The San Francisco Gate reports that American retail giant Target is being sued (possibly class action) for having accessibility problems with Target.com: Blind student sues Target over firm’s Web site

From the article:

Advocates for the blind said the lawsuit is a shot across the bow for retailers, newspapers and other businesses that have Web sites the blind cannot use…

“What I hope is that Target and other online merchants will realize how important it is to reach 1.3 million people in this nation and the growing Baby Boomer population who will also be losing vision,” said Bruce Sexton Jr., 24, the blind third-year Cal student who filed the suit.

Proper accessibility is one of the core motivations for developing websites with web standards, and why we have been proud to do so for over four years now. Check out, for example, our work on the Turner Broadcasting website, which is coded from the ground up to be completely accessible.

Join us January 27th, 2006 from 6pm - 10pm for wine, beer, snacks & conversation. We will be showing off our new homey little office and our new little homie, Justin Goodlett. Justin is our first full time new hire.

Also on display will be some art from next door at New Street Gallery, including a piece by Albina Mattioli who’s videos, drawings, and paintings show opens the following day.

Email us at rsvp@twinsparc.com. Get directions from google right here.

Please help us to welcome Justin Goodlett to the Twinsparc team. Justin is bringing a full plate of XHTML, CSS and Design skills to the table, and he’s already fully folded into our processes.

Does he look familiar? If you’re into web design, you have probably read one or more of his interviews with other designers.

Send Justin a welcome message at justin@twinsparc.com, and look for more good stuff from the three of us in ‘06.

It’s time to have a little fun with Say-So (read more about Say-So). We’ve asked some prominent names in web design and development circles to join us for a series of “Celebrity Say-So’s”. Each participant has agreed to create a Say-So post on a specific day over the next couple weeks. They will pose a question and everyone’s invited to respond and participate.

We hope you enjoy our little experiment here. Don’t take it too seriously, this is just for fun and the topics each author chooses is completely open to their whim.

Here’s the schedule, on each of these days we’ll add a direct link to the post:

Derek Powazek

December 2nd

Say-So Post: What the hell is a weblog? (Redux)

Mike Buzzard

December 5th

Say-So Post: Delivery is 99.9% of success

Stefan Kjartansson

December 6th

Say-So Post: Has Flash 8 lived up to the hype?

Dan Cederholm

December 7th

Say-So Post: Wine?

Heather Powazek Champ

December 8th

Say-So Post: Film or Digital?

Arturo Rodriguez

December 9th

Say-So Post: Where’d you come from?

Kevin Byrd

December 12th

Say-So Post: Band Name: The Forgotten Ponies OR Muff?

John Gruber

December 13

Say-So Post: Blue or Graphite?

Ethan Marcotte

December 14

Say-So Post: Best. Album. Ever.

Update:
Say-So is running smooth, we’ve updated to what is now version 1.4 of the system. This will be the last update about Say-So from this page, from here on out, find Say-So updates and info at the Say-So Blog.

Original Post:
We just launched a free service called Say-So.org, it’s a tool you can use to generate discussions on any topic, concern, question or idea you have. It shares similarities with a lot of different things, such as blogs, event organizing tools, product comparison tools, online polls, etc., but it’s much more free-form. The main focus of the tool (and reason for making it) is to allow anyone to gather feedback on an idea without needing a full fledged blog, and with more control over the “structure” of the responses. When you create a post, you can (optionally) assign up to three response types, for example “Pizza” or “Tacos”. All comments will then fall in either the Pizza or Tacos columns.

We also wanted to make it so that no usernames or passwords need to be remembered, Say-So creation and management happens via a “login-link” that we send via email.

Say-Sos and responses can also be kept completely anonymous, and can be made public or private, public ones can be browsed and searched from the home page, and private ones are only known to those specifically invited. After a Say-So is created, we offer five different ways to let folks know about it. We include help on various forms of emailing Say-So invites, code for posting on websites, and even a print-n-go version of the Say-So that can be pinned to an office or campus bulletin board - includes tear-off URL tabs!

We are excited about this new offering, and even more excited about the planned features to be released. This is something we are doing for fun in our spare time, however we have an organized development environment - so consider this version 1. Please let us know if you have thoughts, ideas, suggestions. If you like what you see, help us spread the word about Say-So.

It’s been around a while in Steve Job’s keynote presentations, but with the new Mac OS X application “Front Row” it seems Apple has fully embraced an image treatment I’m calling “wet floor”. You’ll also see it used in the new video interface for iTunes 6. Want to do something like this yourself?

Here’s an Adobe Photoshop action set you can load in that will automagically create this effect for any image. We’ve included an action that works on black backgrounds and one that works on white backgrounds. Download WetFloor.zip here.

Some tips: Make sure your image and background color are a flat image in their own layer, not in the background layer. The margin underneath your image will be doubled to make the space between your image and the reflection, keep it slim. Have fun.

Want a little more direction? Watch me demo the photoshop action in this quicktime movie (zipped it’s 3.6 MB): Download.

Update: Someone who goes by “Cow” made a javascript effect that does the same thing, no need to open Photoshop.

We released the HTMLstamps for Adobe Illustrator CS2 last month (see the original post here). We underestimated how popular these little stamps would be. Another thing we learned is that not everyone relies on Illustrator for marking up graphics for HTML. So with that said, we present: HTMLstamps for Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Illustrator CS1, Adobe Photoshop CS2 (as brushes), Adobe InDesign CS2 as well as Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Visio.

UPDATE: More versions have been sent to us but not included in the “complete set” - check the bottom of this post for the latest.

Get the complete set.

Here’s a set for those using the OS X app called Create, thanks to Joe Chellman for providing this. Like the other stamps, install instructions are included

OmniGraffle Fans! Marc Nothrup has come through with not one, but two sets of HTMLstamps for your downloading pleasure. An Original Set (5.4 MB) that duplicates the others exacctly and that includes sIFR stamps (which aren’t re-drawn in OmniGraffle, hence the large file size), and a new HTMLstampsPlus (788 KB) which, while it doesn’t yet include sIFR stamps, does have some very nice tweaks and enhancements Marc thought up - some of which are specific to how OmniGraffle works. Neat stuff, find more specifics at Marc’s post about it, or in the included instructions.

I thought I’d share a little tip/tool I use when transforming a website design into an actual web page. In the past, I did this by printing out the design and scribbling notes on it. That worked well, but lately I have gone “digital”.

I made some illustrator “symbols”, which are little drag n’ drop icons you can use as you determine what will be what. The process I use is simple - just create a new layer labeled “HTML” and then open the palete of icons, and start drag n’ dropping.

Watch me demonstrate how to use the HTML Stamps in this:
Narrated movie (Quicktime 5 MB).

Download the HTML Stamps file right here (Illustrator CS2).

Our hero George Penston transformed the HTML Stamps into an InDesign Library. Just download (and uncompress), open like a regular file in InDesign (it will open in a palate window), then drag n’ drop.

More versions coming as time permits.

UPDATE: More stamp versions available now, visit the new post.

Hope for something bizarre, ruined. At least I have my lake monsters.

Welcome to our new website, it co-incides with the move-in to our new office, which (by strange coincidence) is located on New St. in Decatur Georgia. I hope you like what we have going here on this site, it’s taken us several months to find a spare moment to put this together - just a sign that it’s been a busy and productive year.

As a little introduction, this section is the “blog” or daily posts, at the moment they live only on the home page. The work section (see top menu) contains info and screenshots of many different projects we’ve been working on in the last 4 years, of course it’s not everything - but I think it shows what type of work we like to do. Explore the site at your leisure, and by all means, let us know what you think.