Teaching | Web Standards Documentary Project | Topher Kohan
Topher Kohan: Hi. My name is Topher Kohan. I'm a first quarter senior at The Art Institute of Atlanta. I work as a Work Studies student at the Centers for Disease Control in the ATSDR division, which is the Agency for Toxic Disease and Substance Registry.
I was hired on initially to do 508 Compliance conversion for web documents, PDFs, websites, and such. In the sense of that project, the reason I was brought on is they were doing a government mandate move to Web Standards. That was all fine and good.
They were told, “You have to do this”, and they hired an outside firm to redesign the template. But when you got there, you realized that none of the onsite developers actually had any idea what it meant to be web standard compliant. They all thought, “Well, if we just use CSS, we're golden.”
So part of my thing there was working with them to use the information I learned here at school, everything that we're taught, and kind of go through and show them best practices. Show, “This is a correct way. Even though this is basically correct, the better way to do this is this. Use the long description. Make sure you use multiple style sheets for multiple devices, not just one and deal with it however it works out.”
By doing that and working with them, our division, and now the CDC's home page, are both strict standards compliant. Working with them, it was a really great experience.