Silver is Good

For those of you who don’t recall, several weeks ago a few of us here at Capital Metro formed Team Raging Bus to participate in the Knowbility AIR Austin competition. This is a web design and development competition that focuses on building accessible websites for non-profit organizations. It was a fun side project and we learned a lot.

So have you ever gone to an award ceremony dinner where you were certain that you had no chance of winning? You think to yourself “I’m just going to go, have a nice dinner, make some contacts, collect a few business cards, and applaud the winners.” Then suddenly… Surprise! Now you have to make a speech.

Team Raging Bus won second place in our category for our Accessible Housing Austin site. First in our category went to the Texas Inmate Family Association site. First place in the Formula One category (which includes video, flash, and all those other rich media goodies) went to a beautiful site for the Austin Day Lily Society.

Plus, in a moment of wild coincidence, I got to meet Martin Kareithi. He was providing assistive technology testing for one of the other teams. As it just so turns out, Martin starts his new job Monday here at Capital Metro. He’ll be our Accessible Transportation Specialist, and I can foresee pestering him a lot to test our web stuff with his screen readers and braille devices.

So I can already hear all the web curmudgeons chiming in. “Who cares? What does all this have to do with anything?” Well, I’ll tell you.

At some point next year, you will see a new capmetro.org. The skills that we acquired to succeed in this competition are the same skills that we will be applying to rebuilding our site. So we’re making it our goal to build a site that is just as helpful and useful for our disabled users as it is to everyone else without sacrificing any of the aesthetic or functional benefits. In that effort, we’re going for the gold.