Think Before You Type

A List Apart is Back and Better Then Ever

2005-08-23T06:51:00.000-04:00

The web development magazine A List Apart has just launched its redesign. A lot of you may have been looking at the site during the summer and wondering when there was going to be finally new content posted. Well it is here. A List Apart is back and better then ever.

"From the crown of its cranium to the tips of its Ruby-slippered toes, A List Apart 4.0 is both old and new. Old in its mission to help people who make websites see farther and jump higher. New in its design, structure, publishing system, and brand extensions." (A List Apart 4.0)

It looks like they have some really great articles for this issue:

The Most Often Forgotten Definition List

2005-08-16T16:26:00.000-04:00

I recently found an article by Russ Weakley and the guys and Max Design about the often under use or misunderstanding of what HTML Definition Lists are all about.

Definition Lists are to be used wherever there is a name/value pair or wherever you have a thing and then have some more text that you use to describe it with.

W3C Specification Says -

Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-list.html#edef_list_dt

I know with the jobs that I work on, there are a lot of times where it would have been more appropriate to use a definition list. We will often use a unordered list with line breaks, which isn't a good idea.

So next time to remember the possibility of using a definition list.

Dreamweaver 8; Get Up Close and Personal

2005-08-10T10:44:00.000-04:00

As most of you I am sure have heard, Macromedia has recently announced that they are going to be releasing Studio 8, which includes a new version of Dreamweaver.

They are going to be offering free online seminars to highlight and teach people about the new features.

The seminars are actually pretty cool. I did one on Contribute 3 and I found it very helpful. The seminars use the Macromedia Breeze software which is also very neat.

When Dreamweaver 8 actually gets released, you can count on me having a full review of it here.

All you need is love...and Mozilla Firefox Web Developer Toolbar

2005-08-08T21:57:00.000-04:00

The esteemed Patrick H. Lauke has recently published an article about how a web developer can use the Mozilla Firefox Web Developer Toolbar to Evaluate Web Sites for Accessibility.

The toolbar is a pretty awesome tool and I use it all the time. It is the one thing that would prevent me from ever switching to a different browser because I depend on the Web Developer Toolbar as an important part of my tool kit.

Note: In my title I am just being witty. Mozilla Firefox Web Developer Toolbar is just a tool that can assist you in the process of making your web site accessible. You are going to have think and do work yourself.

MSU launches new Web Accessibility Site & Accessibility Guidelines

2005-08-08T21:26:00.000-04:00

One of the projects that I have been working on over the last year at Michigan State University is a new and updated Web Accessibility site.

We have just launched it.

It is going to serve as a main resource for the MSU community on how they can make their web sites more accessible. It will have all kinds of articles, tools, and tutorials. The stated mission of the site is, "Reaching the Broadest Possible Audience with Accessible, Usable & Aesthetically Pleasing Design."

We have also posted a draft of Accessibility Guidelines for MSU Web Sites.

Mmmm...Data Tables

2005-08-08T20:32:00.000-04:00

Data tables, especially in web applications, can play a crucial role in the information that gets put up on the internet.

Data tables are also something that a lot of people really neglect and make inaccessible. Here are two resources recently written to help you make accessible data tables:

Accessible Data Tables; Prepared by Roger Hudson
Bring on the tables; By Roger Johansson

Remembering Low Vision Users

2005-06-21T13:39:00.000-04:00

One group of web users that is often over looked when web sites are designed are users with low vision. What people don't realize is that low-vision users need something a lot different in the way a web site is layed out then what are used to.

Joe Clark, who I hope to meet at some point, talks about this in his A List Apart article - Big, Stark, and Chunky.

"...most people with impaired vision can still see something, and a large but unquantified segment of this group sees well enough to use a computer with a magnified or zoomed display. We have not done a good job of catering to these screen-magnification or zoom users. Using CSS, itÂs easy to do, as we shall soon see."

Joe also at the @media conference in London last week I hear gave an inspiring presentation about Zooming the web.

This challenged Gez Lemon of Juicy Studio and Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street to think about how he could incorporate a different style sheet into his web site for low vision users.

I think this a challenge that we should all try an do zoom user style sheets for our own sites.

Writing a paper...

2005-06-19T00:41:00.000-04:00

I am working on a paper about techniques used in evaluating web sites for web accessibility.

If you have any techniques that you that really work for you and you would like to share, email me. I'd love to hear different insights.

Usability Testing in 5 Seconds...

2005-06-19T00:36:00.000-04:00

Christine Perfetti recently wrote a really excellent article about 5 second usability testing.

Most users will only stay on a web page for about 5 seconds. This technique explores the kind of initial impression that your web site is giving on the user in those 5 seconds.

Try it out. It works.

Joe Clark's Live Blogging at @media 2005

2005-06-19T00:24:00.000-04:00

Over June 9th & 10th, some of the brightest minds in web standards & web accessibility came to talk to a web conference in London called @media.

The indispensable Joe Clark, accessibility writer and expert, both spoke at the conference and live blogged most of it. I was unable to attend the conference so I'm thankful that Joe live blogged it and posted his presentation slides up to the web.

I'm Back...

2005-06-18T19:28:00.000-04:00

I took a little bit of a break from writing this blog because of school, work, and just being unbelievably busy.

I look forward to getting back to helping the masses make better and more quality web sites.

"Clear and simple language"

2005-03-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

One of the guidelines in the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that I have seen people having the hardest time following is guideline 14, "Ensure that documents are clear and simple so they may be more easily understood."

People seem to miss the idea that if you want people read your web site, the user needs to understand what your talking about.

Jakob Nielsen recently did a study about how users with lower literacy have a hard time with web sites. They don't scan what they read. They read it word for word and often miss the whole "gist" of you are talk about. Simplyfing the wording increases the usability and improves the users understanding of your content.

Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view...

The main and most obvious advice is to simplify the text: use text aimed at a 6th grade reading level on the homepage, important category pages, and landing pages. On other pages, use text geared to an 8th grade reading level.

IE Commit's to Web Standards

2005-03-11T13:23:00.000-05:00

In a recent blog entry, Chris Wilson, Lead Programmer for Microsoft IE, said that Microsoft is committed to adding a mode to IE 7 that will include a strong compliance to W3C web standards. Woohooo.

This makes me excited. Does it make you excited?

a great web accessibility booklet

2005-03-10T09:32:00.000-05:00

There have been a lot of reall great web sites that have talked about techniques to incorporate web accessibility into your web sites but there really haven't been a whole lot of great books or handouts.

