Web

Oct 20, 2009

A new approach to web accessibility?

Phil Powell Design, Web 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about web accessibility lately. A lot of that thinking has been to do with how I can improve accessibility in the work I do. I do my best to design interfaces which are logical and easy to navigate, follow accessibility guidelines where they are applicable and appropriate and make sure that I write markup which is clean and semantic. I add little accessibility flourishes wherever possible to help those who use assistive devices, and make sure that copy is written to make sense even when it’s taken out of a visual context.

Al in all, I consider myself to be a pretty responsible practitioner of web standards and web accessibility. It’s something which I consider to be of great importance and it’s become an integral part of my design and development processes. It’s not an afterthought, it’s slap-bang in the middle of every design decision: whether technical or aesthetic.

So when I came to think about what else I could do, I was at a bit of a loss. I fell like I’ve ticked all the boxes for being a responsible web practitioner, but where can I go from here?

There’s been some tremendous work carried out over the years by various working groups and researchers, to raise the bar on web accessibility. It’s great to see that good accessibility has become an example of best practice within our industry, which in turn has had a positive impact on the workflows of designers and techies alike. Some might say that accessibility has dumbed-down creativity and made the web bland – I’d argue that we just haven’t been creative enough.

I came across this note recently, from an article written by Brian Kelly, summarising a paper he has co-written:

Disability is therefore a social construct and not an attribute of an individual. In particular, resource accessibility is the matching of a resource to an individual’s needs and preferences – and is not an attribute of a resource.

That really got me thinking about our perception of accessibility, and in particular the ways in which we view the people we are trying to help.

Accessibility is generally considered to be a way of helping those members of society who have a disability. We often think of users of websites as use cases, rather than individuals: a particular demographic, in a particular geographic location, or a group who behave in a particular way or have common interests.

And it’s often quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking of someone with a disability in a similar way – as a generalised group: someone who is blind, who is deaf, who is a wheelchair user. The fact is that not every disability is the same, and the acuteness and combinations of a disability can effect people in so many different ways.

For example, it may well surprise anyone who knows me to learn that I’m registered as blind. That doesn’t mean that I have no vision, it means I have low vision. Technically, I’m referred to as “blind/severely sight impaired” – there is a point at which my clinical diagnosis puts me into a particular group and classifies me as disabled.

But I’m a web designer, I make films, I do all sorts of outdoor pursuits my doctors cringe at – how can this be? Well, the fact is that because of the complicated nature of the various eye conditions I have, although my distance sight is useless, my near vision is pretty damn good: I might not be able to see a face across a room, but when I’m working with pixels, I’m on an equal footing.

I don’t really consider myself to be disabled, because I’ve spent my whole life learning to adapt and compensate. Out of necessity and downright stubbornness, I’ve had to shape my world to make it fit my wants and needs.

And that, I think, is a good starting point for a new way of looking at web accessibility, and why Brian Kelly’s words struck home so hard.

We, as practitioners of the web, should be creating experiences which are not just accessible to all, but which are intelligently designed to be adapted to a user’s own specific preferences.

And I think this is important to start thinking about now, because the way in which we all engage and interact with the online world will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Our experience of the web is changing: from one where we visit websites, to one where we access services and information through our personal choice of digital devices. Our experience of our online world will become ever-more personalised and ubiquitous. And if we don’t consider the wants and needs of people with disabilities, then we run the risk of marginalising huge swathes of our society.

As we develop new devices, new applications and new experiences, there’s going to be a need for a more integrated, considered and downright innovative approach to design. But by taking that leap, by daring to think about inclusiveness and allowing the design process to be informed by more than just aesthetics and one-size-fits-all usability, there might be huge benefits to be gained by everyone, able and disabled – we will all be enabled on a level footing.

If you’re sceptical about these yoghurt-knitting ideas (and yes, they’re vague, but they’re just that: ideas) then head over to the Accessibility section of Apple’s website, have a good browse around, and then ask yourself: why would one of the premiere designers of digital technology commit so much time and resource to building accessibility into their products?

Jun 18, 2009

Getting hot under the collar

Phil Powell Creative, Web 0 Comment

I was really excited to see the launch of Fever yesterday – a new web-based application from the uber-talented Shaun Inman.

