e-Accessibility is a topic that interests me, and Mark Pilgrim has done a great job of painting the big picture of people with various different kinds of handicaps who might have trouble accessing your web site. Are our sites structured to be needlessly hostile to people with older PCs, lack of high speed Internet connection, human frailties?
We could Ask Alice (tm) for a free report on whether our site is accessible to the millions of Internet users who have disabilities, and if not, what needs to be fixed. However, they are not setup to check personal efforts such as weblogs ... when we fill out the form your e-mail address must match the URL you wish to diagnose. For example, john@company.com should be paired with www.company.com. But in my case my e-mail is with one ISP and my weblog is with another, so I do not qualify for Alice's help. Is that a deliberate choice by them to exclude the service from the smaller personal webloggers, because their resources are limited, or the same form of ignorance, in which most web sites are hostile to large segments of the Internet, that they are trying to help fix, but at the same time exhibiting themselves?
I clicked on the Contact Us icon of their web site to ask about this, but that also has some bugs. In my opinion there needs to be a way to contact people without invoking e-mail client. I have dabbled with several different browsers and e-mail clients, and decided that there are some I do not want to use, because they have certain problems, but I am not ready to uninstall because I have content there I not yet figured out how to transfer, or have figured out but it will be rather time consuming to get done. Sometimes when I click on a web site's e-mail us icon it invokes an e-mail client other than one I want to be using. I consider this to be an e-Accessibility problem.
Answer from the organizers of Ask Alice: they do not want someone from ONE COMPANY to be getting an accessibility report on some COMPETITOR, then using the information to market advantage. I did make several suggestions about future improvements for their service, apparently timely because they now working on a soon future upgrade.
1 in 10 men have some kind of color blindness, most seniors have trouble with color contrast, and a lot of web designers have poor understanding of the reality of how their site color combinations LOOK DIFFERENT through the eyes of different types of PC OS Browser etc. Check out http://www.vischeck.com/examples/ to view the world through the eyes of people with different kinds of color blindnesses.
I do not consider this topic to be Politically Correct run amuck. Rather the topic is whether we want to share our world with the whole world, or if we want to unnecessarily block categories of people from our web sites, and to what degree we want to limit our audience. A commercial site logically should want to open itself to the maximum range of customers, including businesses that employ handicapped workers, and including businesses in other parts of the world with other languages than English. I suspect that most web sites are hostile to large segments of the Internet population more out of site owner ignorance than deliberately exclusion.
My Weblog is still rather random topics because I have not yet learned how to work Categories, Directories, Navigation Links, insert the Spell Checker, and many other features. I periodically try out different things. Improving e-Accessibility is one of the things I want to try to figure out.
12:00:36 PM 
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