Thinking accessibly

Posted by Tommy on March 11, 2011 Comments Off

I recently attended a Web Accessibility Introduction and Awareness seminar run by the Central Office of Information (COI). The seminar was being run as a pilot as part of the Race Online 2012 campaign, headed by the UK’s Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox.

The campaign’s ambition is to make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web. 4 million of the 9 million people in the UK currently not online are among the most disadvantaged. 39% are over 65, 38% are unemployed and 19% are families with children.

Often poor online accessibility is a barrier to these very people having an enjoyable online experience. The seminar highlighted this brilliantly through a live demo with an assistive technology user, showing the huge impact that doing some quite simple and easy things can have on their user experience.

The day after, and back in work, I came across the usual problem of inaccessible content which requires publication on the web. In this instance it was with an organisation chart. Researching creating an accessible version on the web showed me that discussions of this type were being had in the US in 2001, ten years ago! Is the UK so far behind with regards thinking accessibly? If so, then the Race Online campaign, though clearly a worthy plan, is well overdue.

More information

ambition is to make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web.ambition is to make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web.

What’s up with Google…

Posted by Tommy on January 20, 2011 1 comments

or down in terms of the search ranking of some sites I’ve built!

Is it me or has the quality of Google’s search results dropped off recently? It seems many of the results making the top rankings of the SERP are dominated by link-building ‘fake’ sites.

It doesn’t have anything to do with trying to encourage users to click on the paid-for ad links I suppose?

Come on Google, sort-out your algoritham to pick up and promote the natural links a bit more, thereby encouraging the (few badly behaved) SEOs to act a bit more responsibly, in-turn ridding the web of some of the horrible content that is out there.

Your famous for your good search results, we wouldn’t want people to search somewhere else now would we?

I may be a geek….

Posted by Tommy on December 23, 2010 Comments Off

…but that doesn’t mean I know everything about things with wires.

I was reading this comic from theOatmeal.com which illustrate really well what happens when people find out you work with computers.

It also shows peoples un-willingness to learn, for some reason, people have a mental-block to getting to grips with the tool that (i would estimate) over 50% of us now use on a daily basis at work. In 2005/2006 65 per cent of UK households owned a home computer [1], this must be well over 70% now. Why are all but the few (who are derided as ‘geeks’) willing to get to grips with using computers?

Is it to do with their usability or how complicated they are perceived to be? How many of the endless number of features do you use in Word or Excel for example?

I have often suggested Microsoft creates a Word light, containing only the basic features and formatting options, in particular it could do away with the fonts option and ‘force’ people to use styles.

Anyway, it is nearly Christmas so I’ll stop my moaning and wish you all a happy New Year. God Bless. Here’s an image to get you in the christmas spirit:

[1] National Statistics News Release 18 January 2007: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/efs0107.pdf [PDF document, 130KB]

Lift accessibility

Posted by Tommy on November 25, 2010 Comments Off

I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to the accessibility of web sites and don’t really get too tired explaining to people why a PDF of a scanned-in document is a no-no. I always assumed that the accessibility of web-sites was still in its relative infancy compared to other industry’s.

Take lifts (elevators!) for example, according to wikipedia:

The first reference to an elevator is in the works of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who reported that Archimedes built his first elevator, probably in 236 B.C.

Yes, you read that right, the lift was invented in 236 B.C.

Obviously lift technology has moved on somewhat and advances and additions have been made over the years since 236BC. Once such advancement is the addition of the audible announcement of the direction of travel, door status and floor position. The reason for this is for visually impaired lift users, who cannot see the electronic display indicating where and in which direction the lift is traveling.

In our building we’ve recently had some of our lifts replaced, it is these new lifts that I have noticed a change in the order of the announcements. They start by announcing the direction of travel and floor number before the lift doors have opened. The only people who can hear these announcements are the people already in the lift, surely they’re much more useful to the people who may be getting on the lift.

I’m probably being a bit picky but I would have thought lifts would come with a standard configuration which had been tested.

Have we learnt nothing in over 2000 years of lift design?

Back breaking

Posted by Tommy on February 19, 2010 Comments Off

Never break the browsers back button. It’s one of Jakob Nielsen’s top design mistakes from 1999 and it still holds true over ten years later.

The back button is the web users fail-safe, it’s something they can draw comfort from when they’re lost in the depths of a website. I’ve observed many a test where users click the back button five times instead of clicking the ‘home’ link once to return to a site’s front page. They understand and trust completely where the back button is going to take them, or so they think.

Thankfully the practice of deliberately preventing a user from leaving your website by the blocking back button has all but ceased, however with the increase use of AJAX and flash it seems there is more and more opportunity to break the back button ‘accidentally’.

I recently contributed to a discussion on the UX-Exchange about relying on browser for navigation and judging by some of the responses, even the experts are not in total agreement.  The question seems born out of the fact that technology breaks the back button, therefore should we create an alternative within a page.

When navigating a site the user is on a journey, they’re creating a mental path of where they have been, the back button allows them to traverse this mental path and start again if they took a wrong turn. Each turn on this journey is a click of the mouse, be that following a hyper link to another page or clicking a link to refresh a list of search results.

Until user behavior changes and the back button is no longer the third most used feature (behind hyper links and in-page buttons) we should do all we can to avoid breaking the back button, irrespective of the technology we’re using.