In this item, I will refer to “editorial design” as the refinement and optimisation content presentation for content-driven websites.
Of course, editorial design for print predates the Internet and web designers may even take some cues from it, but this item is concerned only with the digital domain.
A very public row broke out recently over a report concerning the results of a survey published by Socitm entitled Better Connected 2007, which surveyed the level of accessibility of 544 local authority websites.
The brouhaha centred upon the methods employed by Socitm to generate metrics amounting to a thumbs up or down.
The ink on the publication had barely dried when the influential PSF weighed in conspicuously with vocal criticism of “continued peddling of what can at best called ill-informed pontificating and at worst out and out drivel.”
Better Connected is one such example, and the Insight team behind it add insult to injury by clipping town halls for £395 a pop as they vacuum up cash like the most opportunistic of privateers while cowering behind and milking their quasi-official .gov.uk status for every penny they can. [1]
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The methodology consisted of a programme of automated testing, followed by human testing conducted by the RNIB, an organisation which has been seen to take a leading role in the promotion of accessibility best practice in recent years.
Acrimony surrounds the report’s implication that sites that did not meet the W3C’s WCAG were deemed to have “failed”, contributing to a generally gloomy bigger picture in which the site of only one local authority was rated ‘excellent’, 64 others reached Level A Conformance (compared to 62 in 2006) and the rest presumably trailed even basic standards.
The overwhelming issue highlighted by PSF and others [2] is that reliance upon WCAG, automated testing and narrow criteria does not make for an accurate assessment of accessibility, generating instead sensational headlines and more spin based on a “dodgy methodology which fails (and therefore implies inacesssibility of) perfectly good websites … This is doing more harm than good” [3].
Are false impressions being created? Certainly a great deal of energy has been spent mooting just that, but away from the glowering flames, there’s also the year-on-year grinding negativity of Better Connected to worry about.
The RNIB’s Donna Smillie suggests that there’s something inherently wrong about seeing accessibility as a boolean [4], yet there can be little doubt that many do make that mistake.
Though the context of Smillie’s statements is intended to support Better Connected, doesn’t the report - and the study as a whole - encourage a pass/fail view of things, attempting as it does to generalise into a digestible format what is a wide-ranging and often laborious area of practice treated in varied meticulous ways by hundreds of different organisations?
This is after all a quantitative study, not a qualitative one.
About eight years ago when I was still a student, I visited New York and Washington DC. Washington is home to many of the United States’ government agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose headquarters I toured like a good little tourist.
As well as the historical and scientific elements and the obligatory firearms display, at the end of one corridor there was an inocuous-looking wall display. It turned out to be a kind of leaderboard for the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted.
Yes, it’s a lengthy preamble, but I was eventually going to come around to a couple of United Kingdom equivalents [1],[2], [3].
The Crimestoppers site is relatively new. According to a BBC news article, it received 350,000 hits in its first day live. Even the fervently archantitech amongst the mandarins in Whitehall must have noted that.
However, it seems that our nation’s leaders have a bit further to go before they truly appreciate the scope of the Internet. It seems today that the Home Office, ever confident of the infinite wisdom of its management cadres, has announced that sex offenders may be forced to register their email addresses and chatroom handles.
Presumably this glorious concept will allow those who run websites to sort the fiddlers from the tiddlers, so to speak.
The internet child safety expert of children’s charity NCH applauds the idea. Well, perhaps the expert needs to be retrained, because whilst a Most Wanted mugshot is fairly hard to fake, an internet identity is not.
Just over a week ago, I indirectly criticised the BBC for running away to the the Jade Goody media circus. A bad case of overexposure if ever there was one!
Now they’re at it again and this time the Beeb is cosying up to our old friends from Redmond:
Spot the overexposed product!
You see, ever since the BBC signed an agreement with Microsoft to “explore ways of developing its digital services” I’ve been a bit sceptical about just how impartial a digital news service can be in today’s times.
Sure, the release of Vista is a newsworthy event. After all, it’s taken Microsoft several years and several dramatic delays to rebuild and market their operating system.
The release of Mac OS X enjoyed a paltry three articles over the period of several weeks and for the popular press, Linux has an image problem.
The logic here would be: “Windows is the most popular operating system, so it should get the most attention from the popular press”. Well it’s a chicken and egg equation, isn’t it? Plenty of exposure equals increased marketability, whilst increased marketability equals more press attention.
