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There were 2485 businesses owned by disabled people in Ontario in 2021, according to BDO Canada, but it is very hard to find them via a search engine. Feel free to add yours in the comments. I use the term disabled people instead of “people with disabilities” because disabled people is derived from the social model of disability (developed by disabled people), which emphasizes that people are disabled by inaccessible environments, rather than the disability being inherent to them, which is implied by “people with disabilities”. Businesses owned by disabled people Adaptability Canada The leading business accessibility innovation company in Canada. They specialize in technology-enabled solutions that support the full spectrum of disabilities and enable superior customer and employee experiences for invisible disability design and inclusion, inclusive experience design for workplace, public, and commercial environments, improving and managing accessibility in complex real estate portfolios, and accessible procurement. T Harris Environmental Management (THEM) @tharrisenvironmental THEM is a leading Canadian environmental consulting firm specializing in Environmental Services, Hazardous Materials Management, and Occupational Health & Safety, and was recently certified as disabled-owned by the Inclusive Workplace and Supply Council of Canada. #disabilitypridemonth July 11, 2025 at 06:09PM via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DL-9Y7BMRCQ/

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Does your website reflect your values?

Does your website reflect your values? Your values are how you show up in the world as a human, so it would be strange if your website did not reflect your values. Values are not the same as politics, although they do affect how you vote and what you campaign for. There is a broad social consensus in Canada that we support the rights of 2SLGBTQIA people, Black people, Indigenous Peoples, and disabled people, and it seems that most companies seek to uplift these groups and their rights to some extent. (Other topics may be more controversial.) It is sometimes difficult to know where to draw the dividing line between values and politics, and in a business situation, it depends on whether you want to attract a broad range of clients, or only people who share your political views. Not feeling the need to have political opinions is a privilege experienced by people who are not frequently harmed by government policies, and who are not marginalized and endangered by other people’s political views. If you support the rights of marginalized people, your company’s website, employment policies, and premises should reflect that support. Your website and communications Canada (along with most other legal jurisdictions) requires websites to be accessible by law. This means that they need to comply with accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There are online tools for checking accessibility, but do you know how to fix the issues that they highlight? One of the services we offer is improving your website’s accessibility. Making sure your content is readable and written in plain language is important. You can check the readability score of your content with online tools. If you have photographs of people on your website, make sure they are not all the same gender, all the same colour, or all able-bodied. The tone of voice you use to write your website reflects your values. Even the colours you use on your website can reflect your values to some extent, as well as your brand. Adding your pronouns to biographies on your website, email signatures, Zoom profile, Slack profile etc shows that you support trans and nonbinary people. Your employment policies Your employment policies include things like vacation time, paid sick leave, time off for family and bereavement reasons, salary and promotion, health insurance that covers gender-affirming care, bonuses, harassment, complaints, and grievance procedures, support for marginalized groups, trade union membership, and so on. Many of these are governed by legal requirements, but others are at the discretion of employers. Make sure it is clear to all staff, contractors, suppliers, and visitors that homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic comments are not acceptable, along with other forms of bigotry. Make sure to offer training to ensure that staff are aware of these policies. It is especially important that this is included in onboarding training courses. Your premises You may have noticed that several businesses and stores in Canada now have a Progress Pride flag on the premises, either in the form of a sticker at the door, or a Pride flag flying. Indicating support for Black and Indigenous rights is also helpful. It also helps if there are gender-neutral washrooms. The best ones are single-stall, accessible directly from a corridor, and labelled as gender-neutral with both text and Braille. Accessible washrooms are a legal requirement. Find out more The Craft of Editing Plain English Getting the Tone Right Services Tags and categories: JEDI, Marketing, 2SLGBTQIA, accessibility, content writing, DEI, UI, user experience, user interface design via WordPress https://ift.tt/4Pmoth3 July 07, 2025 at 01:46PM

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July is Disability Pride Month. This year’s theme is “We Belong and We’re Here to Stay”. This message highlights the way that disabled people are often overlooked when providing services, and there needs to be a cultural shift as well as changes in legislation. People celebrate disability pride in July because it was the month when the United States passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to protect the civil rights of disabled people. Northern Ireland released similar legislation in 1995. England, Wales and Scotland passed disability legislation in 2002. In Canada, each province has disability legislation, introduced from 2005 onwards. Some key principles of disabled rights are as follows: Nothing about us without us This is a general principle adopted by the disability rights movement in the 1990s, which emphasizes that any decision or discussion which affects disabled people should involve them from the outset, not as an afterthought. In 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that “no society can claim to be based on justice and equality without persons with disabilities taking decisions as full-fledged members”. The social model of disability The social model of disability posits that if all the barriers to access were removed, disabled people could be full participants in society. This model was developed by disability rights activists in the 1970s and 80s. “If everyone was taught sign language at an early age, a deaf person would no longer be disadvantaged. If towns were built and planned with physical disabilities in mind and there was no social stigma attached to looking or sounding different, then having a physical impairment would no longer be disabling.” ~ Nancy Doyle (2020), We Have Been Disabled: How The Pandemic Has Proven The Social Model Of Disability https://ift.tt/XGQ2oUS July 03, 2025 at 08:31AM via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DLpU56EMk4f/

