Most entrepreneurs are lucky to sell one start-up. A chosen few manage to repeat the feat, building and selling two or more businesses. The folks at Zimbra have outdone them all, selling the same company...twice.
As Kara Swisher of All Things Digital reports, VMware is expected to soon announce the acquisition of open-source messaging company Zimbra from Yahoo. My own sources at VMware confirm the deal.
While Swisher's report gets the Zimbra ownership change correct, its indication of a distressed asset sale misses the mark.
It's true that Yahoo has never known what to do with Zimbra, leading it to shop the Zimbra business to various potential buyers, including Red Hat and Cisco Systems. But this is a reflection of Yahoo figuring out that it doesn't have a future in the enterprise, a place that Zimbra is increasingly calling home, after early success with Internet service providers such as Comcast.
You do the math.
(Credit: Matt Asay)Zimbra has delivered 100 percent subscriber growth, along with roughly 100 percent sales growth, according to sources close to Zimbra, through the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, much of that growth driven by sales to marquee enterprise customers such as Bechtel.
In other words, Zimbra is a growth asset, though the price paid by VMware is almost certainly lower than the $350 million paid by Yahoo in 2006. That's just the nature of valuing an asset carve-out versus a standalone company pre-recession.
Even so, Zimbra can be a highly strategic asset for VMware. It's not surprising that the virtualization specialist would be interested in Zimbra, especially as it seeks to differentiate its cloud offerings.
Last week, I wrote that an "application war is brewing in the cloud," a war that VMware, more than any other company, is set to launch with its acquisition of Zimbra. Infrastructure isn't enough of a competitive differentiator, especially since most applications aren't designed to run well in the cloud.
Customers, and particularly hosting and service providers, are therefore looking to their infrastructure vendors like VMware to sort out applications for them, or at least give them a head start.
This is where Zimbra comes in. The company's technology was designed from the start as a cloud application, and it should give VMware a viable contender to Microsoft Exchange to offer hosting and service providers, rather than having to peddle applications from cloud competitors like Microsoft and IBM.
With SpringSource, Hyperic, and its adoption of Linux, VMware was already increasingly the open alternative to the closed cloud offerings from Microsoft, IBM, and others. Now, with Zimbra, it is adding its ability to compete at the application level, while retaining its open-source approach.
It's a smart, bold approach. Ironically, it's also an indication that the first shot fired in cloud computing's infrastructure war looks an awful lot like an application.
A new coat of paint can do a lot for a Web site. In 2009, we saw more of an evolution, than a revolution for big site redesigns, but there were a few standouts. Below are five notables (in no real order), followed by several honorable mentions.
1. Twitter (the home page)
In terms of its core design, Twitter itself didn't change all that much in 2009. But at the end of July, the company unveiled a new home page--you know, the one you see when you haven't logged in yet.
Instead of trying to explain what the service was for, it simply shows it. This includes dropping a large search box right at the top of the page as well as displaying some of the latest trends and keywords--all of which can be sorted by minute, day, and month.
(Credit:
CNET)
2. Facebook Lite
Facebook underwent an iterative redesign in March, one that angered a lot of its users. But we're not going to highlight that in this list. Instead we're picking Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of the site that quietly went live in September.
Facebook Lite offers many of the core features of Facebook, but without as much noise. There are, for instance, fewer ads. And applications--once Facebook's crowning feature, are gone too. Other niceties include the removal of the often-annoying launch bar that sits at the bottom of Facebook's screen, and zippier page loads.
(Credit:
CNET)
3. YouTube Feather
Like Facebook's Lite flavor, YouTube launched "Feather" last month. In short, it strips out many of YouTube's more superfluous features and puts the video front and center. It's almost like using the site back when it first came out.
YouTube currently houses Feather within its TestTube labs section, and gives users a way to quickly switch back and forth between the interfaces. Click here to see a before and after of the two interfaces.
(Credit:
CNET)
4. FriendFeed
FriendFeed may not be all that important of a product these days--that is, it's likely to be shelved since being acquired by Facebook. But a redesign in early April made the whole site real-time. This meant that you could view everything that was happening on the site live, and without refreshing the page. Friendfeed kept the new design going as an optional beta for just three weeks before rolling it out to all users.
