« August 2003 Entries »

Amazon Referrals

Aug 29

So AdSense has been the big thing for the past few months, yeah? I just can’t do that to this site. Not only am I not trying to make money here (at least, in the “I’m writing for a paycheque” sense), but they taste horrible. Others are making hundreds, if not thousands off of AdSense. It’s tempting to throw in the towel and just go for it to see what results, but I’m still not ready to compromise yet. (Give me a month of huge overage charges on my hosting plan and watch how quickly I turn to the big ‘G’.)

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (24) | posted to mezzoblue

Plugins & <object> - Illegal?

Aug 28

Via Slashdot come news that Microsoft has lost a court battle against what appears to be a small, opportunistic company called .

The suit contested that Microsoft’s use of embeddable technologies (plug-ins, essentially) violated a patent granted in 1998. The W3C convened an ad hoc meeting which resulted in a new public forum on the issue, and a recommendation that the web community begin thinking of potential ways to deal with this.

The upshot of the ruling is that embeddable technologies, everything from applets to plug-ins to the <object> tag, will be under scrutiny for patent violation. As Ronaldo Ferraz put it, HTML supported the <object> tag by that point, so how come Microsoft couldn’t come up with examples of prior art?

People have been saying for years that the U.S. patent system is broken. Interesting to think that it took a lawsuit to prevent the <img> tag from being deprecated in XHTML 2.0.

Comments Closed (19) | posted to Browsers

A Second Voice: Designing For The Future

Aug 27

In the second installment of A Second Voice, Ian Lloyd shares the problems he encounters when talking to colleagues about web standards, and explores the reasons why those who care are still a rare breed.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to The Industry

Standards: Designing For the Future

Second Voice Icon: Standards Ian Lloyd is a member of the Web Standards Project and runs a site about web accessibility called Accessify. His full-time role is senior web designer/developer with Nationwide Building Society, a UK-based financial services organisation which, despite the protests below, doesn’t do a bad job of making its web pages accessible and standards-compliant.

Designing for the Future, and the Training Gap

How do you encourage unenthusiastic developers/mark-up authors to adopt forward-thinking web development methods?

How do you engage people who consider their work on the web as just that: ‘only work’, something that pays the bills but doesn’t exactly leave them beside themselves with excitement?

I am but one individual in a team of many (in my place of full-time employment) and I am from a strange breed - I have a passion for the web! What happens when you are part of a team that is not as uniformly enthusiastic to learn?

This is a problem that faces many IT managers and standards advocates working in the corporate sector. Though we’re doing good things in adopting accessibility practices and optimising our code, it’s still very difficult to get a site to conform to all the major standards in the real world. Why is this the case?

Learn from Textbook Cases

Andy King’s book Speed Up Your Site includes numerous tricks and tips for committed web developers. Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards is a tome of practical, well-thought-out techniques. Both not only explain how to improve the way we develop sites for maximum efficiency and future-proofing, but they also clearly detail why the problems exist in the first place.

These are just two books among many that have made me think and re-think about how I build personal sites and company projects. I devour the content of these books and regurgitate it - metaphorically speaking - wherever I can. Sometimes these tips and tricks find their way on to the corporate work, but invariably they’re resigned only to my personal work.

Most of my learning happens on the toilet. Sorry! As unappealing as that is, that’s where I pick up most snippets of information (they say that the seat of learning is Oxford but I beg to differ - it’s the downstairs loo). Because I have a passion for what I do, I’ve made it my business (no pun intended) to learn how to construct table-free page layouts, make pages accessible for keyboard-only users, provide different views of a page through alternative style sheets, and more. I don’t have to. But I want to make things work better, faster and cleverer. But we’re not all like this. Most people would rather read a newspaper on the toilet. Or maybe nothing at all. But that’s quite enough of our potty habits for now. Shall we move along?

Individuals Lead the Way

It’s true that most corporate sites fall way behind the personal web sites of mark-up and standards gods and goddesses (e.g. the aforementioned Zeldman, Owen Briggs, Ben Henick, Simon Willison, Dan ‘Waferbaby’ Bogan, Jeremy Keith to name but a few personal favourites among many).

This is because it’s far easier for an individual to introduce a novel or clever way of doing things - there are no committee decisions (and therefore no split decisions or arguments). As well, no matter how progressive and forward-thinking the company you work for (and I believe Nationwide qualifies here), there will always be an issue with introducing ‘new’ methods. Let’s just overlook the fact that many of the methods that I’ve alluded to are actually a number of years old (CSS2, hello?) - it’s all about perception. If other people, and by that I mean ‘corporates’, are not doing it, then it must be new, right?