HP and the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation have put together a really excellent booklet (like 60 pages) on web accessibility.

The booklet, Access all WWW Areas, is availabe in HTML, PDF, and can be ordered online for paper format.

I think this would work great as a text book for web development classes.

starting class at RIT

2005-03-10T09:25:00.000-05:00

Well I have started class up again this week. I am a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I am pursuing a undergraduate degree in Information Technology with concentrations in Web Development and Human Computer Interaction.

I am sure that because of classes and the discussions that I will have with professors, I will have plenty of fodder for posts.

appropriate alt text

2005-03-01T08:01:00.000-05:00

One thing that people hear the most about in terms of web accessibility is that they have to have alternative text for the images that they put on their web sites.

This means that for every decorative bullet, color gif, spacer image, and photo a lot have developers have some type of descriptive alternative text. Which is not what they should be doing.

I then get asked often when is it appropriate to have certain types of alt text and where.

Webcredible has written a really good article, Writing effective ALT text for images. It is right on in the guidelines that it lays out for when to and not to use alt text for images.

But surely there can't be a skill to writing ALT text for images? You just pop a description in there and you're good to go, right? Well, kind of. Sure, it's not rocket science, but there are a few guidelines you need to follow...

Greetings from Boston

2005-03-01T07:55:00.000-05:00

Greetings from Boston.

This week I will be posting from the Hyatt Harborside in Boston, Mass. I am at the W3C Technical Plenary.

In the Education & Outreach Working Group we are working on a lot of exciting things that will help the process of "infusing" web accessibility into the way the people and organizations view the web.

an accessible cms

2005-02-25T09:32:00.000-05:00

A CMS, Web Edition, just came out with its latest version and they are claiming compliance with W3C's Accessibility guidelines. Interesting....

Google maps in Safari

2005-02-24T22:40:00.000-05:00

I, like Jeffrey Veen, have tried to get to Google Maps using Apple Safari. Each I did it I was like oh yeah...it doesn't work in Safari. Much to my surprise today it works. Google Maps is so awesome. I wonder how it accessible it is. I am sure not even close.

Its exciting to watch all the web technologies that are coming out of Google Labs.

Overview of Web Standards

2005-02-21T16:44:00.000-05:00

If your looking for an overview/tutorial to web standards and accessibility, i found a great one. Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street wrote a great paper, Developing With Web Standards - Recommendations and best practices.

AT&T joins the cool kids group

2005-02-20T20:28:00.000-05:00

AT&T has recently released the redesign of their home page. They join the pantheon of the elite as the latest company to embrace web standards in the redesign of their web site. They have actually been able to achieve XHTML 1.0 Strict which is quite a feet. It is something that most companies have failed to accomplish.

I think seeing some of these Fortune 500 companies embrace standards will help to convince some smaller organizations see the light.

Joe D'Andrea has an interesting write up about the redesign of the AT&T web site.

The AT&T home page adopted a brandy-new look this weekend. It's still valid XHTML/CSS, just as before. This time around we've revisited the print media style plus added handheld media style. (Finally, I can view the page on my PDA without scrolling horizontally!)

IE 7...It could be a problem.

2005-02-17T22:33:00.000-05:00

I hadn't really thought about how IE 7 coming out could break all of the IE 6 CSS hacks that we did on our web sites. It should be interesting to see.

Anne van Kesteren - Problems the new IE could cause

Although they could fix a lot of annoying behavior with their current rendering bugs they could also break a lot of stuff if they are not careful. In this post I will outline some possible examples of what could break when the Internet Explorer team tries to support something better. This is especially relates to their CSS rendering, since those rendering and parsing bugs are exposed by web authors to make things work.

clarifiying the natural language

2005-02-16T14:23:00.000-05:00

I have always known that in my HTML documents I was supposed to be declaring what the natural language of the document was. It is very clearly stated in the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Guideline 4. Clarify natural language usage
Next guideline: 5 Previous guideline: 3 Go to contents
Use markup that facilitates pronunciation or interpretation of abbreviated or foreign text.

In HTML 4.01 it was -- <html lang="en">

In XHTML 1.0 they added -- <html xml:lang ="en">

I was never really sure which language declaration I was supposed to use or if I was supposed to use both. Different validators that I use would give me different answers.

Then I looked it up in XHTML 1.0 Specification.

C.7. The lang and xml:lang Attributes

Use both the lang and xml:lang attributes when specifying the language of an element. The value of the xml:lang attribute takes precedence.

So when your working on your websites make sure that you, "Use both the lang and xml:lang attributes."

IE 7; We all Wonder...Will They...?

2005-02-15T19:49:00.000-05:00

Today the Internet was abuzz with the news that Microsoft plans on releasing a new standalone version Internet Explorer by this summer. I think all of the web developers collectively wondered if Internet Explorer 7 is going to have better support of Cascading Style Sheet support.

Sometimes I think that my job as a developer would be cut in half if I didn't have to worry about how IE was mutilating the CSS designs that I am putting together.

Here are some of the articles that others have written about todays IE 7 News.

Ensight - IE 7 Announced

SitePoint - Internet Explorer 7

mezzoblue - IE7

Web Standards Project - Standalone IE To Be Released This Summer

Web Standards Presentation

2005-02-15T13:39:00.000-05:00

I did my very first solo lecture/presentation this morning about web standards.

It went really well. We had 30-40 people there. I was really happy with the turn out and with the response. Ill write more later.

Web Standards Presentation in HTML

Michigan.gov - What Were They Thinking

2005-02-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

Michigan.gov Top Bar
Originally uploaded by thorpus.

Today I was looking for some tax forms on the State of Michigan web site. I saw their top bar. They have some text links up in the top bar. In every browser except for Internet Explorer, the text just sits on the image and it is very hard to read. There is no contrast at all.

What were these guys thinking?

I looked the State of Michigan only works towards W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Priority One, having sufficient contrast is a priority two item.

I wonder if the team that develops the Michigan.gov site only uses Internet Explorer. In IE there is white background behind the text.

Evolt.org coincidentally just published a really interesting article about the use of color and contrast in web sites and how that affects web accessibility.

My New Company Web Site

2005-02-13T14:58:00.000-05:00

In September of 2003 my father and I launched an internet startup company, MyCapitalWeb.com LLC. Our company specializes in blogging strategy and online communications. We have done of a lot of exciting things with infusing blogs into the educational and non-profit organizational enviroments. We are also working on trying to get state legislators to see how blogs can help them communicate.

