Dive Into Accessibility by Mark Pilgrim is a must read for any one building websites. Specially websites that are there to provide information like government websites. It is not just about making it accessible to people with disability but to all people in general. The guidelines help make any website more usable and friendlier. An added motivation factor, it makes it friendlier for the search engines too ;)
The most irritating thing about websites, specially in Nepal, is that every body thinks it is a place to show off their creative skills. I have seen just too many Nepali websites, government specially, filled with lots of pictures and flash animations, making it virtually useless. It is sad, but everyone seems to prefer style over content. Style isn't necessarily wrong, but websites that are there to provide a service, give information should certainly be accessible to all. This definitely means shouldn't lock to a particular browser or technology.
Making accessible doesn't necessarily mean restricting your creative skills. It just means using it more sensibly and responsibly.
Sure, if you want to provide a fancy flash based website go right ahead. Just remember to provide a non-flash version too. Every one has the right to the information and discriminating against some one based on their disability or preferences is just plain silly and wrong.
I wouldn't expect the government to come up with accessibility guidelines any time soon. They haven't even come for public places and the like. No ramps in any government building! So it is up to the designers to take the extra effort to build more accessible sites.
You might say it is extra time and effort. May be, but hardly much. Most of these tips are pretty straight forward. Quite a few of them, you might already be practising. Just take the time to read the book. I am sure you will find they aren't really a big steps, but many small steps. Soon they will just be a habit you will not think about.
I knew that Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya had been working on Unicode and Nepali fonts. I knew they had a version for Linux. What I surprised was finding it in the gentoo.org portage. Wow, all I had to do was emerge nepali-fonts and I had Nepali fonts working in X. Now that was really nice ;) Great!
I got a gmail account when Adu send me an invitation. I am not exactly sure what I am going to do with a gmail account. I will definitely be try to use it more often and may be consolidating multiple accounts that I have created with different providers.
There are few things I liked about gmail beside the obvious google trademark of clean, simple interface and the search capability. The first is the use of labels and second the use of older/newer instead of previous and next.
I definitely like labels instead of folders. I have loved the idea of labels since I read about the issue tracker roundup. The beauty of labels is that you can classify an item under more than one categories. Things in life can harldy be categorised in just one rigid category. Specially when I had to organise my photos, I found I often wanted to keep photos in more than one category. Since I organise my photos on the filesystem it is pretty restrictive as a group of photos can be only in one folder. However, I do make it appear in different categories by using links to the folder. In gmail, I can have an email in two categories, for example an email from Adu about gentoo goes into "family" and "gentoo".
The other thing is more of a usability thing. Using older/newer instead of previous/next. I always found it confusing whether previous would take me to an older email or new email. Specially if I kept changing the sort order based on date. I always found it confusing when I had newer emails on the top; was previous the one on the top (newer email) or does it mean older email. No confusions now :)