Section 508 Web Accessibility Tutorial is Updated - Finally (Posted November 5, 2007)
The Web Accessibility for Section 508 Tutorial was originally written in 2001 for the Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center (ITTATC) out of Georgia Tech.
After completing the tutorial I saw a list message from Joe Clark that he was writing a book on Web Accessibility - and indeed he did - Building Accessible Web Sites, New Riders, 2003. But he hadn't then, and I hadn't heard of Joe - yet - but I still thought that if Joe could do it then I could! (Although, in looking back at some of the emails at that time, I did acknowledge that Joe was a much better writer than I!) Well I contacted about a dozen publishers and none were interested enough to move forward. It was the bottom of the tech bust and publishers were going slow on new technical books.
A little latter and out of the blue friendsOfEd contacted me and wanted to
produce a book on web accessibility in, as I remember, 3 months. I said "great idea," but only if other
authors were brought in to write about the difficult topics, like the accessibility in the law, multimedia, and managing
accessibility in the enterprise. The result was Constructing Accessible Web Sites, by Jim
Thatcher, Paul Bohman, Michael Burks, Shawn Lawton Henry, Bob Regan, Sarah Swierenga, Mark D. Urban, and Cynthia
D. Waddel, published by glasshaus in the UK (another Apress company, like FrendsofEd)
in April, 2002. The book was republished by Apress in 2003 when glasshaus disappeared.
That book, like its successor, maintained its Amazon 
rating.
After writing my five chapters of Constructing Accessible Web Sites I wanted never to write anything again. So I didn't even think of modifying or updating the Web Accessibility for Section 508 Tutorial - except when folks contacted me with errors (thanks!) and I tried to fix those right away.
At CSUN in 2005, coauthor Mike Burks was
agitating to publish a revised edition of Constructing Accessible Web Sites. I didn't want to go through
that writing process again, but the idea moved forward with some new authors and wider content to yield (for the
second time) the best in web accessibility resources, Web Accessibility - Web Standards and
Regulatory Compliance by Jim Thatcher,
Michael R. Burks, Christian Heilmann, Shawn Lawton Henry, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Patrick H. Lauke, Bruce Lawson, Bob
Regan, Richard Rutter, Mark Urban, and Cynthia Waddell - . It was
published in July 2006. I was shocked at how much had changed - as just one example, the Web
Accessibility Toolbar did not exist, and it is key throughout my chapters illustrating concepts
and testing for accessibility. I rewrote most of the content in my five chapters of the book.
But again I was totally sick of writing and so the Web Accessibility for Section 508 Tutorial languished. Then in late summer 2007 Natt Dunn of Webucator, a technical training company, contacted me because he wanted to create a Web Accessibility Course based on the Section 508 Web Accessibility Tutorial. It was an opportunity for me to force myself to update the Web Tutorial. I agreed to a time line for Webucator that required all the sections to be updated by October 19, 2007 - and I only missed by a couple of days. It is done; if you find any errors or have any comments, please contact me.
So there you have it, the tale of the Web Accessibility for Section 508 Tutorial and its published offspring, Constructing Accessible Web Sites , Web Accessibility - Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, and now Webucator's Web Accessibility Course.