We recently launched our new web site. We have really done a lot more with this web site then our last web site. This one was built using CSS layout and we are working on getting it to validate to XHTML Strict 1.0. We have also added Word Press to our site. It powers the company blog. Word Press is a really awesome tool. It is so easy to install.

device independence

2005-02-09T10:21:00.000-05:00

One of the things that has interested me the most about web development by separating out presentation and data, via the use of CSS and HTML, is the idea of being able to use the a web site on multiple different devices. Each device uses a different style sheet. Now technology isn't there yet but it is definetly moving in that direction.

Now I know reading W3C documents has about as much appeal as getting a root canal, but the W3C published a Working Group Note called The Device Independence Princples. It's pretty interesting. It covers the steps and the princples of what needs to happen for the furthering of device independence.

"This document celebrates the vision of a device independent Web. It describes device independence principles that can lead towards the achievement of greater device independence for web content and applications."

The document examines the users perspective, authoring perspective, and the delivery perspective and the different roles that they play.

UPDATED - The W3C is going to do a big presentation at the 3GSM 2005 Congress. They are going to talk about the future of the mobile web and how, "W3C's goal is to provide a Web for Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, using Any Device." It sounds really cool. Just wish I had the money to fly to Cannes, France where it's going to be held.

forms, fieldsets, and legends...Oh my

2005-02-07T21:27:00.000-05:00

Today at work I was working on a search box that we were using for one of prototypes of a web site that we are doing. I have been using label tags for a while and had been implementing them into my designs; but, I guess I was never really clear on the whole like fieldsets and legend tags.

I had heard about them but never really was told what they were used for or how they made a form more accessible.

fieldset - Using fieldset you chunk up your 50 questions into, say, 5 clearly identifiable groups of topics, each with 10 properties/attributes. You increase the usability/accessibility by making the page clearer to the sighted user, or the user who may have cognitive difficulties.

legend - that's the text that sits along the top and describes the content of the boxed area

- Web Standards Project

I am going to work on integrating some of these tags into the forms of my web sites.

accessible bar charts

2005-02-07T21:08:00.000-05:00

Sometimes putting things like bar charts on web pages are really hard becuase the images are so complex and alternative text or a long description just really doesn't do it.

Standards Schmandards wrote a really cool article about how they use data table to make a lot more accessible bar chart. They judged success based on whether users were getting the things they would be normally looking for in a bar chart, whether they were a visual or non-visual user.

I would be interested to hear the reaction of some screen reader users to this technique.

great web standards resources

2005-02-05T16:18:00.000-05:00

I found some great web standards resources.

MaxDesign - The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you!

adaptive path - The Business Value of Web Standards; By Jeffrey Veen

Seybold - Why Table Layouts are Stupid

a MSN Developer's blog

2005-02-02T18:48:00.000-05:00

I found a blog from on the guys who is on the homepage team for MSN, venkatna's WebLog. He talks about the the recent launch of the new MSN homepage. It details how they are striving to make it more standards compliant and accessible. It is also a cool example of corporate blogging.

I hope they keep up the standards compliance and blogging.

"Compared to the old page, the new version is much faster. The page is lighter (about 2/3rds of what the old page was). We have also gone from a table based layout to a CSS powered layout. Granted, we were not able to hit complete compliance with standards. We still have some validation errors (about 130, the last time i checked) in the W3C Validator. We still have a couple of accessibility issues. All we ask for is for people to look at the page as a work in progress."

"Why tables for layout is stupid"

2005-02-02T13:52:00.000-05:00

I found this really great presentation on web standards, "Why tables for layout is stupid."

It makes an excellent case for why web standards should be followed and what it's benefits are.

Tables existed in HTML for one reason: To display tabular data. But then border="0" made it possible for designers to have a grid upon which to lay out images and text. Still the most dominant means of designing visually rich Web sites, the use of tables is now actually interfering with building a better, more accessible, flexible, and functional Web.

MSN Sees The Light

2005-02-01T13:42:00.000-05:00

MSN has recently launched their new web site inconjunction with their new search engine. One of the biggest developments beyond the redesign is the fact that they use CSS layout with the new msn homepage.

They even were courageous enough to go for a XHTML Strict 1.0 Doc Type.

Doug Bowman of StopDesign has an excellent review of the new MSN homepage.

web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities

2005-01-30T18:05:00.000-05:00

Quite often with web accessibility the only thing that people focus on is visual disabilities. Some people think that if the images on their web sites have alternative text then their web site is accessible to people with disabilities.

The fact is that their are a whole host of disabilities and limitations to keep in mind when developing a web site.

One disability that gets heavily overlooked is cognitive and learning disabilities. Cognitive and learning disabilities is the largest disability community; yet, very little has been written about and very little research has been done about how to make a web site keeping in mind those with cognitive disabilities.

Juicy Studio has just published an excellent article called "Developing sites for users with Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties." It sets out guidelines for your web site based on a much more detailed paper written by Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley, and Peter Firminger. I think this is a really incredible set of work. I hope that people will take this paper/article and use the observations and guidelines in the development of their web sites.

Juicy studio also has an online readability test that you can run on your site. It will give you a score about the reading level of the content of your web site.

MSU Web Accessibility Roadshow

2005-01-27T10:48:00.000-05:00

At Michigan State University, myself and about 5 other people are working on a little web accessibility "roadshow". We are going to be presenting to different groups on campus about why web accessibility is important and what services the university offers.

I am talking about the redesign of the MSU Web Accessibility site. For the last few months we have been putting together a vast array of resources that we want to make available.

I will also be demoing LIFT. Lift is a usability and accessibility evaluation & repair tool that the university bought a site license of for all university developers.

The first presentation is for the Advanced Data Users Group on February 7.

Google Video uses Captions

2005-01-25T09:38:00.000-05:00

Google has just released the beta version of a video search engine. Google Video takes the video from about 8 different television stations and archives it.

Our mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. - Google

It uses the closed-captioning from the video as a meta-data, to index it in the search.

I think this is exciting. Hopefully this will help push people to put captioning on their video. No captioning means that Google video search isn't going to be able to pick it up.

This goes along with the argument that when Google indexes web sites its a big blind user traversing the code. It is just looking to be able to get a sense of what your page is about so it knows how to rank it.

something to ponder

2005-01-23T14:54:00.000-05:00

On my W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Education & Outreach teleconference on Friday, we were talking about what accessibility is. Wayne Dick, a member of the working group, I thought gave a great quote.

He said, "Accessibility is that anyone who has the ability has the possibility."