Look at just a handful of the things happening on these forward-thinking personal web sites:

Totally CSS-based page layouts: Gone are the tables that were never intended for layout purposes (tables are for data, folks - layout grids are an abuse of the mark-up, an abuse that we’ve come to live with and accept a bit like an irritable auntie with an equally irritable terrier that visits every weekend). Now we can view such sites on a PC, a handheld device, using a screen reader and more, and we get the added bonus of quicker-loading pages.
More usable forms: The <label>, <fieldset> and <legend> elements are supported by most modern browsers, and in the right hands they can make a form far more usable and accessible. And they’re definitely semantically sound.
Data tables that work: Using elements like <caption>, <thead>, <tbody> and <tfoot>, and attributes such as summary, scope, ids and headers, data tables become meaningful to blind users accessing the content with a screen reader (rather than a jumbled mush of words and numbers).

Training is the Weakness

Let’s assume, for example, that browser support is not the issue, that you’ve taken a stance and agreed to support browsers that support web standards (while not completely turning your back on the older browsers). Let’s assume you’ve already said that your company is going to focus on getting things right for IE5+, Netscape 6+ (or Mozilla/Gecko derivatives) and Safari. Now inadequate browser support is no longer an issue. You should be able to do things right, right? The browsers you’ve settled on are up to the job so what’s stopping your company from moving forward? One word - training.

You may have a few individuals in a department that have a passion for doing things according to the relevant standards and as efficient as possible; but you are equally as likely to have a whole group of people - probably a much greater percentage - who do not share that passion. They may have learned HTML five or more years ago and are still using the same methods (tag soup) that they always have. Every team is different, but here are some that you may identify with:

Fear of change - they know where they are with the ‘old school’ methods
They believe that the new methods are more complicated
They don’t understand semantic mark-up (in fact they have never even heard the word ‘semantic’ before)
Their job is just a job and learning new things is either a bore or an intrusion into their personal free time (they just don’t get that whole toilet-seat-learning thing).
They see themselves as ‘back-end’ people who would rather spend their energies optimising a SQL query than worrying about how the results might be rendered on screen, since “that’s for the UI guys to take care of…”

But perhaps the biggest reason is:

No-one’s told them or shown them how.

And if we are indeed talking about people who otherwise won’t actively go out and learn for themselves, not only can you discount the likelihood that they’ll take a book home, you can also rule out them picking up new techniques from reading the weblog of an influential and knowledgeable individual. Perhaps you even know people who have been working on the web in one way or another for a number of years who would respond with: “What on earth is a weblog?”

When Simple Mark-up Causes Maintenance Woes

When I look at the mark-up on a well-conceived site, I understand the structure intuitively - “Ah, I know what that <h1> means… Ah, so that nested <ul> is the sub navigation” and so on. Editing such pages is - or at least should be - much easier than hacking away at one that relies heavily on the placement of <td>s for layout. Although the page may be 50% smaller than its old-school counterpart, and it may be simpler to edit, what happens when someone else wants to maintain the page that has been so carefully crafted?

Here’s where I begin to fly in the face of common consensus - it being that if you code to web standards, it makes for easier maintenance of your site to those joining a project later. My experience has, thus far, shown the opposite to be true. It pains me to admit this.

No matter how simple the mark-up is, cleverly crafted pages can leave some people struggling. “Er, what are all these <div> thingies? I don’t get it … why can’t we use a table like everyone understands?”. And just wait until they get a load of the Box Model Hack in your CSS file (or any other CSS hack, for that matter)! It’s not unknown for sites/web pages to go far forward in terms of standards compliance, only to be brought back down a level because the new, simpler methods are not properly understood by those who may need to maintain these pages.

Change Come from Within

From my experience though, once people do finally ‘get it’, they wonder why they didn’t do things more simply before. There is a definite ‘Eureka!’ moment, but if the person or persons concerned do not want to learn, you may never reach it. So they have to be told, enlightened - it needs a push on your part rather than a pull on theirs. But that’s not easy either.

Enforced training is not always gratefully accepted though (unless it involves a trip abroad and a nice expense tab, of course) and often the training is hideously outdated. The techniques described in Zeldman’s, King’s and other people’s books are not taught in any residential training that I have ever seen. The latter are still stuck in the old school “Let’s give ‘em <font> tags and nested <table>s” approaches.

