A website that I designed for Formula Power Boats Australia recently went live.
I looked after the information architecture, visual design, HTML/CSS, and created a customised content management system that allows the client to make updates to the websites themselves.
A new site I designed for National Publishers recently went live.
Melissa wrote some of the words while I looked after the visual design, HTML/CSS, and a customised content management system that allows the client to make updates to the websites themselves.
Working at Lemonade I helped develop the Blue Corset Co website.
As I write this Full Code Press is taking place in Sydney. The Woman of Words is participating for the Australian team as copywriter/editor.
It’s my birthday today. I am 30 years old.
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me-e
Happy birthday to me
Mostly cloudy with a few showers and the chance of a thunderstorm. Light wind tending moderate southerly.
Current Temperature: 13.7 C
Forecast Max: 15 C
This year’s birthday sees me at work. Boo!
WIPA is an organisation that brings Australian Web professionals together to exchange ideas, participate in debate, advance education and promote ethical practice.
A List Apart is conducting a survey on the Web Design industry. The results should be interesting.
If you are a Website Designer and have a few spare minutes it would be worth filling in the survey.
Accessibility is now commonplace. Designers, developers, business owners and even advertisers are now seeing the business benefits of accessible websites.
Eyes used to glaze over when we mentioned accessibility. Now those same eyes are passionately telling us all about it. Accessibility is now as important as interaction, branding and aesthetics and fortunately today we can have them all.
Now I am going to contradict myself. Sort of.
Imagine you have a web standards compliant website. It has pleasing aesthetics, semantic markup and good usability and accessibility. Users will enjoy this website and so will search engines.
Now say you want to use Flash on part of your website. Many of us know that Flash and accessibility are like oil and water. However when Flash is used in the correct context it is a brilliant tool for enhancing a website’s usefulness and capacity to communicate… but it royally ruins your accessibility rating.
At this point you have three options:
I choose two. I hope you do too.
Which brings me to my key point. If due to accessibility obligations you choose not to use the technology that best suits your content, isn’t that an accessibility problem in itself? By denying users the most appropriate delivery of content aren’t we denying them of the best user experience possible?
Remember not for a moment am I saying we should exclude certain users. That would be lazy, foolish and inherently against Tim’s notion of the Web.
Rather than following wonky guidelines to the letter in an effort to include everyone equally, we need to push forward where we can but at the same time never leave anyone completely behind. If that means some users get a high fidelity version while others get a low fidelity version then so be it. Fundamentally a sophisticated graph is nothing more than a table of data, or an interactive map from Point A to Point B is nothing more than an ordered list of directions.
So what’s stopping us? Nothing! We can have our cake and eat it too. Sort of.
I would like to clarify that I am not limiting my comments to Flash. PDFs or JavaScript that doesn’t degrade gracefully are just as problematic.
Before you send me a nasty email I want to emphasise that I am an accessibility advocate. I understand and support the WAI and believe that accessibility is truly at the heart of any well designed website… but so are a lot of other things.
Apple knows more about “clean” design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned?