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Joe Clark is leading a group of developers in writing extensions and corrections to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It’s know as the WCAG Samurai, and it looks rockin’ good!

If you are interested in real world, proven interpretations of the WCAG guidelines, check out this site today.

Tom Green at Digital Web Magazine has a great tutorial on using the video captioning feature in Flash CS3 to create accessible Flash video content. Wow, I can’t wait until my copy of CS3 arrives, sometime this week, along with my new MacBookPro! Yaaaay!

Jeremy Sydik, a colleague from RailsConf 2006 and a bona fide accessibility guru of the University of Nebraska, is writing the Accessible Web, which looks to be a comprehensive look at web accessibility and full of practical examples. It should be released in late 2007, but is available as a beta book now. You can buy it, ask questions, and help drive its development. How cool is that?

It’s cool.

How do I know about this fascinating book, you ask? Because Jeremy asked me to be a technical reviewer of his manifesto. And I agreed, having nothing but total disregard for my pet projects and their timelines. If I don’t launch, they can’t be criticized, unless you can see inside my brain. You don’t want to look there, it is dark, dank, and inaccessible in there, unlike Mr. Sydik’s book. The book is bright and shiny and contains many useful and practical insights into the concerns of the disabled and practical approaches to addressing those concerns.

Kudos, Jeremy! I don’t know what kudos are, and I’m too lazy to google it. You should have truckloads of them, though, for having the talent, persistence and foresight to write this book and get it published. Huzza!

Enough Monty Burns talk. On with your day! Nothing to see here, please move along.

I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t had as much time to post as I would like. I’ll make up for that with a post full o’ links today! A plethora. Plethora.

First off, in the spirit of the never-ending redesign, here’s a great 15 tips blog post on choosing a type face. I am a type amateur, but I love reading and learning about it. This Spiegel article is ancient in our 24/7 newscycle, but here’s a community that has done away with traffic signals. This is reflective of Christopher Alexander’s maxim to always design scaled to the user. It also shows how, though human-designed systems are good, human nodes in an amazing complex physical, emotional, and spiritual system called the world possess an innate ability to regulate themselves and their behaviors absent the enforcement of other humans. Libertarian moment over… now.

From a time slightly after the Spiegel article came out, i.e.—right after the dinosaurs started becoming oil—Tim O’Reilly felt compelled to redefine Web2.0 with a more compact definition. It’s a good read, but the Hype Curve has sailed on that one, Tim.

Some random accessibility stuff about video captioning, Dutch law and a new effort by Joe Clark to make media uniformly accessible.

Garrett Dimon has an interesting article about markup as craft. I’m pessimistic today, so all craft feels dead to me. Happy Valentine’s Day. However, Garrett’s 21 points are right on. They’re the implementation details of these 15 research article-derived design tips. What the heck is up with 15 being the magic number of tips? Who the heck knows?

Where did I get all this great stuff? Lots of it came from the Web Standards Group mailing list. This maxdesign guy put out the links for light reading weekly. Highly recommended.

In the file under random portion of our post, I’m beginning to research buying a hybrid, and this Jamis Buck article on concerns in activerecord in Rails hit the spot, oh, a month ago, when I began this post, back when my life was far less chaotic.

Meet the Life Hackers is a great article by Clive Thompson about multi-tasking, interruptions and human-computer interaction at the NY Times magazine section.
In summary, schedule your day to do some work to avoid interruptions, avoid having multiple forms of communication available all the time (e-mail, instant messaging, phone, cell phone, etc.), and use as big of a monitor as you possibly can. It’s a worthwhile read.