Bottom line is - there are still too many people who only understand the old school methods of web design, and only when these people can get enthusiastic about adopting new methods will we be delivered to the promised land of perfect mark-up.

No Easy Solution

"So train them yourself!" I hear you screaming at the page. Perhaps it should be up to individuals to lead the way after all, but this may not be possible for a number of reasons:

no time to train (everyone’s busy)
no skill in training (it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable you are if you bore everyone to death)
someone more senior than you doesn’t want to hear it from an ‘underling’
it’s just not a sexy and exciting topic for a lot of people!

Perhaps we need to send uninitiated developers to a ‘Designing with Web Standards’ boot camp (are you listening Jeffrey?) and leave them in the hands of a capable trainer who can be trusted to enthuse and inspire others to greatness. Any training course today is liable to be of the “Here’s a <font> tag, use it to make nice red text” variety - and that doesn’t help anyone.

So what’s the solution? Unfortunately, I don’t come with the answer, only my very evident frustrations.

One comment I received prior to publication was that “it has to come from the top down”. If management says this is how it should be done, and there are financial gains for doing so (a higher annual pay raise, for example) then you’ve got one big incentive right there.

The dream of writing mark-up based on standards is not a pipe dream, but it can be a nightmare getting other people to follow suit. I just hope that venting these frustrations might spark conversation among passionate people on the web about what can be done. In the meantime, if anyone can prove me wrong about the standard of training available (particularly in the UK) then I’d love to hear from you! I could fill a room with developers who are not yet up to speed on these new techniques - just don’t bore them to death in the process, yeah?

Comments Closed (40) | posted to Second Voice

Semantics and Bad Code

Aug 26

Jason Kottke has written a thoughtful piece on the difference between standards and semantics, and if you’re just learning this stuff by way of my site (heaven forbid) or some of the many others out there, it’s worth your time to read it and consider his points.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (33) | posted to HTML/XHTML

Overflow

Aug 23

I’m slowly plodding along to XHTML 1.0 Strict sitewide, in a happy little idealistic attempt to later move to 1.1 and join the growing list of X-Philes. Evan Goer and Jacques Distler are fantastic resources on this stuff by the way (update: and I can’t believe I missed Anne Van Kesteren), but this is all background for you.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (39) | posted to CSS

RSI and Discomfort

Aug 22

I can’t sit still, and not because I’m excited or restless. I’m uncomfortable.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (27) | posted to Reflective

JAWS Petition

Aug 21

Via Dreamlettes:

We, the undersigned, request that the developers of JAWS® for Windows please provide us a free/cost effective, stripped down testing alternative. This will lead to more websites being tested to suit your software, resulting in an increased audience and hence increased requirement for JAWS.

Signed. I suggest you do the same.

Comments Closed (51) | posted to Accessibility

Browser Dependencies

Aug 20

In Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman advocates designing for the best browser you have on hand and then testing in the lesser ones, contrary to old-school methods of web design.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (52) | posted to Browsers

Interview, Open Component

Aug 19

DMXZone publishes an interview with yours truly (goofy head shot and all), and thoughts on rich-text web-based editors.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (29) | posted to Design

Oh Just Die Already

Aug 18

On Netscape Navigator 4.x and the Zen Garden

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (25) | posted to Zen Garden

ReUSEIT

Aug 15

Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, gets a bad rap for having a hard-to-use web site. Oh, and can I say it’s ugly and outdated?

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (22) | posted to Design

Microsoft Drops By

Aug 14

update: and the link goes to Lloyd Dalton for his amusing answer. Thanks all for playing along!

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (32) | posted to Zen Garden

Inaccessible Site Demonstration

Aug 13

Sooner or later you’ll find yourself wondering what the difference is between an accessible web site and one that isn’t.

The UK Disability Rights Commission has a fantastic demonstration of just a few things that can cause major problems for even the slightly disabled, and I’d highly recommend checking it out as soon as you have a moment. Three short Flash demonstrations require no more than 3 or 4 minutes, and only one actually pertains to screen readers.

(Thanks to Keith Bell and Accessify for bringing this to my attention.)

