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Scripting Enabled (hacking the web to be more accessible) began in 2008 as a two-day conference started by “developer evangelist” extraordinaire, Christian Heilmann. The first video and transcript of one of the September talks is now live: Denise Stephens on Multiple Sclerosis. Denise describes how her symptoms, and thus needs and abilities, change from day to day—from vision distortion to feeling like she’s “wearing Mickey Mouse gloves.” Denise encourages a universal design approach to account for the unpredictable nature of how the unknown visitor may be using and experiencing technology. While the goal is to create for the broadest possible need, Denise’s story is powerful and useful because it offers glimpses of actual problems she encounters. No matter what our abilities, planners and developers of technology must make it out business to hear as many such real stories as we can.

Adobe released the Dreamweaver (DW) CS4 beta on labs.adobe.com last week (along with betas for Fireworks and Soundbooth). The beta is available until final release for anyone with a CS3 serial number. If you use DW regularly, go get the beta! You can run the beta while still running CS3. This is a huge release, especially in terms of workflow efficiencies, with strong attention to standards.
My workflow to date generally involves efficiency-garbling tool-switching. Here’s a breakdown:

1. Dreamweaver (Find/Replace, FTP, Split View—seeing Design View while working in Code View, working on sites with DW templates/Contribute)
2. Eclipse (JSEclipse, CFEclipse, PHP, synching with CVS)
3. Firefox/ Firebug/ WebDev Toolbar (debugging & tweaking styles, testing standards & accessibility, debugging javascript)

Find-and-replace and ftp are hardly the main things for which DW is designed. That these are primary tasks for me in DW perhaps reflects the software’s (previous) focus on designers. CS4 represents strong attention to developer needs and workflow. It will be some time before I know if I can be as fast/effective with the new built-in tools for my tasks. I think it is likely that new features will reduce but not eliminate the need for round-tripping to more robust debugging tools. Nevertheless, it feels like someone was watching us work when they decided on a lot of the new functionality: hooray! Read the entire post: Efficiency Scores in Dreamweaver CS4 Beta