Let me start by saying that this is neither a critique of Shaun or his new app. Shaun is both a very talented web designer and an innovative developer, and his work is held in high regard – and rightly so. Fever looks like a really great app which looks to be a beautifully conceived idea which opens up all sorts of new ideas.

What really struck me though was how the launch and subsequent fire-fighting played out in the public eye, and it got me thinking about the potential perils of transparency and honesty when running a small venture.

(Fire-fighting is what we used to refer to as the unpredictable period of time prior to the launch of a big website release – when you think you’ve tested thoroughly and covered all eventualities, only to realise that you haven’t. It’s a frantic time of desperately trying to patch bugs and fix overloaded systems whilst your new code is out in the wild causing mayhem.)

Shaun has been very open and honest in describing the little gremlins which crept into the system post-launch, which I think is great: much better to have an honest, human reason for a problem than the standard “technical issues”.

to everyone awaiting an Activation Key, server is getting pounded, PayPal sluggish.

what a wonderful time for a unanticipated spontaneous server configuration change.

Gah! Firefox doesn’t allow you to submit a form to an iframe and instead opens it in a new window? wtf?

also, loving the understanding and patience of early adopters as I work out the un-beta-able kinks.

These kind of insights are not only informative, they’re also an interesting look inside the workings of an app as it launches.

Here’s where I think it gets dangerous though: when this kind of dialogue becomes personalised and opinionated.

Don’t get me wrong – being personal and opinionated are great things, and are what make our global digital culture the wonderful, throbbing democracy it is. But if you’re going to use Twitter et al to self-promote a product or service, then do you need to apply a bit of a filter to your musings? Does being too transparent mean that people might get to see things you otherwise wouldn’t want them to?

As I mentioned earlier, Fever looks like a great app, and I would have absolutely considered paying out for it. My main problem is that it is a self-hosted application – you need to install and run it on a PHP/MySQL server. It’s totally up to Shaun how he packages and licenses the app – I“m not here to start criticise someone for their business model. I did post this comment on it though:

http://feedafever.com/ looks great, but doubt I can be bothered installing it on a server. Surely @shauninman is missing a trick?

Then I read this tweet from Shaun later:

To all the self-hosted app haters: People said the same thing about Mint. Different strokes and all.

That got to me a bit. I know he’s not refering to me directly, but to be refered to as part of a group of ”haters“ made me feel a bit… put off. This came across as a little bit defensive and confrontational, and probably bought on by stress and tiredness. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about posting things when stressed or tired, and it’s that you just shouldn’t do it. You can come across as incredibly condescending and insulting without even realising.

Then it started getting a bit ugly:

Waiting for my Fever (http://www.feedafever.com) license to compare against Feedly. Hurry the fk up Inman!

.@nevercertified what a wonderful thing to wake up to. I don’t do business with people who curse at me. Expect a refund shortly.

A little shrift I thought, and a bit uncomfortable, like watching a fight at a wedding. But again, this is Shaun’s venture, so he’s perfectly entitled to do business with whomever and however he likes. But as a potential buyer, it made me think ”do I really want to give this guy my cash?“ Particularly when I read this:

I have no patience for impatient people. So we have something in common people.

So what am I trying to get at here? Well, it made me think of three things:

1. Can transparency and honesty go too far when you’re using Twitter for business? Shaun seems to be using it for three things: to post his musings, promote his products and provide product support (in the form of status updates). When personal and professional threads start to mix, it can start to get confusing from an observer’s point of view, and maybe even potentially hazardous to the reputation of you and your services.

2. I’m all for honesty and transparency, and advocate them as central virtues to the way that my own business is run. But I wonder whether honesty and transparency can give way to being casual and flippant sometimes? I guess this comes down to whether you can be open and honest whilst still maintaining a certain amount of professionalism.

3. I won’t be buying a license for Fever. Sorry Shaun, as lovely as it looks and as talented as you are, I’ve been put off.

Jan 15, 2009

Announcement – Gridlet V0.1

Phil Powell , , , Design, Web 0 Comment

I’ve been using grids in my CSS designs for quite a while now, inspired by frameworks like Blueprint CSS.  Although I don’t use Blueprint for production work (using a CSS framework starts to get a bit restrictive, and I prefer to build from scratch, rather than trying to override someone else’s default), I do use the methodology in my own CSS to create structured, grid-based layouts, and consistent typography.