I think it was amazingily well put.

whitehouse.gov has a bad case of the "click here's"

2005-01-22T17:15:00.000-05:00

I was on the White House web site this afternoon. There is a box on the web site that highlights Inauguration Day. They have a link that you can click on that will take you to video of the Inaugural Day festivites but the link is "click here." I would have expected better from the White House. That link is going to make absolutely no sense out of context.

Click here to watch the inauguration, view photos, and learn more.

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are pretty specific about making sure that links make sense out of context.

WCAG Checkpoint 13.1

13.1 Clearly identify the target of each link. [Priority 2]
Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context -- either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse.

Aesthetically Pleasing and Accessible; Why doesn't it happen more often?

2005-01-20T22:20:00.000-05:00

One group that web accessibility advocates often have a harder time getting the message across to is web & graphic designers. Web accessibility is often seen as a gigantic creativity kill joy for designers. They don't want to take the time and the energy.

How do we get our message across? How do we get them to understand that their needs to be a change of mindset, where accessibility becomes part of the development and design proccess?

CSSZenGarden.com is a great example of the celebration of the use of standards compliance and attractively designed web sites.

Bob Regan of Macromedia gave a presentation called, "Web Accessibility and Design: A Failure of the Imagination", at the Designing for the 21st Century Conference. He examines the gaps or disconnects between the message of accessibility and web designers. He also looks at what we can learn and do better.

"The hardest part of Web accessibility, in my opinion, is the stuff outside the angle brackets." - Matt May

2005-01-20T08:45:00.000-05:00

Matt May, Web Accessibility Specialist for the World Wide Web Consortium, has written an article for Digital Web Magazine called, Accessibility From The Ground Up.

It is a really good article to read for people that are new to web development or design. It goes over why web accessibility is important and how it fits into the various parts of web design development (i.e. flash, java script, tables).

"The hardest part of Web accessibility, in my opinion, is the stuff outside the angle brackets." - Matt May

He also talks about how it's important that the content needs to be accessible and easy to use. Some of the biggest usability and accessibility problems can run into having confusing and complex content.

word count

2005-01-18T14:38:00.000-05:00

Someone wrote a sweet little flash application that just takes in words and archives them.

Wordcount - Tracking the Way We Use Language

The Death of a Browser(Internet Explorer)

2005-01-18T08:56:00.000-05:00

This sounds like it could be the title of a new Arthur Miller play.

There has been a big movement within the web development community to get users to switch from using Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox. The web site Digital Proof wants to do whatever it can to prove that Internet Explorer is the worst browser on the market. They have a collection of articles which further explain that dangers of IE.

In short, this site is here to persuade you not to use the Internet Explorer web browser. There are hundreds, probably thousands of articles and weblog posts around the internet which talk about Internet Explorer, and why it is more than necessary to use an alternative, more modern and secure browser. This site is a collection of links to these articles, and information about them.

Meaningful Markup

2005-01-14T13:30:00.000-05:00

At work one problem that I saw pretty recurringly is that developers were making sites but were using the tags for their visual presentation and not for their mearning behind them. I wrote an article on our company blog called, Structural HTML.

It talks about how that HTML is their to provide structure and meaning to the data that you are putting on your web page. Each tag has some type of meaning and should be used for what it was intended.

Joe Clark - "Big, Stark & Chunky"

2005-01-12T09:34:00.000-05:00

Accessibility guru, Joe Clark recently wrote an article of web standards magazine A List Apart called, Big, Stark & Chunky.

He highlights how the web standards community has slowly started to move towards embracing designing web sites for screen readers. Now we also need to start taking a look at designing for low vision users. Joe details how we can use alternative style sheets that will tailor to the needs of a low vision user.

I really think within the next year you will see site preference pages or style sheet switchers, as Joe talks about in his article, starting to pop up on pages. This will give people the ability to customize a page based on their needs.

Testing in Internet Explorer

2005-01-11T13:59:00.000-05:00

Today someone found a bug in one of the site's that we did in all css. Internet explorer 5 wasn't rendering the width of the box model like it was supposed to. It only did this in IE 5.5. I unfortunately didn't have IE 5.5 to test it on to see how I could fix it.

I submitted my problem to the css-discuss discussion list. They very very quickly got back to me with how to fix it. They also showed me a site where some one had links to places where you could get all the old versions of Internet Explorer. As much as I would love to see IE die, I have to test on it. The site is:

Skyyxz.com - Standalone Internet Explorer

CNN "sees the light" with RSS

2005-01-10T15:20:00.000-05:00

CNN has finely decided to let users syndicate their news using RSS. This is an awesome move on their part.

Justin's Image Replacement Technique

2005-01-10T14:10:00.000-05:00

In the redesign of my office's web site, our designer used an image to do some text. I decided to make my own spin off of the Fahrner Image Replacement. I think its more accessible then some of the alternative solutions that I have seen. Of course its ALWAYS better to use marked-up text rather then an image as text because you can't enlarge an image.

This the is the article I wrote for the MSU AP Development Blog - CSS Image Replacement. I details how I did it.

color blender & layout maker

2005-01-06T18:52:00.000-05:00

I love the internet. There is so many great tools and resources that people can use.

I am working on the redesign of my company's web site and I needed some help with the CSS design and found this great layout maker. It is Inknoise's Layout-a-matic. You stick in the statistics about how big of a layout you want and what type of layout you want. It then gives you the CSS and the HTML. It's a thing of beauty.

Then Eric Meyer made a online program where you take two colors and then it will give you a range of colors between the two colors. It's works wonderfully when your trying to figure out what the color scheme of a web site should be.

paper prototyping

2005-01-04T16:01:00.000-05:00

We are doing some paper prototyping in our office on a e-commerce product search that we are building from the ground up. I am leading the paper prototyping study and I guess I was looking for a little bit of online information to brush up on things.

Carolyn Snyder wrote this great book called Paper Prototyping, unfortuantely I don't have it.

I looked and Carolyn Snyder took some of the resources from the book and put them on PaperPrototyping.com. There is copies of scripts, consent forms, checklists, prototyping overviews. This site is a very useful resource.

Access keys is it worth it?

2005-01-04T15:05:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of talk about access keys for web sites and if they are worth the time they take. I think they are. If there is a good access key standard, then they can become effective. Richard Rutter wrote a great article on access key standards and how they are used throughout the world.

What do you think?

David Shea says that access keys aren't worth your time.