(Credit:
CNET)
5. Google Voice
Google Voice was Google's complete overhaul of GrandCentral, a voice services company it bought in 2007. Google Voice had all of the same GrandCentral features, plus a few extras. More importantly, it fit in with the look and feel of other Google products, notably Gmail. As a result of this, GrandCentral was due to be shuttered on December 31.. You can read more about that, and 15 other sites that went the way of the dinosaurs in 2009 in our slideshow from last month.
(Credit:
CNET)
Honorable mentions:
• StumbleUpon
• AOL
• MSN
• Friendster
• Salon
• CNN
• Technorati
• Google Caffeine
See also:
• Best redesigns of 2008
• Best designs/redesigns of 2007
Quark and other similar design programs are infamous for having a very tough learning curve, making it extremely difficult for amateurs to pick them up and make anything of quality. The company is looking to make layout and design more accessible for the general public with the introduction of Quark Promote. The goal of Quark Promote is to allow individuals and small business owners to quickly and easily create promotional materials.
Quark Promote's online template gallery features professionally designed templates for everything ranging from business cards to letterhead. Once users pick a set that they like, the Quark Promote application quickly installs and launches. Users can then enter in their own information as well as play with the color schemes and layout.
Quark Promote features hundreds of professionally designed templates that you can customize for your needs.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)The actual Quark Promote application is very easy to use and is not intimidating. It doesn't have all of the functionality of the full blown version of Quark, but there is enough there to tweak the design to your liking.
Up to this point in the process, everything is free. Users don't need to pay for templates like they do with other services. Rather Quark thinks that you will like the design enough to want to make prints. Quark Promote gives you the option to order prints by mail or to find a neighborhood printer where you can pick them up yourself. This is where Quark makes its money--on the referral fees from printers.
When I talked with the guys behind Promote, they said they have bigger plans for the service, moving forward, which include partnering up with stock photo sites such as Getty and iStockphoto to give users more customization possibilities with images. It is also possible that they will add support for searching for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr to the application to widen the selection of available images that users can use in their promotional materials.
The original SheevaPlug computer
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)Six months ago, I had an exclusive First Look at Marvell's prototype plug-in computer, the SheevaPlug. Ever since, dozens of companies have contacted me about their applications. Most recently, CNET reviewed the Pogoplug from Cloud Engines.
That said, it didn't surprise me when Marvell announced Tuesday that 10,000 SheevaPlug units featuring Marvell CPU technology have shipped.
To celebrate this milestone, Marvell also announced Tuesday the launch of its worldwide Plug Computer developer competition, called "Free Your Imagination," to award the most innovative Plug Computing concept submitted.
You can participate or find out more about this competition at plugcomputer.org. This Web site is also the main Web resource for the plug application development community, where members can access software that facilitates the development of the SheevaPlug. Developers can also exchange ideas for free.
While the applications differ from one vendor to another, in a nutshell, Marvell's Plug Computer is a tiny unit, about the size of a small wall-plug power adapter. The little computer, despite its physical size, is equipped with Marvell's 1GHz processor and some 256MB of RAM. The computer also comes with a USB port and an Ethernet port to be best used as a network storage or an Internet-based cloud storage server.
One of the biggest selling points of the Plug Computer is the fact that it uses very little energy and therefore is the cheapest solution to offer users high-performance, always-on, always-connected, and environmentally friendly computing.
Over the last few months, you may have noticed the Meebo Bar gracing the bottom of some Web sites, mostly large blogs, or other similar big content sites. That's because previously, the Meebo Bar was only available to select partners, so the little guys were mostly shut out. Now, Meebo is making the Meebo Bar available for all Web sites, with a specific focus on blogs.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Meebo Bar, it's a JavaScript plug-in that sits at the bottom of Web pages. It enables a lot of different social interaction and sharing features, such as displaying a specific stream of tweets, promoting a Facebook fan page, as well as Stumbling or Digging the page. The Meebo Bar also allows users to chat with their friends through the IM platform that made Meebo famous. Additionally, the Meebo Bar enables easy sharing of content on the page through its very slick Meebo Share Dock.
The bar is extremely easy to set up on blogs, especially TypePad, self-hosted Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, all of which have preconfigured solutions, built by Meebo. For those with other setups, the installation just consists of inserting a code snippit, something to which we have become very accustomed. Users can customize which features appear on their Meebo Bar all on Bar.meebo.com. The changes are then pushed out to the installation on your site in a matter of minutes.
