Last night hosted our first "real" meeting for the Central Illinois .NET User Group based out of Bloomington, IL.  I say "real", because every meeting prior to last night, were just brief get-to-know-you meetings, and discussions on what we'd like the group to do.

Last night's meeting was great, for 2 reasons.  One, I got appointed as "Program Director" for the club.  I thought this role would be great, only because I get to create the ideas behind each meeting, and setup speakers from INETA, Microsoft, or other local companies to come and talk to us.  So, be for-warned...you may be contacted by me if I want you to speak :)

Secondly, we had 2 great speakers that talked about accessibility of web and windows applications.  The speakers, who are employees of State Farm Insurance, are disabled themselves and do a multitude of conferences, classes, and whatnot.  They were both very entertaining to listen to, as they've been working very closely together for quite some time, so all the friendly quirkness comes out in their talks.  I believe that our group got a ton of information out of them, as we're all now aware of the "dos" and "donts" of making an application. 

Some key items I wanted to stress with the community, are the following:

• When creating web applications, make sure you use the "alt" attribute for images, describing what the image is portraying.  Without these, a webpage could be completely blank to a screen reader.
• Always keep the navigation/menus, and commonly used items in the same place.  By moving them around on the screen, it can confuse users who have to memorize where items are.
• Make sure you provide descriptive instructions on what needs to be done.  An example that was used, was don't say "Press the red image to continue", but rather say "Press the red triangle to continue."
• Make sure when you develop a UI, that it goes to your users to have them actually test it out, and see if it is logical and easyto use to them.  If a disabled person gets confused with your UI, then the UI is worthless. It should be well laid out for disabled & non-disabled persons.
• Make sure that if you have an e-commerce site, that you have a return policy. 

Well, the last item is more of a joke, rather than a "do" or "dont".  One of the speakers, who is blind, always scours a website prior to purchasing anything, for the return policy,  only because sometimes the wrong item is ordered, and he had no idea it was coming -- so when he wanted a sweater, he really got a BMW... big difference on the credit card.

I encourage anyone who is in the Central Illinois area, to come to our meetings.  We meet the first Wednesday of every month at the Microsoft office in Bloomington, IL.  For more information on our group and see our up-and-coming schedule, visit http://www.centralil.net for more information. 

Just as a heads-up, our next meeting will have a speaker talking about security in .NET.  My guess is that it will be something similar to what we're hearing at DevDays.