Comments Closed (16) | posted to Accessibility

Designer’s Wishlist

Aug 12

I’m currently subscribed to www-style, the W3C’s mailing list for CSS development. CSS-3 is being developed this very moment by engineers and programmers. Why aren’t a few designers involved in building a language meant for style? I honestly don’t know. Maybe none of us were ever asked. Maybe none of us ever volunteered.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (41) | posted to CSS

A Second Voice: Build it, and They Will Come

Aug 10

We’re kicking off a new feature on mezzoblue today called “A Second Voice”. I use the ‘royal we’ because, in fact, this will be a joint effort.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Accessibility

Accessibility: Build it, and They Will Come

Second Voice Icon: Accessibility Nic Steenhout is a long time disability rights activist. He has been the director of a Center for Independent Living for several years. CILs are non-profit, non-residential advocacy and service organization operated by and for people with disabilities. He has been interested in web accessibility issues since images first came in the picture (pun intended).

Accessibility on the web raises questions, disagreements, and passion. Let me tell you why I personally cannot compromise on accessibility.

First, let me point out that I am a person with disabilities. I have several disabilities, but the most obvious is that I use a wheelchair. I do not have a vision disability, but have more than a handful of friends, employees and consumers who do. I cannot help but draw parallels between my experience with brick and mortar stores’ lack of access, and my friends’ experiences on the web. I can’t get in the building, they can’t get into the website. Different, yet similar. Let’s continue.

It’s Your Responsibility

Why is accessibility important to you, the designer? In many cases, it’s the Law (for US based companies, at any rate). While there is currently one case creating a precedent against the Americans with Disabilities Act applying to US based online businesses, this will likely change in the near future. The spirit of the ADA is not being followed by judges who see it as a brick & mortar law, when it is in fact a civil rights law. The disability community is working hard to push one that would represent that aspect. But the ADA is only one law that addresses online presence; there is also Section 508 (of the Rehabilitation Act). I won’t go into details of that, but basically if the group you are working with receives federal funding, they had better be compliant.

If you’re only the designer, why does it matter if your client insists on a non-accessible site? Consider this: in brick & mortar lawsuits it’s common practice to sue the owner as well as the architect, contractor, and anyone else involved in construction of the building. It’s only a matter of time before non-accessible sites will start being named in lawsuits. You can bet that as the site’s designer, you will be named in the suit as well. You have a responsibility to make accessibility happen; don’t ask your client, chances are they don’t even know what you’re asking about. If you develop solid habits when you design, it’s easy to make a site comply not only with priority 1, but WAI priority 2. (Priority 3 is much more finicky, but not impossible) Feed your clients accessible websites, perhaps even despite what they think they want.

…but it’s such a small market! It’s easy to dismiss accessibility concerns with a statistic. You may have good eyesight, but how’s your Vision? Approximately 10 million people with visual disabilities (blind and low-vision) live in the US alone. And the market share is growing, especially considering many folks prefer to shop online for products and services. An accessible web site is so much easier than fighting with transportation and figuring out a product at the store. Also consider that these 10 million people have family and friends who will often patronize a particular business because they know it’s more accessible to their loved ones with disabilities. And let’s not forget we live an aging society where soon a large percentage of people will have vision issues.

You Don’t Want to Consider Accessibility!

But how can we consider all cases? Some debaters are fond of using extreme imagery of folks with multiple and very significant disabilities (e.g. Deaf and Blind and paralysed “from the neck down”), arguing they will never receive the full experience that someone without a disability will. Of course not, but frankly we people with disabilities grow tired of other folks shrugging off their responsibility by using the extreme example. A little goes a long way, and making no attempt at all in this direction because “you can’t please everyone” is an excuse for the idle.

Okay! I got your attention, put that flame thrower back in the closet! Seriously, we say we’re all for accessibility, as long as we don’t have to work too hard at it. That last bit is unstated, yet comes through loud and clear in most discussions. In fairness, it is indeed a lot of work to go back into a site and retrofit for access. Just like it’s difficult, time consuming and costly to remove a 28” wide door and replace it with a 32” wide door. Had the proper width door been planned for from the beginning, well, you wouldn’t have had the problem to start with!

One major issue stems from the fact that more and more frequently, we don’t have the option of seeing products at a “real” store. Products or services are only accessible online, which means a person cannot visit the physical store. Without that option, a site that isn’t accessible shuts out a whole lot of people. And whether consciously done or not, that is discrimination.

As my good friend Dan Wilkins says: A community that excludes even one of its members is no community at all. Of course, this is not a question of community, but one of business. I would argue that without the community supporting the business, there is no business. But that’s another discussion.