Users can customize the Meebo Bar for their site with a variety of buttons.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)This version of the Meebo Bar, for everyone, includes all of the same features that it offers to its partner sites, which is something that they were really shooting for with this release, Daniel Bernstein, Meebo's director of business development tells CNET. Meebo Bar users get all of the features of the bar, as well as detailed sharing analytics to see how people are using it, all for the low, low price of...free.
The Meebo Bar is a really great way of enabling a lot of different types of sharing and content interaction very quickly and easily. The sharing that results could, potentially, be a big driver of traffic back to sites. It's really great to see this rich functionality being adapted into to a "self-serve" type of system. With so many more possible installs out there, the Meebo Bar should see a huge explosion in growth.
Meebo's Share Dock pops out when you drag a piece of content on an enabled site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)
Reports that Google is considering an acquisition of Yelp fit right in with an increased focus on local search.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Online reviews powerhouse Yelp might just be what Google needs to help rid the world of 40-pound tomes with yellow pages.
Throughout the second half of 2009, Google has had its eyes squarely on one of the last remaining online advertising markets it does not dominate: local. With a series of moves, Google has shown a clear interest in combining Google Maps, search results, and its small-business-oriented advertising technology into its next big source of revenue growth as offline local businesses come online.
However, Google management seems to have decided to step up the pace. TechCrunch and the New York Times reported overnight that Google is in discussions to acquire Yelp for $500 million or more. Yelp has grown into a huge destination for those looking for new places to have fun, turning it into one of the more pervasive brands among the digerati.
And it's not just bars and restaurants anymore: dentists, churches, and top-notch local golf instructors can be found on Yelp. That makes the site a huge repository of locally sorted data on how people are spending money, and that's the kind of thing that gets Google and its advertisers excited.
"We want to make search a way to discover things that are interesting about a place. A big interest of ours is helping you get to a place and also helping you identify what is interesting about the place when you're choosing one," said Carter Maslan, director of product management at Google and overseer of all things local. Maslan declined to comment on the reports about Yelp (as did Yelp itself) but he was more than happy to talk about the huge opportunity that Google sees in local search.
Local business listings have been available on Google since 2005 through the Local Business Center, which allows business owners to essentially claim their establishment on Google and add basic information such as their phone number, hours of operation, and a link to their Web site.
That operation has been expanded in 2009. Over the summer Google asked a list of celebrities to name their "favorite places" as part of a promotion for a Google Maps feature that lets users identify local businesses they enjoy. For instance, Kerri Walsh, the gold-medal winning volleyball player, added her thoughts to listing pages for Lake Tahoe's Lone Eagle Grill and the Pump Room at Chicago's Ambassador East Hotel, spotlighting two local businesses that aren't necessarily on the national radar.
Google followed that up by launching Place Pages, which the company described as "a web page for every place in the world" when launching the service. Place Pages are very Yelp-like in their design. They feature reviews, photos, and, of course, ads--far more than could be crammed into a simple listing.
Location, location, location
Just last week Google unveiled plans to send local businesses decals declaring "We're a Favorite Place on Google!" That's a clear nod to Yelp's strategy of handing out similar decals to business owners, although Google took it a step further by adding unique codes that could be scanned by mobile phones to bring up additional information about the business.
The motivation behind Google's recent moves and its possible acquisition of Yelp is simple. The number is squishy, but Google estimates that anywhere from 15 percent of 40 percent of all search queries have some sort of local intent. A large number of those searches are also done from mobile phones, a number that will only grow larger as sales of the devices themselves continue to grow. And, of course, maps are required to find local businesses.
That gives Google three ways to target someone looking for local information. They'll see an ad on the search results page for a local query. They'll see an ad on the Place Page for that business, which might soon be more attractive with Yelp content. And they'll see listings and ads on Google Maps when they try to find directions to that business, which might alert them to nearby businesse--which starts the cycle anew.
And to top it all off, there are still a ton of small businesses that have yet to build out a presence on the Web, giving Google an opportunity to capture that content itself by providing listings and Place Pages for small-business owners that don't want to deal with maintaining their own Web site. This is true "long tail" content, in that demand for any one search result is relatively small but it's almost impossible to estimate how many results will exist over time.
