Beast-Blog.com
Mike Cherim's Professional and Personal Web Log

It’s more than a Rebootification Project. It’s a lot more accessible, more usable, friendlier, better than before, and quite simply more. Yes. I’m extremely pleased to announce the launch of my Beast-Blog Theme v.2.0 and its dedicated support blog, now sporting the new design. Finally a new version of my long-popular version one of the same name. This has been long overdue and was screaming for a technical upgrade.

Continue reading “Beast-Blog v2: Accessible WordPress Theme” »

Over at Accessites we’ve been at it since January 1st of 2006: checking in (234) and grading sites (64), issuing awards (54) — also rejecting some (158) — and giving recognition to developers who are helping us prove accessible sites need not be plain Jane and boring, and publishing some related articles (31). Speaking of articles, I wrote one just for this one-year milestone. This post here on my blog is simply to host any comments or questions our readers/visitors/submitters/supporters may have.

Continue reading “Accessites.org Turns One” »

I noticed others have done a year-end recap of things done and things written and I thought that was neat. I decided to do the latter here with a list of some of my more decent articles of 2006. Hopefully the Best of the Beast! I hope you have enjoyed my efforts.

Continue reading “The Best of the Beast in 2006” »

Fellow Accessites team member and good friend Jack Pickard came up with a fun and interesting idea: Namely a Blog Swap Alternative Christmas Message where participants will make guest comments in other people’s blogs related to Christmas. I will be posting Jack’s message here (keep reading), mine will go in Dan Champion’s blog, Dan’s will be posted in Stephen Lang’s blog, and Stephen’s message will be posted in Jack’s. Should be fun and interesting. Here’s Jack’s offering:

Continue reading “Alternative Christmas Message Blog Swap” »

Why should US businesses make their sites accessible? Especially considering it’s not toothy law and where the law does apply, there is little to no compliance to serve as a worthy example. For instance, since 1998, sites affiliated with and for the US government are supposed to comply with Section 508 guidelines. But many, if not most, don’t. I suspected this was simply due to aged designs that would be made accessible when refurbished. After yesterday morning, though, I realize the US isn’t even close. I don’t particularly want to criticize my own country’s government, but the failings in the area of web accessibility is undeniably pathetic. Get with the program Uncle Sam!

Continue reading “The U.S. Needs Exemplary Accessibility” »

Web accessibility isn’t exceptionally difficult to get a handle on, and the majority of its practices fit nicely into contemporary web development, especially if said development adheres to web standards. It’s like most things, you just have to embrace it a bit. But, when first learning web accessibility and uncovering its secrets, like many things, it can seem daunting and difficult. I think a lot of developers are downright intimidated by web accessibility — maybe even scared to go that route. But why? I suspect the reason is web accessibility is a discipline that lacks accessibility. Just look at the play book (and what’s ahead).

Continue reading “Making Web Accessibility Accessible” »

I’m happy to announce the Beast-Blog theme has exceeded the 10,000 downloads mark — and that’s just from my site. There are also download mirrors such as the Themes.WordPress site (where it’s been downloaded over 2200 times), plus it comes in different languages. It’s really nice to see that this thing was/is so well received. It was voted by users the number one two-column theme and the number two of all themes for a long time, but about a week after I found out about it some dude gave it a crappy grade for an include error that really wasn’t even my fault so that shot that all to hell. Oh, well, that’s the way it goes. The download number says a lot more than its current rank anyway… people seem to enjoy it.

Continue reading “Beast-Blog Reaches 10,000 Downloads” »

I need your feedback. On Friday, November 3rd I will be one of the speakers for the “Accessibility in Cyberspace: The ADA’s Applicability Online” conference. There I will be representing web developers. Frankly, I’m a little nervous and could use your help. I’ve given plenty of talks and presentations in my life, but as a representative of web developers this is my first. And since it’s a teleconference I can’t imagine the audience sitting in their underwear to ease the tension. I will be the last presenter, so the audience may be bored to tears at this point, yet for ten minutes I have to try and prevent them from nodding off and offer them value.

Continue reading “ADA’s Applicability Online” »

If you’ve gotten Firefox 2.0 you may have noticed a red dotted line under certain words when, say, posting a comment on someone’s blog. This is a spell-check feature. Very handy indeed — especially for me since I’m a rotten typist. Well, like most spell-check features, Firefox also offers a custom- or user-dictionary.

Continue reading “Firefox 2 Spell-Check Custom Dictionary” »