A Donkey on the Edge

I'm always curious to hear any information that suppports the argument that not making your site accessible is a nonsense. The DDA Centre has nothing to do with website design, but they did have this little snippet on their website:

Disabled people have an annual spending power of 50 billion pounds a year. There are approximately 8.6 million disabled people in Britain.
Source: Regulatory Impact Assessment, Access to Goods, Services and Facilities, Disability Discrimination Act, Department of Work and Pensions, July 2001

Essentially, it is now so easy to make your website accessible, that you're just chucking customers out the window by not making the effort...

Embedded in the back of the bag are three lightweight, tough, waterproof solar panels which generate up to 4 watts of power. This means quicker charge times!

Yes folks, this is a solar powered laptop bag and I want one:-)

Bob was livid when he found out about L8 tickets changing hands for loads of cash online. I saw him on TV a couple of days ago really laying into eBay. I'm not sure if this was Bob's idea, but someone suggested bidders enter absurd amounts to sabotage the auctions and undermine eBay's system.

This must have worked as folk started entering nonsense bids (all for 10-Million pounds, the amount suggested by Bob) and now eBay has decided to stop the auctions...

Way to go Bob :-)

14 June, 2005 | 07:34PM BST

Dear all,

Today you have made it very clear to us that our previous decision to allow the sale of LIVE 8 tickets on eBay.co.uk was not one that the vast majority of you agreed with. As a result of this clear signal from the Community we have decided to prohibit the resale of LIVE 8 tickets on the site.

Although the resale of tickets is not illegal, we think that this is absolutely the right thing to do. We have listened to the views you expressed on the discussion boards and in the many emails you have sent to us. We shall be working over the next few hours to remove all LIVE 8 ticket listings from the site.

Thanks for taking the time to contact us and make your views heard,

Regards,

Doug McCallum
Managing Director, eBay (UK) Ltd.
On behalf of the whole eBay.co.uk team

Attention all CSS boffins, you have until 15 July to post comments on the working draft of CSS 2.1

If you're gonna bitch about the box model or query whether generated content should really have been implemented the way it was, you'll feel a lot smugger if you did your bit to keep the W3C on the straight and narrow by participating and getting your notes and queries in on time.

From the W3C front page:

Last Call: CSS 2.1

2005-06-14: The CSS Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1 (CSS 2.1). CSS 2.1 is derived from and is intended to replace CSS2. A snapshot of CSS language usage, the specification adds a few highly requested features, fixes errata and brings CSS2 in line with implementations. Comments are welcome through 15 July.

Recently lost my rag with a very nice person on one of the HCI lists I subscribe to. My juvenile, agressive and totally uncalled-for behaviour was triggered by the fact that the person works at Verisign (regular readers may remember this, this, this, this, or even this or may even have displayed this banner). She was enquiring about font-sizes, not as it turns out whether scalable fonts in web services are a good idea (she already knows they are) but whether they were in use in real-world applications (as opposed to public-facing websites).

As part of the general flow of font-size-related helpfulness, one of the respondents posted an interesting page from Human Factors

...What can we conclude from these studies?

• No Web page fonts should be less than 10-points,
• Optimal reading speed for most adults will be elicited with 12-point fonts (size=3)
• There is probably no reliable difference in reading speed for most adults when viewing common font styles (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman),
• Most users tend to prefer sans serif fonts (Arial, Verdana), and
• Older users will benefit from type sizes that are at least 14-points.

All the tests mentioned in the article were performed with black text on a white background, but the three different tests used different monitor sizes and resolutions which makes useful comparison difficult.

The findings were helpful, but only up to a point. Strangely, all the research is conducted in point units rather than pixels (font-size:9px) or keywords (font-size:x-small) which would have been more useful, as point measures have no real consistency in the world web browsers, OSs, video cards and monitors.

Other factors would have increased the usefulness of this research.

The relationship between point-size and line-length is not factored in and would definitely account for some of the results. Not including a number of characters per line in a readability test isn't such a great idea (strangely, the guy who taught me this stuff specified number of words, not characters--I've never worked out if the brain handles words and characters differently and whether I should be counting characters or words in my layouts).

Anyways, getting back on topic, I was able to report that a large financial services institution that I was contracting for a couple of weeks back has implemented scalable fonts even in it's 'private' applications (it offers password-protected tools for UK financial advisers) which is really very encouraging.

Finally, has anyone used the Schaffer-Weinschenk Method of user-centred design and is it any good?

Winston Churchill whups Shakespeare two sets to nothing... it must be the BBC's Tardis Tennis

This is an idea as beautiful as it simple...

I just learned a new word:

Inukshuk

What an absolutely fantastic word, check out the album cover as well...

Just bumped into this quote from Voltaire

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Chillingly current for a guy who died 227 years ago...

Ahhh love those logos with a swoosh. Speakup has compiled a definitive list of design clichés with a prognostic on each. I'm embarassed to admit I'm fond of bubble-head people... Still, I suppose I could always get my thinking cap back on.

The Wall Street Journal says:

Walter Carl, a professor at Boston's Northeastern University who has studied "word-of-mouth" communication and marketing, says blog-watching services "are very useful for quickly getting the lay of the land" in trends and consumer reactions.

Well, I guess we already knew that but then

Blog-monitoring services typically charge big companies $30,000 to $100,000 a year.

Which seems like extremely good value. I think it might be time for us UK consultants to take our rates up a bit;-)