Yelp's unique brand of user-generated content would fit very nicely into that equation. However, owning Yelp would also expose Google to some of the more controversial aspects of Yelp's strong local presence, such as allegations of intimidation and pay-for-play reviews. Yelp has denied the charges, but given Google's position under the antitrust microscope, any sort of extra scrutiny will not be appreciated.
At around $500 million, Yelp would be one of Google's largest acquisitions to date and its second major deal since CEO Eric Schmidt announced the company was once again in shopping mode. Even if the deal falls through, it's a clear sign of the company's interest in expanding its online advertising empire to the local market.
But it's perhaps also a sign that Google realized it needed a little help in getting there. After all, every decision about expanding a business comes down to build versus buy. Sometimes it's just easier to write a check.
I am a willing subscriber to The Wall Street Journal's online edition. It's $100 a year, which is a lot for online content, especially considering that you can generally find a way to get for free. But I'm a professional writer, and times are hard for all of us. I consider it a professional courtesy to pay, even handsomely, for excellent work. What I won't do is pay for twice. Unfortunately, that's what the WSJ wants me to do:
I recently downloaded the iPhone app for the WSJ, and discovered that getting access to the stories that I'm paying for already on the Web was going to cost me another $52 a year. And that's the discounted rate for existing subscribers. iPhone and BlackBerry app access is $78 a year if you don't already have either a Web or print subscription. It's only if you subscribe to both the Web and print editions of the WSJ that you get iPhone app access for "free."
No, I don't think so.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)This is madness. I'm paying for online access to the stories. Why on earth should the publication charge me for it twice, or differently, just because I want to view that content, sometimes, on another connected device?
A Dow Jones spokesperson replied, "Each platform or device provides a different experience, and our model reflects that."
By this logic, I'm surprised the WSJ doesn't try to charge me an additional fee for reading stories on a second computer. At least a WSJ Web password can be used on any browser, including the browser on the iPhone.
But what if I want to read on yet another device, like an e-book? Actually, and sadly, Amazon's Kindle content delivery system seems to take a play from the Journal's book. If you're already a subscriber to the WSJ in any form, don't ask about the Kindle version of it. You don't want to know. The Kindle system is so divorced from its content producers that people who subscribe to electronic editions of one service, such as The New York Times' Electronic Edition at $175 a year, must pay again to get that same content delivered to their e-readers. In the case of the Times, that's another $167 a year. For the same stories, except stripped of color.
Granted, for most papers so far there are no corresponding non-Kindle payment plans. You only have to pay for USA Today if you want it on your Kindle ($144 a year), but it's still completely free over the Web; even the iPhone app gives you the content for nothing, save the crossword, which is a paid app.
Here's a better idea for Amazon, the Journal, and the Times: Set up a way for users to subscribe to a content service, and let them get that content electronically wherever they want. Kindle, iPhone, Web, whatever. It should be a right: if you have to pay for content, it should follow you around like a devoted puppy. (To be fair, let's let newspapers charge extra for actually delivering newspapers, since printing and distribution does incur non-trivial additional expenses.)
This idea is already working its way through the television industry. It's called TV Everywhere. In a nutshell, it says that if you pay for certain shows or networks via your cable bill, you should be able to watch what you're paying for online as well, even when you're not on the cable company's network.
Another emerging idea that augurs for this is the concept of the "digital locker." We can hope that Apple's purchase of Lala.com will mean that the music you purchase from iTunes, as well as the tunes you upload from CDs you own, will be stored by Apple for you, to be streamed when you want, to wherever you are, for as long as Apple stays in business.
That's the way to do it. Paying for content that's restricted to a platform is an analog anachronism that should die in the digital age. It's not fair nor sustainable, since delivery methods and platforms shift all the time. It is fair for content providers to charge for their work, but they should sell the content itself, not the media that holds it or the connections that transmit it.
Career site Glassdoor.com has announced the employees' choice awards for the top 50 best places to work. Unfortunately, tech companies didn't make the top five.
According to Glassdoor, Southwest Airlines, General Mills, Slalom Consulting, Bain & Co., and McKinsey & Co. were the best places to work this year. Only General Mills and Bain & Co. were in the top five last year.
