, there are probably a few that uses them but it’s like a needle in a hay stack. We often work together with the top 20 internet agencies in Belgium. In most of these projects we are responsible for the design and XHTML templates.

I’ve been reading a lot about accessibility the last few days. One of the latest articles about this issue is over at Andy Budd’s place. He is saying that it is in a small part up to the law to make people/companies aware of those issues. Well I can only follow to a certain degree. Yes the law/gouverment should have a role in all this but not necessary a legalization with a negative tone by forcing things or fear by legal action. It’s very good that people in UK have a legal route if they feel that they are discriminated but I personally think a lot of those people just don’t bother to go through all the hassle that is associated with it. 

The @media conference
Lots of people have already posted an extended review of the @media conference , while I was enjoying London during the weekend. So I’m just gonna post my impressions and give you some of the highlights. Jeffrey Zeldman‘s keynote speech was a perfect starter for this conference. After all he is the (famous, at least in ‘our’ world) man that inspired us all and made us care for web standards. Same goes for Molly Holzschlag, she is a real pro and gave us some promising news, an exclusive that we have to keep for ourself at the moment since it hasn’t been officially announced yet.

This morning around 11 my boyfriend and I departed for @media London. We took the train from Deinze to Brussels, ate a sandwich and then checked in to take the Eurostar from Brussels to London Waterloo. This was my actually my first time I travelled with the Eurostar. Apart from the very poor Dutch by the train manager (it was advisable to pay attention to the French version instead, it was that bad) the trip went smooth.

Maybe you remember my Illustrator tutorial about freshening up bad source material that I did a while ago. It’s my pleasure to show you the final result because the website went live a few days ago. The project is for patients who suffer from Multiple Sclerosis and want to find out more about the disease and its treatment.

It’s a site that contains a lot of text (in Dutch) but with the power of CSS we tried to make it as engaging as possible. A few examples of graphics that had an overhaul are found here and here. In this project we had accessibility on our mind most of the time and I think the end result isn’t that bad. There is always room for improvement but this is our best effort yet.