Lothian Centre for Inclusive Living (LCL) have won the Breathrough Award for their new website and Online help service.

As the web developer who designed these services with LCIL I am of course extremely happy to hear about this award.

UPDATE: I got this nice email from Catherine Garrod,

Hi Jim,
I think Carol has already let you know that LCIL has won a Breakthrough Independent Living Award under the Information category for the LCIL website and the Grapevine Online service. The judges were particularly impressed with the website and asked for the name of the person who designed the website. So much of the credit goes to you for producing our new website. Breakthrough UK is a user-led disability organisation so it has been a particular honour for us to receive recognition for the website and online service from this group. There is more information about the Breakthrough awards on their website.

Best wishes,
Catherine Garrod
Information Co-ordinator
Grapevine, Disability Information Service

Here are the long-awaited results of the two recent GAWDS Awards, for the Third Quarter of 2008 and the Fourth Quarter of 2008.

GAWDS Award, Third Quarter 2008

In September, GAWDS members voted Lotus from the mud by Tee G. Peng the winner of the GAWDS Award for the Third Quarter of 2008. Congratulations, Tee! Unfortunately, the site is no longer available to browse due to technical problems.

The site featured a pleasant elastic design with a spacious, organised layout, good visual onfocus cues for keyboard navigation, and was built using structured and semantic markup. You can find out more in a detailed review of the Lotus from the mud site on Accessites.org.

GAWDS Award, Fourth Quarter 2008

December’s voting by our members made the site of the Philippine Web Accessibility Group (PWAG) the winner of the GAWDS Award for the Fourth Quarter. The PWAG is a government registered, non-profit association of web designers, advocating accessible web design and tasked to oversee and implement relevant programs on accessible ICT in the Philippines.

The site is well-built with semantics and accessibility in mind, but with some room for improvement. More comments may be found in the Accessites review of the PWAG site, however, we have been informed by the Group that a brand new site is due to be launched very shortly, so be on the look-out for that very soon!

Retiring the GAWDS Award

After four years in the running, we are sad to announce that we have made the decision to retire the GAWDS Award, previously the Site of the Month.

The Award start life as the GAWDS Site of the Month at the end of 2004, focussing on good accessible design, but also to demonstrate that accessible design does not have to mean ugly design. It gave GAWDS members the opportunity to nominate sites and have them battle it out by peer review and member voting.

In 2007, we announced the GAWDS Award in partnership with Accessites. The Award replaced the Site of the Month, with nominations being selected from sites that have already been vetted by the Accessites team to meet the Accessites selection criteria in order to improve the quality of sites submitted to us for voting on by GAWDS members.

The Award has been running for a year now. Unfortunately, the number of votes we receive has seen little improvement, and support for running the Award has not been forthcoming. As the organisers of the GAWDS Award, Grant and I have had little time available lately to continue to look after the Award, and we have not been able to give full reviews of these recent GAWDS Award winners, hence our decision to retire the Award.

We are very pleased to have seen some fantastic designs nominated for and win the polls over the last four years. We hope that both the Site of the Month and the GAWDS Award have helped to promote accessible web design and inspire our members and readers to think about accessibility in their designs.

Thanks for all your support! Keep it accessible!

Jon and Grant

Update: Voting is now closed for this Award.

We are now taking votes for the GAWDS Award for fourth quarter of 2008.

Due to the holiday season, this poll will remain open until midnight GMT on January 5th. Get voting now! Voting has closed and the winning site will be announced soon!

The award replaces the old Site of the Month feature. A review of the winning site will be written up and published for people to comment on.

If you are a GAWDS member with good technical auditing and writing skills and would be interested in writing a quarterly review, then please let us know.

Happy holidays to you all!

Jon

Update: Voting is now closed for this Award.

We are now taking votes for the GAWDS Award for third quarter of 2008.

The poll will be open until the end of the month (23:59 GMT on October 6th). Get voting now! Voting has closed and the winning site will be announced soon!

The award replaces the old Site of the Month feature. A review of the winning site will be written up and published for people to comment on.

If you are a GAWDS member with good technical auditing and writing skills and would be interested in writing a quarterly review, then please let us know.

You can find out more about the Award and Regelingenbank Stadskanaal, winner of the last GAWDS Award, in last quarter's review.

Jon

GAWDS are pleased to announce that the Regelingenbank Stadskanaal site is the winner of the second quarterly GAWDS Web Accessibility Award.

Find out more about the Award and the Regelingenbank Stadskanaal site in the review: Regelingenbank Stadskanaal gains GAWDS Web Accessibility Award, Second Quarter 2008

After a successful first round of the GAWDS Award for accessibility, we are now taking votes for second quarter of 2008.

The poll will be open until the end of the month (23:59 GMT on June 30th). Get voting now!

The award replaces the old Site of the Month feature. A review of the winning site will be written up and published for people to comment on.

If you are a GAWDS member with good technical auditing and writing skills and would be interested in writing a quarterly review, then please let us know.

You can find out more about the Award and Little Blue Plane, winner of the last GAWDS Award, in last quarter's review.

Jon