PhotoshopDesign

An increasing number of web developers are aware of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (though they don’t necessarily use them in their work). But another set of accessibility guidelines seem to be almost completely overlooked â€" the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG).

Where WCAG addresses the information and functionality of a website, ATAG addresses software that is used to create websites or manage the content of websites. There are two versions of ATAG; ATAG 1.0, which was made a recommendation on 3 February 2000 (yes, over ten years ago), and ATAG 2.0, which is currently in Working Draft status. Since a lot has happened on the Web in ten years, ATAG 2.0 is what I am basing the information in this article on.

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Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.

5 Years ago somebody wrote something stupid on the Internet that annoyed a bunch of bloggers enough to write about it, including myself. Yesterday I received a contrite email from this person saying that the incident had ruined their life and asking if I’d remove the post. It turns out that my blog post ranked in the top 20 results for this guys name and he was wondering if I’d remove the article. I considered it, as to be honest I’d completely forgotten about the event (as had most people 2 weeks after it happen) and I didn’t really care that much anyway. However it got me thinking about two different things.

On the one hand, the Internet can freeze youthful folly and a small transgressions can stick with you for life. So that picture of you drunk and passed out in a skip, or that heated argument you had on a mailing list when you were twenty can come back and haunt you. This is something that the Facebook generation is beginning to discover as they enter the job market only to have their potential boss Google their antics. Surely everybody deserves the anonymity of youth; to screw up a few times and not have it haunt you for life for ever. I’m a pretty decent chap and felt sorry for the guy, so was definitely tempted to strike his transgressions from the history books. I know that I’d want somebody to show me some compassion if the position was reversed.

On the other hand, by removing this information aren’t we effectively rewriting history? I’m sure we’ve all written dumb things on the Internet in the past, yet we don’t all go around asking for this information to be doctored. Shouldn’t people be forced to standby their mistakes and carry them with honour and dignity? Isn’t it important to know that the MP now campaigning for family values once smoked pot and screwed around? Similarly isn’t it useful to know that somebody who now makes their living writing standards based code once said…

“Standards cronies have now latched on to the disabled ‘the starving African children of high technology’ for leverage. Spend time reading A List Apart, and you’ll soon get the impression that accessibility is bigger than cancer, and we’re all about to go blind and lose our mouse-bearing limbs. The solution? Web standards!”

So what do you folks think? Should youthful folly be let to rest or is ther a moral obligation to keep this information around?

A rarely used accessibility feature in HTML is the longdesc attribute on the img element. It allows you to enter a URL for a page that contains a longer description of the image than is suitable for the alt attribute.

One of the reasons that longdesc is not used a lot is likely lack of support in visual browsers. iCab has supported it for years, but that used to be the only one as far as I am aware.

However, now there is at least one more browser that supports longdesc: Opera. Henny Swan talks more about how it works in Adding Londesc support to Opera 10.10.

If this will make more people use the longdesc attribute (and use it right) remains to be seen, of course.

Posted in Accessibility, Browsers.

Every now and then I need to ask a client or another developer to save a copy of a web page and email it to me. Mostly it is because they are viewing a page that is behind a firewall and I need to see the markup. Something that happens a lot is that they send me HTML that is more or less mangled.

This HTML mangling happens when you choose “Web Page, complete” or a similarly named option in your web browser. With this option selected, browsers don’t save just the HTML source of the page â€" they also save any associated images, stylesheets, javascript files and other resources and change all references to those files to make them point to the locally saved copy.

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Posted in Browsers, Quick Tips.

A month ago I posted a tip about the Readability bookmarklet which can be used to make websites easier to read. After that I was made aware of another option: Readable.

The Readable setup page offers more customisation options than Readability does, which is useful. One of the options is to use Better Web Readability, a CSS framework intended to make web content easier to scan and read.

Just like Readability, Readable doesn’t work perfectly with all sites, but it’s great to see efforts like these.

Posted in Accessibility, Typography, Usability.

You may have seen the job listings from Authentic Jobs in the “Sponsors” section here or on one of the other partner sites. Maybe you found one of the listed jobs interesting and checked it out. Or maybe you didn’t, but went straight to the Authentic Jobs site to look for other jobs. It’s also quite possible that you’ve never visited the site.

Well, whether you’ve been there before or not, if you’re currenly looking for a job (or for someone to hire), now is a good time to take a look at the recently relaunched Authentic Jobs. For more details about the redesign, check out founder Cameron Moll’s blog post Introducing the new Authentic Jobs, completely retooled.

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Posted in Job openings.

Ever find yourself reluctant to read stuff you really would like to read if it wasn’t on a site whose visual design is not compatible with your eyes? I do.

There’s always the option of simply turning CSS off, but that doesn’t always look so good. Another option is to try the Readability bookmarklet, which tries to remove everything but the main content of the page you are viewing. It also lets you choose from a few different colour combinations, font sizes and line lengths.

The bookmarklet isn’t perfect â€" it doesn’t work on all sites and sometimes hides a bit too much content, but I like the concept.

Translations

This article has been translated into the following languages:

• Turkish: Readability: Web İçeriÄŸinizi Daha Okunabilir Yapın

Posted in Accessibility, Usability.

Tickets for the UK’s premier user experience conference are now on sale. The great thing about putting together a conference like UX London is that, as a user experience consultancy ourselves, Clearleft gets to set up exactly the conference that we would want to go to. And yet again I’m massively excited about who we’ve lined-up for 2010: Bill Moggridge, Scott McCloud, Peter Morville, Liz Danzico, Josh Porter, Kristina Halvorson, Whitney Hess and Jesse James Garrett to name but a few.

Details of the workshops are still being finalised, but you can expect to learn more about running Agile UX teams, using comics as design tools, understanding patterns for discovery, designing to influence behaviour, using metrics effectively, applying psychology to interaction design and loads more.

UX London is designed to be the conference we at Clearleft want to go to, and that’s probably why it was so successful last year. Despite the economic climate fellow UX professionals still wanted to come; in fact the conference sold out quickly and the waiting list meant we were over-subscribed by 200%. On that basis alone I recommend you get in quick, but also if you buy a ticket in December or January, you’ll also be saving a massive £200!

Read or add comments

I always enjoy reading real world examples of the design process in action. It's fascinating to see the thought process and choices made in arriving at a certain design.

I especially like 37 Signals' occasional 'Design Decisions' posts where they talk through the process of redesigning an element of one of their web apps.

Here is a collection of the ones that I most enjoyed:

• Redesigning help
• Saying more in less space
• Support request form redesign
• Signup chart redesign
• Campfire transcript page redesign
• Calendar picker redesign
• Prompting for an upgrade
• Saving space without losing meaning
• Designing the calendar strip
• Redesigning the Highrise list view page
• Redesigning the permissions page
• Designing the 'Add Anywhere' feature

I also highly recommend reading through the comments to each post. There's rarely universal agreement with the decisions made, which really highlights how a particular design objective can be approached from many different angles.