On the tech side, it was enterprise-solution provider Juniper Networks that led the way for the industry, placing 10th in the list with a 3.9 (out of 5) company rating from employees. Google placed 14th with a 3.9 rating, followed by NetApp, which also received a 3.9 rating. Last year, Google was ranked seventh on the list. NetApp was ranked 10th.
Some other tech notables from the list: Apple placed 22nd with a 3.8 company rating, which is a little lower than last year's 19th place. Online career site CareerBuilder took the 26th spot with a 3.7 rating. The site experienced a steep decline, dropping eight spots from its 2008 ranking of 18th.
But it was Adobe Systems that declined most of all the tech companies on the list. The company placed fourth last year. This year, its rating slipped to 3.7, giving it the 29th spot on the list.
Intel is new to the list this year, garnering a 3.6 rating and taking 41st place. Best Buy inched up to 45th place from 46th last year with a 3.6 rating as well.
CEO ratings
Glassdoor also asked employees to rate their CEOs. According to the company, Google CEO Eric Schmidt received an 87 percent approval rating from employees, while Apple CEO Steve Jobs scored a 91 percent approval rating. CareerBuilder's Matt Ferguson had a 78 percent approval rating. Adobe's Shantanu Narayen had a relatively low 60 percent approval rating. Best Buy's Brad Anderson didn't fare too well either, garnering a 64 percent approval rating from his employees.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Google ventured into new territory on Monday with the launch of a new URL-shortening service it's calling Goo.gl.
Unlike some existing and high-profile shorteners such as TinyURL and Bit.ly, Goo.gl is not a general-purpose link shrinker that users can access by going to a standalone site. Instead, it's been built into Google products, beginning with Google's browser toolbar and its Feedburner RSS service. Both of those services can now create shortened Goo.gl URLs that link to the source content while using fewer characters. This is especially important for sharing on places like Twitter, where there are size limits.
The feature goes hand in hand with the launch of a share button for the Google toolbar that lets users share whatever page they're on with a number of social services. As for its integration with FeedBurner, Google now provides feed owners with a way to automatically publish certain posts directly to Twitter, which will again help keep the number of characters to a minimum.
Google says the shortening service is both fast and stable. The company has also placed the same security measures that go into its search index to block pages that may contain malware or phishing schemes.
In an introductory post on its official blog, Google said that it may eventually roll out the service as a standalone site, but that for now it's being built into Google products. Such a feature would likely allow third party sites to build Goo.gl link shortening into their own products. In the meantime, other Google properties that could certainly benefit from having link shortening built-in include YouTube, Maps, Reader, and Blogger--many of which have integrated sharing features.
Update 2 p.m. PST: As we should have mentioned before, .gl is the top-level domain for Greenland. Also, Google's launch comes on the heels of Facebook having quietly launched its own URL-shortening service called FB.me. Heading there in your browser simply takes you to Facebook's home page, whereas sharing links through Facebook's mobile site will shorten them for you using a shortened FB.me URL. More on that as soon as Facebook publicly acknowledges its existence.
Visitors of Goo.gl get this page, which tells them what the service does, although will not let just anyone create shortened URLs. Instead, Google is allowing use of its service through its own products.
(Credit: CNET)
Yahoo's Victor Tsaran, blind since the age of five, is responsible for making sure Yahoo developers design Web pages with accessibility in mind.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)Yahoo's Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started Yahoo's accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features.
Fortunately for Tsaran, Yahoo's accessibility manager, he's running into that problem less and less. Web designers are starting to take accessibility as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their products, improving the Web experience not only for people like Tsaran--who lost his sight at the age of five--but for Web users in general.
"We're seeing a lot more awareness and involvement in Web accessibility than we did a few years ago, particularly among big companies," said Judy Brewer, director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium. "It's becoming a solid business expectation that Web sites need to meet the needs of all users."
At the two biggest Internet companies in the world, accessibility is seen as an increasingly important part of what they do. Yahoo requires every new hire to receive accessibility training from Tsaran and Alan Brightman, senior policy director of special communities. And it books engineering teams for tours of their Accessibility Lab.
Google recently rolled out a service that will let YouTube users add captions to their videos, and believes that as the Web moves more from an era of presentation to an era of two-way "data-driven" communication, accessibility becomes even more important, said Jonas Klink, accessibility program manager.