Do you use access keys?

bloggers coming together to make a difference

2005-01-04T13:28:00.000-05:00

If you have a blog, pledge all of your ad money for the month of January to the Tsunami Aid relief.

BlogAid - Support the Asia Relief Effort

Hopefully someday I will have enough people that ready my blog that I can do this.

Making Forms Accessible

2005-01-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

We need to make forms accessible. I know this is one place that can really trip up disabled web users.

Webcredible has put together a really good tutorial on how to make your forms a lot more accessible.

Making accessible forms part 1

Making accessible forms part 2

WCAG on your iPod

2004-12-30T08:47:00.000-05:00

Dey Alexander - Web accessibility podGuide

You know can take the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), as well as UAAG, ATAG, and Section 508 with you on your iPod. After seeing what Westciv did with their CSS guide for your iPod, someone decided that we needed to put accessibility guidelines on your iPod also. This is just too cool. I am at work so i can't try this now but I will when I get home and report back.

So now as your rocking to U2's Vertigo on your iPod you can be reading up on how to make your alt attributes comply with international and national web standards. :)

What 2005 holds for Web Design

2004-12-30T08:33:00.000-05:00

This is a good article that talks about what 2005 could possibly hold for web design. They predict that standards compliance will become even more mainstream (yay!).

Forty Media - Web Design in 2005

podcasting

2004-12-30T08:24:00.000-05:00

For Christmas I got an iPod Mini, it very sweet. So I decided that I was going to find out what everyone was talking about with podcasting.

Podcasting is oh very sweet. It's pretty much anyone who wants to record audio can put it online and into an RSS feed. Then I can subscribe to your audio feed and download all your latest shows. I think this has HUGE implications for the future. This means anyone can have their own Talk Radio show...move over Hannity and Rush.

I wonder how long it will be before there is a podcast that is competing in audience with one of the big name radio jocks.

Wired News - Podcasts: New Twist on Net Audio

"It's aggregating audio content, but it's taking one extra step, in that it's putting it on your device," said Adam Curry, who built the first podcasting aggregator, known as iPodder. "Not only do these devices play it, but you don't have to put it there yourself. It just happens automatically."

Turning Lists into Nice Navigation

2004-12-28T13:54:00.000-05:00

Are you bored with just having a boring bulleted lists for your navigation?

Today I have been working on a prototype for a system that we are revamping. I used Accessify.com's List-o-matic online tool. It's pretty cool. You plug in what you want your list items to be and what URL's you want them to go to. You then choose a design and it will spit out the HTML and the css for you to use. I just wish it had more list designs loaded into it.

It was apparently inspired by Listamatic, which has many other examples.

These are really great tools that will empower you the developer to make greater strides in web standards.

Handles CSS Better? - Dreamweaver vs. Style Master

2004-12-28T08:33:00.000-05:00

I have recently heard a lot of really great things about Westciv's program Style Master. With the projects that I am workign on I have been doing more and more cascading style sheets, especially css layout. Dreamweaver doesn't do the best job of style sheets but I use dreamweaver ALL the time to develop pages. Hopefully CSS is something they will make better in the next release.

I am considering whether or not I should check out Style Master. It says it has a 30 day trial. Sweet! I will try it out and let people know what I think.

What you do you all think? Westciv's Style Master or Macromedia Dreamweaver to do CSS work?

A CMS doesn't solve All

2004-12-21T09:02:00.000-05:00

Jeffrey Veen wrote an excellent article about how companies have wanted to find ways to get their web sites update on a more regular basis. They decide the thing that they need to do is a shell out a lot of money for a giant content management system. They think once people have the technology in their hands everything will get updated on a regular basis. But once the cms has been deployed no one ends up using. This is a people problem not a technology problem.

There needs to be a strategy. Jeffrey Veen goes into the strategy that he recommends.

This is more than just a way to manage content, it’s the beginning of a content strategy — a plan for how your site will respond to your customers, inform them, and help them make decisions that will ultimately increase their loyalty to you and your site.

And frankly, I could not care less what system you use to publish it.

adaptive path - Why Content Management Fails

We Have Work To Do

2004-12-21T08:41:00.000-05:00

There is a story in the UK Register yesterday morning about how there has been lots of disregard for the accessibility laws that they have in the United Kingdom.

This lack of action on accessibility is creating an internet underclass, according to web testing firm Scivisium. The company has identified several different kinds of accessibility problems, where the site will only work with a particular browser, or requires the user to change their browser settings to gain access.

Ladies and Gentlemen we have some work to do. I am confident though that we will get our message across. Check out the Web Standards Project for more resources about getting the standards message out.

firefox is taking over

2004-12-20T20:50:00.000-05:00

Eric Meyer, the css guru, recently posted that on his company's web site 43% of the users were using firefox. 69.2% of the users were using a browser that was standards compliant. That rocks guys! Way to Go!

I found this sweet standards compliant browser campaign, Browse Happy. check it out and if your viewing this blog using Internet Explorer, read why you should switch over to something better.

web design world sessions

2004-12-17T08:53:00.000-05:00

The Web Design World Conference 2004 in Boston sessions have been posted online. This includes TONS of helpful video. I would take the time to watch through the video. Jeffrey Zeldman gave the keynote to the conference.

accessibility tip of the day - alt text length

2004-12-15T09:18:00.000-05:00

from the great Joe Clarks' book, "Building accessible websites"

Keep the alt text short. There is no set limit on the length of an alt text, but as we shall see shortly, a very long alt may not be fully displayed when image-loading is turned off or when the browser cannot locate the image file. By convention, limit alt texts to 1,024 characters (1 K) or less.

When it comes to writing the actual text, remember that alt takes the place of the graphic. Tell us what the picture is or represents or sum up its function, but don¹t tell us that it¹s a picture. I¹ll give you actual examples in a moment, but steer clear of writing a sort of metaalt text, like ³Picture of sunset over Darling Harbour² or ³Picture of company logo.²

Joe Clarks - Building Accessible Websites: The Image Problem

Updated - HTML Test Suite for WCAG 2.0 Test 3 - ALT text must be short.

a css tutorial on your iPod

2004-12-15T08:38:00.000-05:00

I have found what seems to be one of the better CSS guides on the net.
WESTCIV - Learning Web Standards :: CSS Guide

They have also rigged it up so that you can download the css tutorial and install it on your iPod. I know i would do it ( if i had an iPod ;-) ). If a party was getting lame and you wanted something to talk about, you could wip out your iPod and show everyone how cool you are with your CSS tutorial.

