As many of you know, the state of Planet-A11y.net has been in disrepair for quite some time.  But fear not, we’re finally on the path to greatness.  My new server to host Planet-A11y is now ready and we’ll be installing the software to aggregate feeds from the contributors of Accessibility (A11y) soon.  On Monday, my co-maintainer, Flavio Percoco and I will stage our own mini-hackfest

This will get us up and running on a stable server and have the feeds aggregated on a regular intervals.  I’ll update you all here when that is done.  But that’s only the beginning of what we need to do.  The next steps we need to do is to ensure the site is accessible and looks good.

One of the problems we’ve had in the past with the existing Planet-A11y.net is that while our site met W3C validations, many of the feeds we imported did not.  And as soon as someone’s site got imported into our pages, it turned our site into !FAIL, which was a definite black eye on a site that promotes accessibility!  We’re going to put in more stringent controls to keep that from happening again, which means more work on our end.  But, an inaccessible accessibility site can no longer be considered acceptable.

The other thing we’ll be looking to do is work on the theme and create a logo that is special to Planet-A11y.  Artists and designers are welcome to come on board to hone their craft on our site.  Again, I’ll let you know when we’re ready for that step.

So hang on folks!  Planet-A11y is NOT DEAD, just merely hibernating.