The ICI Experience:

This is part one of my  post for Invisible Illness Awareness Week .   It's an update to the series of blog posts I did for National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week in 2007. The three posts that I wrote in 2007 are all still pretty pertinent to the topic, but as I mentioned in my last blog post (links to the three 2007 posts are there), there's a lot more being written on blogging about illness now than there was three years ago.  So I figured an update was in order.  Plus Lisa Copen, founder of II Week, suggested it as a topic. Part 1 of the 2007 series of posts was also about the mechanics of blogging.  In 2007 I referred to Jakob Nielsen's Blog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.   I still think it's  an excellent resource, with one argument about item  #10, "Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service."  Nielsen says: "Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equiva...

Well, I didn't make the 7/24/2010 deadline for this round of Bloggers Unite; I was going to find out how to make my blogs accessible to all. Silly me, I though this would be a no-big-deal kind of thing to do. Wrong. I should really learn to research these things BEFORE I make commitments about doing them. I'm living and learning, and although I'm late for the event, I wanted to at least report back what I found out. First I went to WAVE , a Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool that I found on the Blogger's Unite for People with Disabilities page, and plugged my blog's address in. That told me everything that was wrong with my blog regarding accessibility. And that's all. No clue as to how to fix it. Or if there are any clues, I'm too clueless to pick up on them. So I went back to the Bloggers Unite for People with Disabilities page and put in this comment: Any hints on how to make a site/blog 100% accessible? 16 days ago by: sherrillynn I...

From the good folks at BlogCatalog, another great blogging event: From the email I received notifying me of the event: Dear Fellow Blogger, As bloggers, you and I have the unprecedented ability to raise awareness about important issues by simply posting about them. When we act on behalf of a cause and then write about it, we dramatically increase the positive impact we can have on the world. Today, I am asking you to take action on behalf of all the people around the world living with a disability. Just like those of us who are able-bodied, they simply want to live a happy and productive life. Help us eliminate the barriers to participation and the prejudices they face every day by taking a simple action. You can donate to an organization that supports people with disabilities, sign an online petition asking for equal access, make your blog 100% accessible. Then write about it. Tell others how important it is to make all the opportunities our world has to offer accessible...

National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week // Bloggers Unite I'm writing today as part of Bloggers Unite, which is an off shoot of BlogCatalog . Bloggers Unite is an attempt to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By asking bloggers to write about a particular subject on a particular day, a single voice can be joined with thousands to help make a difference in raising awareness of a particular issue, in our case, ICI. I've chosen to write about chronicity vs. disability because it's an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a few years now. Laurie Edwards, of A Chronic Dose wrote a similar post recently, titled Illness vs. Disability . In it she says "people with chronic illness may be considered disabled, but people with disabilities do not always have chronic illness." This is an important distinction. Her post goes further into the semantics of the situation, and she promises we'll hear more from ...