They even get into the css mobile profile in the tutorial. Sweet!

browser wars - firefox vs. ie

2004-12-15T08:28:00.000-05:00

go firefox go!
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000-5568116-1.html

paging vs. scrolling

2004-12-14T08:28:00.000-05:00

This is a cool paper. Someone did usability testing to see if people react better to paging through a long selection of text or just scrolling through it.

Usability News - The Impact of Paging vs. Scrolling on Reading Online Text Passages

"Google suggest" is just too awesome.

2004-12-11T10:38:00.000-05:00

Google just released the beta of their new search engine, Google Suggest. Ever want to search for something but not totally sure how to spell it?

Google suggest as you type entries in will give you the top searched entries starting with those letters. It is too cool.

I think between this and g-mail it shows that Google is one of the king companies of the online industry.

The Ampersand Problem

2004-12-11T10:34:00.000-05:00

I have been working on getting our office blog started at where I work.

The latest entry that we wrote was about the Ampersand problem. We are working towards getting our web sites to comply with web standards but one thing that was tripping our pages up is the ampersand. People were using "&" instead of "&amp."

css design problem solving techniques

2004-12-08T16:35:00.000-05:00

I have been working on converting some of the table-based web sites that my office is responsible for into css based layouts. So I have been spending lots and lots of time troubleshooting getting the designs to look as similar across browsers.

This article has a good list of techniques that can be used to assist in the css problem solving.
Mezzoblue - CSS Problem Solving

alt and title attributes are kind of like apples and oranges

2004-12-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

At work for me and in web development in general there is confusion between what an alt attribute is used for and what a title attribute is used for. Here is a good article that helps to explain the difference.

456 Berea Street - The alt and title attributes

The Alt Attribute

For user agents that cannot display images, forms, or applets, this attribute specifies alternate text. The language of the alternate text is specified by the lang attribute.

Source: How to specify alternate text.

The title attribute

This attribute offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.

Source: The title attribute.

Fangs; Taking a bite out of inaccessible web sites

2004-12-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

Good chance that there are a fair share of you that have wanted to test your site with a screen reader but shuddered at the idea of shelling out lots of money to purchase something like Jaws.

A developer, Standards-Schmandards.com, is working on a Mozilla Firefox extension, Fangs, that will emulate the work of a screen reader as text output.

It is still under development but the beta version that is available now would still be very helpful.

amazon.com learned their lesson

2004-12-07T11:26:00.000-05:00

If you ever thought about using a text-only page as an accessible alternative for your web site, read this article.

Wired News - Amazon Access: How Accessible?

Amazon.com did a text-only version of their site and got really criticized. You can no longer find the text-only site linked on their page. Or at least I can't find it. Yah text-only alternatives to web sites are a bad idea. Most of the time they just aren't going to get used.

According to the W3C guidelines, developers should create an alternative solution only as a last resort:

"Content developers should only resort to alternative pages when other solutions fail because alternative pages are generally updated less often than 'primary' pages.... Before resorting to an alternative page, reconsider the design of the original page; making it accessible is likely to improve it for all users." - Wired Article

Web Standards, "It's Whats For Dinner"

2004-12-07T09:18:00.000-05:00

Have you been looking for a material that you can use to show your friends, family, and co-workers about the positives of web standards?

I ran across a good presentation this morning.

Max Design - The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you!

a web development tool bar for Firefox

2004-12-06T08:53:00.000-05:00

Recently I posted about web development tool bar that was an add-on to Microsoft Internet Explorer. I am sure that I got a lot of sighs because people despised the idea of having to Internet Explorer.

The Mozilla web site has recently posted a web developer tool bar for Mozilla Firefox. It looks excellent. You can do all kinds of stuff like disable the css, change page sizes, enable showing of various html elements, disable images, and much much more. It also has a validate button; yay standards validation!

Check it out and let me know what you think.

designing web sites for the pda.....come on you can do it

2004-12-05T23:51:00.000-05:00

Lately at work I have been convincing the higher ups to let me design the web sites that they already have using CSS and making them XHTML 1.0 Strict. The idea is that we could move in the direction of making multiple style sheets to fit whatever environment someone could be using. I wonder how long this is going to take to catch on?

I have been reading the A List A Part article called, Pocket Size Design.

When am I going to be able to surf with ease on my pda?

Every web site that I go to I am faced with the dreaded horizontal scrolling. Or I use the pda browser to mess with the layout to get it in a way where I can read it, but even that is not pretty at all.

Help me move the web in the right direction, follow web standards and design a css for a pda.

"Whats In Your Wallet?" An Accessibility Quicktips Card

2004-12-02T22:56:00.000-05:00

Capital One has great commercials. "What's in your wallet" has become of the phrases that if you say it everyone knows what your talking about.

I am on a discussion list for the Web Standards Group and someone was looking for a resource that she could point novices to to tell them about web accessibility. The quick tips card that the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative provides is really a great resource. It is just 10 quick items that you if you do them it will help to make your web site more accessible.

If your a developer take this card and use it as a mini-checklist to make sure that you are doing all these things in your web site.

The great thing is these cards are FREE. Just send a request for them via the Web Accessibility Initiative web site.

The quick tips:

For Complete Guidelines & Checklist: www.w3.org/WAI

Images & animations: Use thealt attribute to describe the function of each visual.

Image maps. Use the client-side map and text for hotspots.

Multimedia. Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video.

Hypertext links. Use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, avoid "click here."

Page organization. Use headings, lists, and consistent structure. Use CSS for layout and style where possible.

Graphs & charts. Summarize or use the longdesc attribute.

Scripts, applets, & plug-ins. Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.

Frames. Use the noframes element and meaningful titles.

Tables. Make line-by-line reading sensible. Summarize.

Check your work. Validate. Use tools, checklist, and guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG

(c) W3C (MIT, INRIA, Keio) 2001/01

If you have any problems getting quick tips cards let me know. I can inquire for you.

.php stylesheets

2004-12-02T19:06:00.000-05:00

At work today I was helping a colleague work on a web system. It was an open-source calendar program. We had some new features that we were adding on to customize it more to what we wanted to accomplish. We were trying to add a style sheet to the new feature pages.

The system was using a .php file as it's style sheet. The file had all the normal css stuff in it but with some dynamic content. The styles were being dynamically created based on what type of situation it was being used. It was really wierd. I had never seen a .php dyanmic style sheet before. It's very non-compliant solution but interesting.