Challenges to Consider

I was asking Denise, a colleague of mine, about the problems she encounters on the web. She pointed out that sites using Flash don’t let her go anywhere. And while there may be more accessibility features in the most recent versions of Flash, it’s still not really an accessible technology. She was also telling me that a number of sites have a splash page with one big graphic, and no alternate text or anything to give an inkling as to what she is supposed to do from there.

What I found very telling is that when I asked Denise if she could give me a few websites that she found particularly non-accessible, she couldn’t. Because if it’s not accessible, she moves on to another site! (and promptly forgets where she was). These companies never had a chance to even showcase their products to her.

Drawing another parallel with brick & mortar, I’ll tell you about Pete. Pete was my car mechanic in Illinois. Pete is probably one of the best, most affordable, and honest mechanics there is. A gem. But Pete’s garage was not accessible. It had one step in front of the entrance. It’s not much, only 6”. A mere step for you who are walking, you won’t even notice it. Yet it means that I can’t get in. And in the middle of winter, when it’s -20°F, or in the middle of summer, when it’s over 100°F, having to wait outside is not only unpleasant and inconvenient, but can be outright dangerous.

I asked Pete to put in a ramp. He then asked me, “why should I put a ramp in? You’re the only customer I have in a wheelchair.” I asked him why he thought that was. Of course if your potential customers can’t get in, you won’t have them as a customer! He agreed to build the ramp. And when he did, I recommended him to all my friends. Pretty soon, his customer base increased by nearly a dozen people. Not bad for investing $300 in cement.

The point of this is that while you can track who visits your site(s), you cannot track if they have a disability or not. So you can’t excuse accessibility by claiming you don’t have any blind visitors. But you can rely on the fact that if you build it, they will come. Word of mouth is big in the disability community.

Spreading the Word

Of course, awareness is a big problem. The issues surrounding the need for web accessibility seem to be a closely guarded secret. Frankly, before I landed in this wheelchair, I was blissfully ignorant of accessibility issues. I am not faulting anyone who doesn’t know about the issues for not fixing their sites. But the moment one becomes aware, one must think about starting accessible/universal web design.

I also fault people with disabilities in all this. If accessibility is such a secret on the web, it is in part because we don’t speak up enough. I have no compunction telling someone when their site (or restaurant, or…) is not accessible, but I find that a majority of other folks with disabilities aren’t that vocal. If more people took the time to email site owners with faulty design, we would see the word and requests for accessible sites grow.

On the other hand, having been on the receiving end of the rejection that usually follows my requests for accessibility, I know that it is difficult to keep on advocating. Typically, email asking for a site to be more accessible are either ignored, or sent canned answer like “thank you for bringing this to our attention, we’ll look into it.” Months later, of course, they haven’t changed a thing. It’s a brush off. Every once in a while, we get an outright we don’t care about it, shove off (in so many words or not).

In Summary

I probably could go on and on and you wouldn’t be the first one to rightfully accuse me of having diarrhea of the mouth/fingers. Let’s draw this to a conclusion for now. Here are a few parting thoughts/recap:

Making accessible sites is not that difficult.: Even if you opt to only fulfill WAI Priority 1, you’ll have a site that is at least usable.
Making accessible sites is the right thing to do.: Shunning (on purpose or not) people just because they have a different way to do things is bad, and you’re not bad people.
Making accessible sites benefits everyone.: There are more and more people surfing on devices that need a little help, like PDAs, cell phones, etc.
Making accessible sites brings in $$$.: In today’s market, I cannot accept the argument that a market share is too small to be worth catering to, especially considering the very low cost of building accessible sites. Every dollar in sales is important to today’s companies.
We must pass the word about accessible/universal design.: Until more and more people demand accessible sites, and more and more designers demand tools providing accessible design features, it won’t happen on the scale it really needs to.

For more on the subject, here are some sites of interest:

SitePoint on Accessibility
W3C’s Web Accessibility Guidelines
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act
A List Apart on Accessibility
Web Page Backward Compatibility Checker (which can give you an idea of how your site looks on text only browsers)
Dive Into Accessibility
Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark
Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

So… That’s that for now.

Comments Closed (27) | posted to Second Voice

Cross-Site CSS Files

Aug 06

File this one under goofy fun.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (33) | posted to mezzoblue

Digital Web Article Posted

In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement, my first article for Digital Web Magazine has been published. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (70) | posted to CSS

Writing Assignments, FIR

Aug 05

There’s good news, there’s great news, and there’s Amazingly Great news. The good news first.

mezzoblue

Design, Typography, and the Web as Seen by One Guy in Vancouver, B.C., Canada

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