Web accessibility has come a long way in the decade since many of these proposals were first floated. It's still a challenge, however, for the Web community to remember that as it pushes forward with exciting new technologies like HTML5 that could reinvent the Internet experience, it must keep in mind the needs of those who can't type 60 words per minute, operate a mouse like a scalpel, or see the unobtrusive pop-up windows that point to the next destination on the page.
"As the Web gets more and more dynamic, the accessibility requirements get more and more interesting, and sometimes challenging, to implement," Brewer said.
The challenges
There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can't use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion, said Yahoo's Brightman. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.
Sites that don't play nicely with special input methods cause accessibility problems that can easily be avoided.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)That can cause problems for Web designers who rely too heavily on mouse navigation, or who design pages with special multimedia whiz-bang effects that look cool only to the people that can see them. "There can be an assumption of homogeneity on the Web," said Naomi Bilodeau, technical program manager for Google.
Users of screen readers--software that essentially reads out loud a description of text, links, and buttons on a page--are confounded the most by Captchas and Flash Web pages, according to a recent survey of screen-reader users conducted by WebAIM.
But simple things like photos or images can also create problems if the Web publisher doesn't add alt text to those photos, or relies primarily on images as a way of explaining what is happening on the page. And as Web designers push forward with Javascript and AJAX-based technologies that overlay Web content over the primary Web page, there's great potential to confuse screen readers.
The good news is that most of these problems aren't as much technology issues as design issues; content created with things like Flash can be made accessible if designers start off with that principle in mind.
"There are a bunch of things (in Web design) that are not features," said Nicholas Zakas, principal front-end engineer for Yahoo's home page, meaning that while you can jazz up a page all you like with additional features, there are certain things that should be standard fare. "Performance is not a feature, internationalization is not a feature, and accessibility is not a feature."
However, features can make the Web more accessible. As mentioned, Google recently rolled out automatic captioning software for YouTube videos, making it much easier for deaf people to enjoy the world's largest collection of cute cat videos.
In all seriousness, the automatic captioning technology is being rolled out first on YouTube's Educational channel, allowing deaf or hearing-impaired people to take advantage of distance learning programs or other educational systems. It's most definitely a work in progress, (check out this YouTube video of a lecture by a University of California at Berkeley professor by clicking on the "cc" tab, the left arrow, and then "Transcribe Audio") but with refinement could really add to the amount of knowledge that can be consumed by disabled people.
"I wanted this so badly (that) it's good enough, I don't care if there are some bad captions," said Google's Ken Harrenstien, a deaf software engineer who played an instrumental role in bringing the project to life.
The reasons
There are no explicit laws that companies design Web sites to be accessible to the disabled, but many disability experts and Web companies believe that portions of the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 do apply to the Internet, despite having been written several years before the Web emerged as a mainstream phenomenon.
And in order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.
But these are businesses, after all: Yahoo's Brightman estimated that there's about $220 billion in discretionary spending available to disabled people. Making a Web site accessible to as many people as possible isn't just the right thing to do, it also makes business sense, he said.
Also, with a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world--notably the U.S.--accessibility requirements will become useful for today's crop of baby boomers as they grow older. People over 65 are increasing their use of the Internet, according to Nielsen, and features designed for accessibility could aid those who aren't technically disabled but wouldn't mind a little extra help.
The Web is becoming more accessible for people with disabilities, but it's far from complete: 46.3 percent of screen reader users think the Web is getting more accessible.
(Credit: WebAIM) The future
The immediate challenge for those working on Web accessibility is to ensure that accessibility standards are not trampled in the rush to finalize the HTML5 collection of standards that Google and other Web browser companies are currently debating. Brewer said it's "extremely important to be sure that HTML5 can support accessibility fully," and her group is working closely with the other parts of the W3C to realize that goal.
But beyond that goal, Web accessibility advocates have reason to feel optimistic about their cause. Long-awaited technologies like sophisticated speech recognition are finally coming to fruition after decades of joking about how such capabilities were just two years away. And 46 percent of respondents to the WebAIM survey reported that Web content has become more accessible in recent years.
"Anybody should be able to use anything on this page," said Yahoo's Zakas, keeper of the all-important Yahoo.com page. "If anybody can't use it, it shouldn't be there."