Anybody else tried this before?

quick guide to making forms accessible

2004-12-01T08:54:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest areas that people have trouble making accessible is forms. Web credible has written a great article, Making Accessible Forms Part 1.

Forms are one of the most crucial parts of your website. Forms are used to:

* Buy products
* Sign up to newsletters
* Contact you

These are the goals of your website! When a web user fills out a form they're doing something you want them to do. Unless you make sure they're accessible to one and all, some of your site visitors may not be able to perform some of these crucial tasks.

ATAG; The Other White Meat...I mean W3C guideline

2004-11-30T20:36:00.000-05:00

Most people think that reading W3C recommendations are on the same level of getting a root canal, despite the fact that some might be very helpful. The Web Accessibility Initiative Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is working on the next release of the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines. This guidelines help to promote that people who make authoring tools(anything that makes HTML or web content in general) develop them in a way that promotes web accessibility.

http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/

There are many different authoring tools out. Somethings that you use are authoring tools and you probably wouldn't have thought are authoring tools. This is what ATAG lists as the defintion of an authoring tool:

Code-level Authoring Functions: Authors have full control over all aspects of the resulting Web content that have bearing on the final outcome. This covers, but is not limited to plain text editing, as this category also covers the manipulation of symbolic representations that are sufficiently fine-grained to allow the author the same freedom of control as plain text editing (e.g. graphical tag placeholders).
Examples: text editors, text editors enhanced with graphical tags, etc.

WYSIWYG ("What-you-see-is-what-you-get") Authoring Functions: Authors have control over entities that closely resemble the final appearance and behavior of the resulting Web content.
Examples: rendered document editors, bitmap graphics editors, etc.

Object Oriented Authoring Functions: Authors have control over functional abstractions of the low level aspects of the resulting Web content.
Examples: timelines, waveforms, vector-based graphic editors, etc.

Indirect Authoring Functions: Authors have control over only high-level parameters related to the automated production of the resulting Web content. This may include interfaces that assist the author to create and organize Web content without the author having control over the markup, structure, or programming implementation.
Examples: content management systems, site building wizards, site management tools, courseware, weblogging tools, content aggregators, and conversion tools, etc.

Does your authoring tool support ATAG 1.0?
ATAG Checklist

Have Questions? email me

mobile photo blogging

2004-11-30T20:20:00.000-05:00

I have a pretty cool cell phone. One thing I never really understood is why someone would want to have a camera on their cell phone. They take horrible pictures. In the last few months I have reallly gotten into using it. The only question that I had is how am I going to get the pictures from my camera to people.

At a conference one of the presenters I heard said there was the ability to take a picture on your camera and post it right to a blog. Well I have found it, Phlog.net. You take the picture and then e-mail it to a special e-mail address for yoru photo blog. Then people can check in to see what photos you have taken recently. It's pretty cool.

So if i were on vacation I could be out at a landmark taking a picture and post it immediately, for everyone to see.

My mobile photo blog:
http://www.phlog.net/user/thorpus

powerpoint is making us stupid

2004-11-30T08:43:00.000-05:00

In the past the only thing visual aids were used for in presentations was to show graphs are or charts. People needed the ability to take complex data and put it in a way that people could understand and it could be presented. Recently with the age of microsoft powerpoint we have presenters using it to push content at us with the words that they want us to remember.

I was reading a blog entry, Jerry Veen's Death by Auto Content someone wrote about a MIT paper they were reading. It's very fascinating.

It's a fascinating look at how PowerPoint has, essentially, automated lazy thought. Or, to put it another way, created bullet-point expectations for all organizational knowledge.

accessibility - the google argument

2004-11-24T19:50:00.000-05:00

I was reading a colleagues blog where he referenced an e-mail about how an argument for implmenting accessibility in a web site is that Google is the biggest blind user. I was intrigued and was forced to read on

From the original e-mail:

The premise: Google is, for all intents, a blind user. A billionaire
blind user with tens of millions of friends, all of whom hang on his
every word. I suspect Google will have a stronger impact than the ADA
in building accessible websites.

Other arachnocides:

- Java/Javascript dependencies.
- Obviously CGI-driven sites ('bots avoid these as they tend to be
spider traps)
- Session-ID'd URLs. There's no there there....
- Audio content (not searchable)
- Text-as-graphics. Google handles a number of formats, but it
doesn't OCR. Scanned PDF and PS docs suffer a similar fate
(ordinary PDFs are searchable).
- Changeable sites. The longer you stay in one place, the better your
Google score. Don't move content.

It's an interesting premise.

Donald Norman is going to be giving a lecture at Penn State

2004-11-21T14:11:00.000-05:00

Donald Norman is going to be giving a lecture at Penn State on Friday from 330 - 430pm that is going to be web cast live. The lecture is about "Emotional Design."

For those that aren't familiar with Don Norman, he is one of the "godfathers" of usability and user-centered design. His book "The Design of Everday Things" changed the way I look at the world, the objects, and interfaces that i use (especially the web). His new book "Emotional Design," which I assume is what he is talking about, is about how things that are more attractive are more usable.

It is only an hour long. I would highly recommend that everyone tune in.

Update, Nov 21 - Penn State screwed up the link on the day of the lecture. They have archived the lecture and you can watch it now. I watched the lecture today at work and it was excellent. He talked about how behavorial, reflective, and visceral design are being used in the design of products today. I ask, is anyone trying to capture emotion in the design of web sites?

http://live.ist.psu.edu/ - Then you have to click on "IST Distinguished Lecture Series"

corporate blogging at Google

2004-11-20T22:02:00.000-05:00

A version of Blogger, Googles Blog Tool (the one this blog is developed with), has been implemented within the corporation of Google. In a Macworld story they talk about how Google employees are using blogs to help with their day to day business.

"Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to," Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager, said.

This is awesome. Blogs have really taken off as a way to communicate. I think they will be the future. I think google is really on to something.

down with powerpoint

2004-11-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

"Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely."
- Edward Tufte at Yale

CSS master Eric Meyer and his crew have developed S5, a system for developing presentation slides using XHTML, CSS, DHTML and Java Script. It's cross browser compatible. It is also ALOT more accessible then any type of powerpoint based presentation.

If you are looking to break away from the hold of Microsoft Powerpoint. I would check this out. I am convinced. I'll never use powerpoint again if I don't have to.

Cingular - - an advocate of web standards

2004-11-16T08:39:00.000-05:00

I am a customer of AT&T wireless. Recently AT&T Wireless was bought out by Cingular; making a massive wireless network. Well apparently to get their features (ie rollover minutes ..**smiles) I have to switch over to a new phone with the Cingular software in it.