One of the clever things that Blueprint introduced was the idea of displaying the grid while you’re working – this proves to be an invaluable aid as you try to refine CSS rules.  But I’ve found that – as good as the theory is – it has a few drawbacks:

  1. Because it uses a background-image CSS property, it overrides any beautiful background design you might have implemented.
  2. Because it uses images, if you change your grid size, you have to generate a new custom image – a bit of a faff.
  3. You have to tweak your CSS every time you want to turn the grid on or off.

Since I work with grids more and more often, I decided to have a stab at coming up with a solution which refines the Blueprint idea, adds a dash of jQuery to produce something which is a little more flexible and user-friendly.

What I’ve come up with is a jQuery plugin called Gridlet.  Instead of using pure CSS, the plugin generates a grid on-the-fly, and it’s an improvement in the following ways:

  1. It doesn’t use images – instead it dynamically generates a grid on top of your page, so your design remains intact.
  2. Changing your grid size is as simple as changing a setting – no need to generate images.
  3. You, er, have to tweak your JS to turn it on or off (this is something I’m going to work on improving – it’s early days).

It’s also worth noting that this first version only produces horizontal grids – that’s all I need at the moment  No doubt I’lla dd vertical grid spacing as and when it’s needed.  Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

You can download version 0.1 of Gridlet here.  I’ve only tested in Safari 3 and Firefox 3 so far.

Implementing it is really easy – you just do something like this:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("body").gridlet();
});

If you want to override the default grid height or colour, just pass in the settings like this:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("body").gridlet({
    height: 18,
    background: "#fcc"
  });
});

And finally, for your curiosity, here’s the source code:

(function($) {
  jQuery.fn.gridlet = function(options) {

    var opts = $.extend({}, $.fn.gridlet.defaults, options);
    var line_position = 0;
    $("<div/>").attr("id", "grid_container").appendTo("body").css({
      position: "absolute",
      top: 0,
      left: 0,
      height: "100px",
      width: "100%",
    })

    while(line_position < $("body").height())
    {
      line_position += opts.height;
      $("<div/>").css({
        position: "absolute",
        top: line_position,
        left: 0,
        height: 1,
        width: "100%",
        background: opts.background
      }).appendTo("div#grid_container")
    }

    return this;

  };

  jQuery.fn.gridlet.defaults = {
    height: 24,
    width: 24,
    background: "#ddf"
  };

})(jQuery);

Dec 23, 2008

Cadence

Phil Powell , , Design, Web 1 Comment

Rands has written a really interesting post all about cadence, and more specifically how the tone of language used on the Web has a direct impact on our trust.

What does a lie sound like? How do we decide to trust? There’s a reason why you can figure out in an instant whether a mail is spam or not. It’s not a single, measurable thing, but a whole set of small, invisible variables with which you can instantly make a judgment — I do not trust this mail.

You have a complex set of analytical mental muscles that help you make critical snap emotional judgments. Whether it’s a mail, a website, or a person, your brain can instantly look at 12 imperceptible aspects of a thing to determine how you should feel.

Truth, love, or lies, human has a signature cadence.

I always place a lot of emphasis on spending time developing the language of a website – the words used aren’t incidental: the language and tone should be an integral part of the design.

Jun 4, 2008

Access All Areas

Phil Powell , Creative, Video, Web 0 Comment

On 19th May 2008, I presented a business masterclass which aimed to demystify the modern-day internet, and show how it can be easily put to use by any business – large or small.

This event was organised in association with Furness Enterprise, and the presentation is here for you to watch in it’s entirety.

May 21, 2008

Working in New Media

Phil Powell , , Creative, Video, Web 0 Comment

On 9th May 2008, I spoke to students at Lancaster University as part of the “Insight to Creative & Media Careers” event.

The two-day event was organised by CEEC (Centre for Employability Enterprise and Careers) and included a wide range of speakers from different areas of the media industry.

As an experienced practitioner in New Media, I introduced a brief history of the industry, and then explored the 10 commandments for following a good work ethic, before concluding with some of my ideas about where the industry is heading in the future.

We filmed the presentation, and you can watch the whole thing, right here, right now.

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