A couple of things that you could try is to invite a screen reader, voice input users or volunteers in to your office meet with the budget holders and actually use the site in front of them. This is always a sure fast way to make people sit up and listen. If this is tricky there are lots of videos out there that you could show people. Jon Gibbons has pulled together a good selection at http://lab.dotjay.co.uk/notes/assistive-technology/videos/.

Other things you can do is make sure that you have a clear feedback mechanism on your site and an email and actively ask people what they think. The only thing I would caution with that is to make sure you, or somebody, is available to manage the inbox – there’s nothing worse that asking questions and providing comments and it going ignored.

Finally, a book that you may find handy is “Just Ask: integrating accessibility throughout design” by Shawn Henry (http://www.uiaccess.com/accessucd/about.html). This has some really great pointers about user testing and so on.

I admire your efforts and feel your pain, I know how tough it can be, good luck!

As a web developer who desperately wants to make sites more accessible but can’t get support to spend time changing existing sites or training other staff, I implore users with disabilities to make themselves heard! If a site is coded such that it is not usable or conflicts with additional software/hardware that you require, please send a note to let them know. We have over 1500 employees and work with over 20k students, and no one has ever told us that we have accessibility problems. I just can’t sell accessibility improvements to management as a priority until I have stakeholder feedback showing that there is a problem.

Interesting link by the way, will add it to my list above. Too bad you weren’t at the workshop as I think your ideas would have gone down really well. There is a mailing list covering the future of social networking at you can subscribe to it by sending a message with “subscribe” in the subject to public-social-web-talk-request@w3.org . Be great if you were on there

If anyone else has any links to share let me know and I’ll add them above.

Yes they need to grow-up, and I define “grow-up” as be more mature and stop acting like selfish children by letting us long suffering user have control over our data!

Use of social networks with a mobile phone is tricky, especially if you factor in activity streams from everyone you follow across dozens and dozens of sites. The slang term is “drinking from the fire hose”. Managing all that data on a tiny screen, often without a QWERTY keyboard is nearly impossible – here’s all of us trying to find a solution:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/do_you_want_this_activity_stre.php

Great post!