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Customer service

Customer service I had a great customer service experience today. One of my domain names was deactivated and I didn’t know why. I contacted WebHosting Canada’s support chatline. They fixed the issue, and explained what had gone wrong. And now I am a happy customer. Communication is key Great customer service is all about communication. There were two handovers during my interaction. The first was from an AI chatbot to a human. The second was from the human to another human from a different team. Both times, the system provided the new person with a history of the chat, so I didn’t really need to explain the problem again. Contrast this with all those times you’ve phoned a helpline, only to have to explain the problem again to the person you’ve been passed on to. I was also really happy with how they explained what had happened and why it happened. The reason was that if you have a .com domain, you have to verify the Registrant contact email address for WhoIs domain lookup, otherwise the system will disable your domain. The verification email had gone into my Updates tab on Gmail and I did not see it. Only promise what you can deliver I was (briefly) a customer service person in the 1990s. If I said I would call a customer back between 3pm and 4pm, I would do that, even if I had not yet solved their issue, and I would let them know what was happening. Colleagues sometimes promised something they couldn’t deliver, which made customers very unhappy. The WebHosting Canada guys told me that my domain would be restored in 30 minutes but full service would still not propagate across all servers for a few hours. Now I know what to expect, and can plan accordingly. That is much better than being promised something unachievable and then being disappointed. Usability glitches Sometimes these issues arise from poor usability. In the case of my disabled domain, it was because, in its otherwise admirable attempts to divert unimportant messages away from my inbox, Gmail decided that a time-sensitive and important email should be routed away from my main inbox. Argh. Tags and categories: General via WordPress https://ift.tt/6yhe8Fc June 24, 2025 at 11:16AM

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The Craft of Editing

The Craft of Editing Writing is a process of constant editing and revision. When the dreaded red or blue squiggle appears under the text you’ve just written, it can induce frantic back-tracking and even self-doubt. If you don’t know where to start, staring at a blank screen can be disheartening. Many authors still prefer to write long-hand for this reason. I rarely write long-hand, except for poetry. But writing by hand on a physical piece of paper can be a great way to marshal your thoughts. Why style matters Writing style, grammar, and ease of reading matter because they are the basics of effective communication. They suggest to people that your business is trustworthy and values attention to detail. Communicating clearly avoids confusion, and even lawsuits. Using plain English helps your website rise to the top of search results. Does AI help? People are currently debating whether AI tools help or hinder the creative process. In reality, “AI” would be more accurately described as a Large Language Model. AI tools use large amounts of text scraped from the web, plus a set of rules, to make suggestions. AI can be helpful, but if you do not already have a good sense of what makes a piece of writing great, it may actually make things worse. As this article from Allegrow points out: Tools can help do some of the monotonous work of proofing, but there are many areas that machines just can’t match. Those include context, industry-specific jargon, brand voice, cultural nuances, emotional intelligence, and originality. For that, you need a highly skilled human. Other editing tools The standard grammar and spelling tools that come with most word-processing tools are pretty useful. However, if you want to do something more complicated, then you need other tools to help you. Examples include writing in a specific variant of English, or checking the reading ease of your document. GrammarCheck will check grammar, spelling, and punctuation, wrong words, punctuation and capitalization errors, run-on sentences, dangling modifiers, style issues, and incorrect tense. It uses a minimal amount of AI. It offers an app and a browser extension. It will check six regional variants of English, including Canadian, British, and American. This is especially helpful for people who have moved from the UK to Canada, like me. The Flesch-Kincaid Calculator is a useful tool for checking how readable your writing is. It looks for long sentences, subclauses, and other complex constructions. It doesn’t highlight the sentences that need changing, though. You have to figure that out on your own, although it does give you general guidance. I just used Flesch-Kincaid to check this article. I then edited it to make the sentences shorter. This reduced the level to Plain English. Personally, I feel it makes the style rather staccato. The Oxford Text Checker will analyze a piece of text and give you the CEFR reading level of each word (except for the ones it has not classified yet). If you’re writing English for people with a different mother tongue, this would be very useful. TextGears checks grammar, readability, and style for multiple languages (English, French, Russian, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Arabic). There is a standard package and an AI-enhanced package. LanguageTool is a free open-source language checker. It uses AI to check your text for grammar mistakes, help you find the right tone, and rephrase your sentences. It can be added to browsers and supports multiple languages. Find out more Plain English Writing for the web Flesch Reading Ease: What It Is and Why It Matters, by Animesh Sareen (2024) 7 reasons why grammar matters in marketing and business communication, by Jessica Perkins (2023) Why it is Important to Use Proper Grammar, from the Allegrow blog (2023) Tags and categories: Marketing, accessibility, content writing, editing, marketing, user experience, UX via WordPress https://ift.tt/nQLNGku June 20, 2025 at 11:25AM

