How can a workplace be made accessible? The Sterling Creations fall 2011 newsletter Hello and welcome to the Sterling Creations newsletter, which is produced quarterly. We hope that you enjoy it and encourage you to pass it along to those who may be interested in the types of services that we offer. We welcome your feedback and invite you to give us your comments for it is only through you and with you that we can improve our services. Table of contents 1 Message from the president 2 The third quarter in review 3 Sterling services 4 List of blogs 5 Contact info Message from the president Hello there and welcome to the fall season; probably my favorite season after spring. I hope that everyone is well and getting ready for the upcoming holiday season although it may be a bit early for me to be mentioning this. Ah yes! The season of colors and despite my no longer being able to see them, I still have vivid memories of them and probably always will. It has been a very interesting third quarter for Sterling Creations. Lots of new projects on the go and lots to be looking forward to for the fourth quarter. I’d like to thank everyone for their continuing support for it is only with you that Sterling Creations can continue to be successful. I invite you now to read our third quarter in review. I wish all of you a great fall and I thank our friends and customers for continuing to support Sterling Creations. With very best wishes for a great fall and upcoming holiday season Donna J. Jodhan; president Sterling Creations The third quarter in review The third quarter has been an extremely busy one both for Sterling Creations and for our president Donna. We will take a look first at what our various teams have been doing. The accessibility team has been approached by Shane Holten of www.sph-planning-consulting.ca to join their consulting team as an accessibility consultant. This is a Toronto based company that specializes in providing resources to IT companies. The accessibility team is pleased to be a part of this esteemed team. Our accessibility folks are also involved in ongoing projects to provide support consulting to other clients in Canada. At the end of the third quarter, our accessibility team was in preliminary negotiations to work with one of Canada's federal parties to bring accessibility to their main website. The writing team has probably been the busiest team of all. They continue to produce weekly articles for the Avalanche SEO Company, a Toronto based company that specializes in search engine optimization. In addition, it continues to churn out weekly blogs for our own website www.sterlingcreations.ca and www.sterlingcreations.com as well as for the fredshead blog at www.aph.org. The writing and research teams continue to work in tandem to provide writing and research services for other clients and assist our president Donna Jodhan with her personal blogs; research, editing, and proof reading. These two teams also work together to help our president produce a bimonthly column for the www.diversityintheworkplace.ca website. We thank Jill Walters for giving us this opportunity. The translation team along with all of our other teams continue to service clients in Britain, Europe, and the United States and we expect the pace to pick up for the fourth quarter. Thanks to our esteemed developer Eric Martin, we have been able to revamp our two main websites; www.sterlingcreations.ca and www.sterlingcreations.com. The former is now solely dedicated to accessibility issues while the latter promotes our services. We hope you like our new streamlined websites. Our president continues to be up to her old tricks; work, work, and never stopping. Her court case is entering a new phase; the Canadian government is appealing the landmark decision that was handed down in Donna’s favor on November 29 2010. The hearing will be held on November 15 and 16 in Toronto. The E Accessibility Bulletin online magazine, a British based magazine, has already written an article in its September edition with regard to this matter. This article is titled New Canadian web access guidelines fail to satisfy critics. This article can be found at www.ukauthority.com and another article titled Canadian Accessibility Guidelines ‘Not Fast Enough’ Can be found at http://www.headstar.com/eab/ Donna thanks Dan Jellinek for helping to spread the word. Our president has been kept extremely busy in her new position as president of the Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians. She is committed to improving communications with chapters and members, reaching out to other organizations, and finding ways to encourage blind and partially sighted kids to become self advocates. On October 29, Donna and others will be holding a town hall meeting where participants will have an opportunity to ask questions and make comments to John Rafferty, CEO of the CNIB, on issues directly pertaining to library services in Canada. This meeting is being jointly sponsored by the Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians and Citizens with Disabilities of Ontario. John Rafferty has kindly agreed to participate and it is hoped that this is just the beginning of other town hall meetings to come. In August, Donna was asked by the Canadian Council of Disabilities to write an article for their 30 accomplishments booklet and her article was titled access to websites. This booklet will be presented to participants at a conference in Early November to be held in Ottawa Canada. Donna attended her first board meeting as part of the expert consumer advisory panel of T-Base Communications INC; an Ottawa based company that specializes in the production of documents in alternate formats. Donna looks forward to being a contributing member of this panel and thanks Sharlyn Ayotte for having included her on this esteemed panel. Sharlyn Ayotte is the founder of T-Base Communications INC. On September 11, Donna was invited to speak to some members of the Federal Liberal Party of Canada and her topic focused on employment for blind and partially sighted Canadians; where is the workplace. Donna thanks Jim Karygiannis for having invited her to speak at this event. Sterling Services OUR ACCESSIBILITY SERVICES Meet our accessibility team! Made up of a hard working group of very dedicated professionals. This team offers compliance and evaluation services. They can help you to test and evaluate your websites for W3C compliance. They are experienced at what they do and some of their tasks include: Accessible website design and development. Accessible website testing and evaluation. Accessible content development. Creation of user testing, technical support, high level, and detailed evaluation documents. Managing of user testing teams. User and technical support. Hardware and software evaluations of access technology. Presentations, seminars, and workshops. Meet our research services team! Our newest edition. This team can help you to research info on all kinds of topics. From simple subjects to the more complicated ones. This team can do it. At the present time the research team is heavily involved in helping clients to research info for some very complicated Human Rights cases and in addition, they are assisting several authors to find ways to market their books. They also offer their research services to home businesses, small businesses, and to individuals. Some of their tasks include: Researching of requested info. Producing well-written documents containing the requested info. This team can carry out Internet, phone, and library research on your behalf. Meet our writing team! Known as the one stop writing shop. This team is probably the busiest of our groups. Working with authors, students, and marketing personnel from companies of all sizes. Some of their tasks include: Proofreading and editing. Copy writing. Re-writes. The writing team can help you to enhance and expand your articles, blogs, newsletters, online magazines, and web content. Meet our translation team! Made up of translators and language coaches. This team works in English, French, Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin. They are heavily involved in the translation of storybooks for kids into several languages. Their language coaches are also heavily involved in helping business professionals and new Canadians to become more proficient at writing and speaking English. Our dynamic team of translators and language coaches can help you to improve and translate your articles, blogs, emails, faxes, newsletters, and online magazines. In addition, they offer services to help you improve your phone conversation. Some of their tasks include: Translation. Language coaching. Transcription. Proofreading and editing. To learn more about our accessibility activities, visit www.sterlingcreations.ca. To learn more about how you can use our research and writing services to help you be successful in your endeavors, visit www.sterlingcreations.com. List of blogs The following is a list of websites where you can read blogs and editorials written by Donna J. Jodhan: Donna Jodhan! Advocating accessibility for all http://www.donnajodhan.blogspot.com Sponsored by the American Printing House for the Blind www.fredshead.info Weekly features on how to increase your success with your business ventures http://www.sterlingcreations.com/businessdesk.htm Weekly articles and editorials on issues about accessibility http://www.sterlingcreations.ca/blog Editorials: Issues and concerns on diversity in the workplace http://www.diversityintheworkplace.ca ***** Contact info To contact us by email: Please send your email to info@sterlingcreations.ca To contact us by phone: Please give us a call at (416) 491-7711