Last nite was looking at their site and apparently they were taking it down for maitenance. I got a page that said you could be getting this because your browsers is not standards compliant. They were pointing people to the Web Standards Project website. Cingular's website is apparently all laid out in CSS.

Way to go Cingular!!!

I found this article - Web Standards Group - CSS Example Sites (Cingular is listed)

Bloglines - Great Way to Store Feeds Online

2004-11-15T20:38:00.000-05:00

I have found this really awesome site www.bloglines.com. It's an online feed reader. You can take xml & rss feeds from a bunch of different web sites and display them on one web site. One thing I didn't like about rss reader software was that I couldn't take my feeds with me. On my version of bloglines i have 46 different news feeds coming in all from different sites.

I would check it out and sign up for it.

http://www.bloglines.com

hiding content on web pages

2004-11-15T08:54:00.000-05:00

Quite often there is information on a webpage that needs to be in HTML but we don't want the sighted user to be able to see it. There is a dilemma. Most often people will use the display or visibility attribute in CSS. This can actually also hide content from some screen readers even though the text is still on the page.

One technique that is being used more and more is to position text off the page using CSS positioning. This way the text is not rendered invisible, so it will be seen by all screen readers. The text is off the page so it can not be seen by sighted users.

There is more information about this techique and lots of other helpful information in WebAim's article - An Accessible Method of Hiding HTML Content.

web accessibility bar for IE 5

2004-11-11T16:04:00.000-05:00

I found this really cool web accessibility bar from the National Information Library Service in Austrailia. It's an add on to Microsoft Internet Explorer. The bar gives you lots of built in validation tools that you can use with pages you are on.

Some features:

resizing the page to different resolutions

send the page url to evalutation tools (bobby, cynthia)

disable style sheets

disable color

show heading structure

and much much more

This is very very cool. This is a MUST download for anyone who does web development.

http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/index.html

eric meyer...the style sheet master

2004-11-11T15:40:00.000-05:00

this a cool article about Eric Meyer and some of the cool things he's doing with cascading style sheets.
http://www.apple.com/pro/words/meyer/

My first CSS Design

2004-11-09T19:15:00.000-05:00

We have been trying to slowly move things over at work to CSS-based design. So when I heard that we were going to redesign the office web site, I knew that this would be a good occasion. At Applications Programming, I knew we wanted to be an example of good development practices, so i figured I could probably seal the idea of using CSS.

I got the template for the design from a site called the Noodle Incident. They provide a whole bunch of css box designs that developers can use as a start for a web site. I had to do a lot of tweaking on the design to get it to work right.

Something cool that we did with this site is get it to validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Microsoft is starting to feel the "fire"

2004-11-09T16:21:00.000-05:00

Information Week - Microsoft feels Mozilla's fire(fox)

Apparently Microsoft is already planning an attack against Mozilla Firefox 1.0, which was officially released today. Apparently the browsers numbers are already starting to show a trend of people slowly moving away from Microsoft Internet explorer.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is official

2004-11-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

It is official Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is no longer a beta release.

Download it and lets take back the web from Internet Explorer. I

f you are friends with a web developer and want to show them how much you appreciate them; uninstall internet explorer on your computer and download mozilla firefox.

the user's point of view

2004-11-05T13:40:00.000-05:00

I just read an article/interview about a blind person and what their opinion of how easy new web sites are to use. I think it is interesting. All too often we talk about making web sites accessible but don't ever think about the disabled user and their perspective.

http://holovaty.com/blog/archive/2002/08/27/1324

email address encoder

2004-11-04T09:44:00.000-05:00

A lot of people don't like putting their email address on the web because they are afraid that they are going to get spam. Penn State University made an e-maill address encoder. It takes the e-maill address part of the "mailto:whatever@yahoo.com" and makes it an ASCII string that can't be picked up by spiders. It's pretty cool.

usable accessibility guidelines

2004-11-01T09:06:00.000-05:00

Mary Theofanos and Ginny Redish did a paper that recently got published about usable accessibility. They were looking to based on research and usability testing put together some guidlines for making accessibility more usable. I think what they came up with was very interesting.

I saw this presented at UPA 2004 in Minneapolis. It was presented to a packed room.

Accessfiy.com - Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers

Steve Jobs - The Real Godfather of Usability

2004-10-28T18:50:00.000-04:00

There is one person that over time has really championed the usability cause before everyone else had really started thinking about it. He made making products that people could use a priority of his business. He wanted all the possible potential problems that a user thought of in advance thought of before the users has it; so they can account for it in the design. Who is this man? But Steve Jobs of course...

This is really apparent in the success of the new iMac and the iPod. Both have dominated their respective markets and Apple has trouble keeping them in stock.

This high priority of being user centered helps keep the Apple customers so loyal.

In a interview with Business Week, Steve Jobs said,

"It's because when you buy our products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure out [how to get past it]. And you think, "Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this!" And then three months later you try to do something you hadn't tried before, and it works, and you think "Hey, they thought of that, too." And then six months later it happens again. There's almost no product in the world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac. And you have it with an iPod." --Steve Jobs

MSU Usability and Accessibility Conference

2004-10-27T18:51:00.000-04:00

I recently attended the the MSU Usability and Accessibility Conference the last two days. It was really interesting. There were some good speakers; not as many as I was expecting. Some of the speakers I liked more were: Mike Paciello, Charmane Corcoran, Christina Wodtke, Whitney Quesenbury, Susan Weinschenk, and Nate from Yahoo. Charmane was my boss/mentor at Mich State that helped me get into web accessibility.

Susan gave the the talk at lunch today about how to persuade people and the art and science behind it. Learned some new tricks.

I have come across a whole lot of info from the conference that I will post as I get the chance.

Conference Web Site
http://usability.msu.edu

alternate style sheets

2004-10-19T18:50:00.000-04:00

One thing I have been working on implementing at work at MSU is using alternative style sheets. This allows you to alter the presentation of your web page. This will allow us to change the colors, contrasts, and type size. We can customize it whatever might be needed. Alternate style sheets has huge possibilities for web accessibility.

We really need to move in the direction of seperating out the content from the visual design. This will allow us to change the content display to whatever situation that we might need it.

A great article:
A List Apart - Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets.

accessible vs inaccessible

2004-10-19T11:55:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder what it's like going through an inaccessible web page with a screen reader?
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/chocolateaudio.asp

This example illustrates how some simple changes to your page can make a world of difference.