On July 30, 2011 I posted My Challenge to the Accessibility Community: We Need an Accessibility Body of Knowledge in which I lamented:
The fact that there is no single source to get good, clear, peer-reviewed information on this topic is, in my opinion, a very huge barrier which prevents “outsiders” from participating in accessible development.
The post was received favorably by some in the accessibility community who agreed. Others felt differently, asserting that there’s already a lot of information sharing happening on the web as a whole. Private discussions took place among those who were interested in this idea but ultimately no direct action was taken to actually put together a single, cohesive body of knowledge.
In response, I created A11yBuzz as a way to crowdsource a single resource for accessibility information on the web. A11yBuzz was released for public use on January 01, 2012. But, it was never really finished. I wanted to add features that allowed for entries to be voted on and reviewed. At CSUN 2013, Mike Guill and I presented a redesigned version of A11yBuzz which had these features. Unfortunately that version was never finished, either. Mike had a series of relocations, and a new adoption. I had shifted all of my energies to Tenon and A11yBuzz just withered away.
This August, Joe Dolson and I talked about re-launching A11yBuzz as a complete refactor based on WordPress. Joe completely ran with it, using Mike Guill’s redesign and my Day One Theme as a starter as well as some of his WordPress plugins and custom programming, Joe has done an amazing job.
The rest is up to you, my accessibility friends! For the site to be successful, it needs contributions. At this point, the site has a pretty good number of resources on accessibility, but it could be better. To achieve that goal, we need more contributions. If you want to contribute, go to A11yBuzz.com and register to help!