Note that our equation takes no account of the product’s actual quality. But in our times that simply doesn’t matter.
Just ask Jade Goody…
What AJAX isn’t, in this context
Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a significant leap forward in computing technologies and on one side of the coin, for the first time the Internet looks capable of delivering on the promise it showed a decade ago.
The flipside is that, during this time, the detritus of the computing has also increased exponentially, with over 95% of emails classified as junk [1] and ever more vocal reports of shady behaviour on the part of software vendors [2,3].
Riding the crest of this digital wave, the web technology “warp drive” that brought us Basecamp, del.icio.us and GoogleMaps - defined and described ad nauseam as “Web 2.0″[4] - represents both sides of the coin.
The positives are well-documented, the negatives less so. I decided to zoom in on one particular aspect: the conflict between AJAX [5] and Accessibility. This is not an especially new area of concern, but recently I wanted to check what progress there had been.
The key front-end advantage of the AJAX programming technique is that data can be served to the client without a page refresh. Small amounts of data are requested and managed by using a powerful scripting language. This language is JavaScript, and the AJAX technique finally shows how powerful it really is.
But therein lies the problem. Assistive technologies such as text-only browsers and screenreader software step over JavaScript altogether. As Joe Clark rightly points out [6], the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints include that:
“if you use applets and scripts: Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page.” [7]
So how do we use a web application like Google Maps if our assistive technology steps over or mauls the very JavaScript that brings us the functionality needed to navigate the interface and serve maps dynamically? And just what would an alternative accessible page for a map of your hometown contain? Could it be something like David Hawgood’s map of Kent [8]?
Here’s another example: if we choose to validate a form with AJAX, so it’s possible to check for data entry errors in real time as the user fills out the form [9], then isn’t an assistive technology user at risk of entering invalid data?
If, like me, you consult on web accessibility issues, then AJAX is a major concern: procurers see the power of an AJAX-ified application but none of the fallout.
People seemed to be all too willing to put aside the years of building awareness, interpreting and implementing standards and complying with the law just as soon as the jaw-dropping cleverness of this powerful (and discriminatory?) approach to web development became clear.
AJAX became a saleable “feature” of web applications, moulded into a point of difference that could be touted by salespeople who very likely had no idea what software had to do with the Achaean strongman.
The sad truth on this angle is that, as Clark succinctly points out, accessibility is also just a product feature.
For procurers whose personal experience of assistive technology amounts to little more than the wearing of spectacles, and whose personal knowledge of the law is as blurry as not wearing those spectacles, accessibility just ain’t sexy.
One answer to all this might be: change the assistive technology software, not the development techniques. Another might be to simplify the complexity of the offering (often wrongly interpreted as “dumbing down”). In the best tradition of human interaction, the best response is probably to meet somewhere in the middle.
The product of research conducted by James Edwards et al on screenreader reactions to AJAX is predictable: the reactions are unpredictable. [10]
The key finding, for screenreaders at least, seems to be that the whole process of updating content inline, which is what AJAX facilitates, is not picked up at all. This acts out as “I select a button or a link and nothing happens“. Not good.
If AJAX is used almost totally to improve user interaction, Edwards makes a typically valid point: “[i]nteractions are just details, and perhaps what we’ve really been doing is projecting our own desires and preferences onto users for whom they’re not really relevant”.
Imagine a boxing match attended by politicians. If you asked a cross-section of the attendees about the result of the bout, all that you’d learn is that the red corner and the blue corner both won.
Similarly, both of these are true: accessibility best practice is totally on the ropes and AJAX is seeing stars.
On the one hand, progress is both inevitable and inexorable, but on the other, we have come too far towards a best practice for accessibility to lose out now.
Seconds away, round two?
The old RouteOne website
A new website for RouteOne, the leading publication in the Coach and Bus industry, is set to go live shortly.
My job was to turn the old offering - primarily a storefront for new registrations - into an accessible, readable editorial site to reflect the investment in design.
RouteOne was a great opportunity for me to follow up on my recent interest in the area of editorial design and I did a lot of research into what works.
The business of designing for a readership turned out to be a process of experimenting with subtlety, since content and continuity are the most important factors in getting the site to sit well with users. I think we’ve certainly achieved this, based on the results of the testing I did.