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Posting to social media

Posting to social media Posting to many different social media platforms is such a chore, isn’t it? They all require a slightly different format for your post, so you end up rewriting your post excerpt and rejigging your content to fit the requirements of the platform. This can become a full-time job on its own. Then there’s the way that each social media platform requires a slightly different header image for your page. LinkedIn has one set of dimensions, Facebook has another, and Threads and BlueSky have different requirements too. Thankfully, there are tools to automate all this and make it easier, but they can be expensive. Sometimes it is hard to evaluate which of the tools you actually need, and how to keep track of them all. Key considerations What are the use cases where you need an automation tool? What level of technical knowhow do you have? Think about what features you want before you go shopping. Do you want… Your automatic social media posting tool integrated with your CRM (customer relationship management)? * A tool that connects your blog to your social media accounts? * To be able to schedule social media posts in advance? * To automatically push newly published blogposts to your socials? * An analytics tool that will tell you how many people opened your posts? * An AI caption generator? * An AI Copilot which can generate an entire social strategy for you? * The option to bulk upload content? * The ability to recycle popular posts? * To automatically share from RSS feeds? * A social inbox to notify you of comments and messages? Different automation tools will have some features but not others, so it’s important to decide what you want and then shop around. Some automation platforms will only offer some features on their more expensive plans, so check that the features you want are available within the plan that you can afford. Always do a search for lists of tools by independent bloggers. The makers of automation platforms write these lists, but they usually rate their tool as the best (quite understandably), so review lists by impartial authors. Find out more 15 Best Social Media Automation Tools For 2025 (Comparison) Top 10+ Social Media Automation Tools Tags and categories: Marketing, automation, chores, formatting, marketing, posting, social media via WordPress https://ift.tt/5fmJBW0 June 18, 2025 at 09:30AM

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Design and development

Design and development What’s the difference between a designer and a developer? A lot of people assume that these terms are synonymous, but they are increasingly found on different teams in large organizations. There are other roles in the software development space that are also needed to ensure that the finished product is reliable and usable. Designer A designer typically creates a graphical representation of a website or a piece of software, making decisions about colours, typography, branding, and increasingly, how the information is organized on a website (often in conjunction with a specialist copy editor). The software they use is often a high-fidelity mockup tool like Figma or Zeplin, which can also represent the user’s journey through the website, from signing up to making a purchase. Developer A developer writes the underlying code that will realize the design. They might be writing dynamic components like search pages, organizing the code in the most efficient way, ensuring that it is high quality code, fixing bugs, running tests, making sure the website loads quickly. Development is still a creative endeavour because it involves writing elegant code that other developers can use, and collaborating with designers and the product team to share their knowledge of usability, accessibility, and website performance. Front-end and back-end Developer roles are often divided into front-end (the developer who builds the web pages and components that visitors will see) and back-end (the developer who takes care of the underlying database, and the code that sends data to the front end of the website). Software and websites There is also a distinction between web development (creating and maintaining websites, which are largely content-focused, such as online shops or newspapers) and software development (creating and maintaining web applications like travel booking websites, customer relationship management tools, or virtual learning sites). Product manager A product manager evaluates the effectiveness of different designs and components by monitoring website visitor statistics (the most important one being how many people bought the product). They will use tools like Amplitude and Google Analytics to track visitors’ journeys through the website, and make recommendations for new features based on their findings. The product manager needs to understand website metrics and A/B experimentation, user journeys, user experience, design, and development. There are two other important roles in a development team: the team leader or manager, and the quality assurance engineer. Quality assurance The quality assurance engineer creates automated tests (visual regression, functional regression, and continuous integration tests) and manual tests of the software or website that the developers are working on. Team leader The team leader protects the team from distraction so they can get on with their work, mentors the team, liaises with higher management, and organizes sprints and team meetings. They need to be able to understand agile methodologies. At Carnelian Web Services, all these functions are rolled into one person: me. So when you hire us to build your website, you’re getting the product of a single creative mind, which gives you a more cohesive service.

Find out more

From the Gemology Blog:

Accessibility

Agile methodologies

Content writing

User experience

User stories and personas

Carnelian Web Services:

Services we offer

Pricing

Different job roles:

Web Designer

Web Developer / Software Developer

Product Manager

Quality Assurance

Team Leader

Copy Editor

via WordPress https://ift.tt/Ya82Tj6 June 16, 2025 at 08:45AM

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A website is a window

Websites are virtual store-fronts. The best ones tell a story of who you are, why your business is unique, and why people should choose your product or service.

Carnelian Web Services helps you to develop your unique virtual store-front by identifying what your audience wants and needs.

We have 25 years’ experience of making user-friendly, well-crafted websites that tell a compelling story about the product or service being offered.