The new RouteOne website homepage
As ever, the site is put together with a CSS-based layout and on this project, a full stylesheet was devoted to the provision of the numerous editorial styles that should make RouteOne distinctive and highly readable.
I really enjoyed working on the new site, my first under the banner of our new business. I look forward to the desired results being achieved!
I just completed a new CSS layout build for Memorabilia, the event that runs every year at the Birmingham NEC.
The Memorabilia show features appearances from actors and actresses, sports personalities and stalls selling collectibles from film and television. There’s often a particular bias on sci-fi.
Past guest appearances have included Verne Troyer (Mini-me of Austin Powers fame), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) and Bond-girl Britt Ekland.
The new site sports a broader, more attractive layout in keeping with the direction in which the event organisers Expo Management are pushing.
Check it out at http://www.memorabilia.co.uk!
I saw an article on the BBC website last week that asked what had happened to the campaign websites of Conservative leadership candidates since David Cameron took on the post. It made me think once again of all those sites I worked on in my early career. Sometimes one will pop into my head and I’ll wonder what became of it. This is especially true of the start-up .coms I helped build four or five years ago - so today, in the shadow of a growing gascloud of Web 2.0 efforts, let’s take a trip down Memory Lane …
What was it? Sitesforkidz was a space for subscribing children to “build” their own themed websites (there were different styles for different age groups).
The cacophonous Sitesforkidz as it was, and still is!
What could you do with it? Within their site, the child could create content pages and choose from about 100 online games. There was also a dubious mandatory page that featured lots of, er, sponsored links. What’s the verdict? Given the success of online tribal activities such as blogging and MySpace.com, Sitesforkidz was way ahead of its time. What happened next? The service was never quite finished. Despite high expectations and a great write-up in the Dumbarton and Vale of Leven Reporter, like the proverbial emu, the service just didn’t take off. Then it died out like a dodo. Where is it now? Unbelievably, most of the original site complete with Flash intro, is still there today. For the ultimate in bad design (for which I hasten to add I was personally heavily culpable), visit Sitesforkidz.
What was it? An online showroom for Bletchley’s finest, not to mention only, purveyor of tiles. What could you do with it? Browse a range of tiles, mainly. What happened next? The company sold a few tiles. Then it sold a few more. Then some other agency took over the site. Where is it now? Apart from an exciting redesign, it has survived more or less intact in its original format at bletchleytiles.com
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What was it? tIVG was a startup for startups. The company invested in the crackpot ideas of would-be internet tycoons, organised development and initiated the marketing process.
tIVG: feel the superiority complex…
What could you do with it? The tIVG website was pure Flash brochureware. It featured a tasteful colour scheme, liberal use of the classic Baker Signet typeface and less than intuitive navigation. What happened next? Nothing. Where is it now? The tIVG website still exists today. Not doing much, but it’s still there alright! Take a look at tIVG
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What was it? The website of one of the millions of corporate events companies in a feeding frenzy for ‘training budgets’ thinly disguised as tax write-offs. Its owner was holding down a job as a supply teacher whilst awaiting his entry pass to the dotcom overnight hall of fame. His anxiety at the success of the likes of Red Letter Days was made him one of the most demanding and impatient people you could ever meet. Which is presumably why it took more than nine months to finish the site. And we deemed it finished, not him. What could you do with it? It was possible to browse and book any event, from skydiving to skiing, from colonics for your successful sales team to corporate hospitality at Crufts. What happened next? The supply teacher client was obsessed with search engine rankings and even claimed once that Channel 4 had asked him to organise some teambuilding games for the bored housemates of Big Brother. Needless to say, nothing came of it, or the business. Where is it now? Tombstoned. The URL points to the dreaded search page graveyard of dead domains: 1stencounters.com.
Briam asked on the forum for the blog software that runs MikePadgett.com about template styles.
I had written a brief article before MikePadgett.com was so kindly hacked about the work I’d done on templates.
In common with most blog software, the idea is to separate content from presentation, so it’s just a matter of writing decent CSS.
Here are the two previous ’skins’ that have graced these pages:
Japon - the first blog style I used in 2005
Woollen - a Norwegian sweater to keep the blog warm for winter
If anyone would like some help with their templates, let me know.
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