Does Accessibility Belong on the Server-Side?
If you think you knew how to design or code a site with disabled people in mind, head on over to this National Institute of Standards and Technology accessibility study (via: Henrik Olsen) and find out exactly how much you don’t know.
Somewhere in Toronto, even Joe Clark is taking notes.
In a nutshell, Redish & Associates observed 22 screenreader users interact with a variety of web sites. Most were government sites, but Google was also included to represent search behavior. The results showed that most sites, whether or not they complied with the syntax of accessibility, were difficult to use based on the presentation of the content.
The study covers lots of ground, all the way from “skip navigation” links to recommendations against creating branded words like “LiveHelp” (apparently, screenreaders read that as “livahelp”).
Read more…
Costanza Loves the McDLT
So one of my friends e-mailed me yesterday to tell me that he had just moved to St. Croix and that they are so far behind the times over there that you can actually still get a McDLT. Yes, the McDLT… possibly the best sandwich to ever come out of the Ronald McDonald School of Culinary Arts.
The McDLT hasn’t been seen in America for about 15 years, but you remember it well: The hot stays hot. The cool stays cool. One half marketing genius, one half environmentally-unfriendly styrofoam waste.
Upon hearing of the McDLT sighting, I immediately hit Google to feed my nostalgic lust. There isn’t much current McDLT news to speak of, but I did find this gem of a commercial featuring George Costanza, circa 1985, who in the words of the site’s author “seems to love the HELL out of the McDLT.”
The spot is great. Extra points for the white Miami Vice jacket with the rolled-up sleeves and the kooky mid ’80s “Fame” dancing.
MacWorld 2005: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Twice a year, Apple fans like me take the first half of the workday off to watch the semi-annual ritual that is Steve Jobs’ MacWorld Expo keynote speech. When Apple is nice, they provide a live Quicktime feed for us to get our drool on. When they are cruel, they provide no video and force us to watch text-based accounts provided by the nice folks at MacNN, Engadget, MacMinute, and others. Either way though, we eventually get what we’re after: a first glance at what’s coming out of Cupertino this year.
UPDATE: The archived keynote is now available here.
I thought this year’s announcements were quite good and filled with several things to be excited about, but at the same time, I feel Apple is still behind the game with regards to a few lines of business they should be in. Let’s talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Read more…
Playing Along with African E-Mail Scams
With all the genuine relief efforts going on in the world right now, it’s easy to lose sight of the fake ones. Particularly the plight of poor Augusto Nandu Savimbi, son of Jonas Savimbi, recently slain leader of the UNITA movement in Angola (pictured at right). If you’ve ever received one of these e-mails, perhaps you’ve been tempted to help poor Augusto or one of his siblings out of the horrible predicament that has been thrust upon them by the oppressive government of Angola.
Or, perhaps you’ve just wanted to play along via e-mail and see how much of “Augusto’s” time you could waste.
As it turns out, a designer I work with, Stephen Lodefink, has a friend who has been doing just this for the last month or so, and it’s one of the more entertaining e-mail exchanges I’ve read in awhile. This friend Patrick has been trading e-mails with “Mr. Savimbi” stringing him along and setting up a fake meeting in Dublin to transfer funds and make them both millionaires.
The e-mail chain has gotten a bit long and Mr. Savimbi has grown quite frustrated, but I’m going to go ahead and post the entire transcript before the saga is complete. I will add new e-mails as they come in. The whole thing starts off rather tame, but once Patrick’s broken english and “kooky-kitten-kat” stories kick in, it goes way over the top.
The transcript follows:
Fantasy Football Addiction
Fantasy Football is a terrible addiction. For the last 17 weeks, I’ve wasted almost all of my Sundays watching NFL games I otherwise wouldn’t have watched, all for the sake of a small amount of cash and some bragging rights. I’m so bad that even though both of my league championships have already been decided, I’m watching the meaningless Cowboys/Giants Sunday night game right now because Tiki Barber is still scoring me points.
With the emergence of web-based fantasy sports engines like our own ESPN League Manager, fantasy football has gone, in only a few years, from an obscure fringe hobby to one of the most popular paid services online. I’m the commissioner of two ESPN leagues this year and they are both the biggest leagues I’ve ever participated in (16 and 20 people). I think that growing league sizes and multiple league memberships are signs that fantasy football fever is still very much exploding.
One of the leagues I’m in is a blogger’s league that Keith Robinson and I set up to help get to know some people in the community a little better. It is my jealous pleasure to announce that Keith won the league championship today with a 159-124 victory over Mike Papageorge (a.k.a. The Shifty Spaniard) in the final game. Keith’s team, Kiss My Asterisk, was among the most exciting to watch this year, winning several nailbiters on clutch plays and good coaching decisions. Mike Papageorge’s team, The Alicante Algonauts, was quite strong as well, especially considering it was operated out of Spain, a football starved province in Western Europe. I was one fumble away from taking the title this year, so I can’t complain, but congratulations to both Mike and Keith on making the final game and to Keith for winning it all <marv_albert>WITH AUTHORITY</marv_albert>! Thanks also to the 17 other industry know-nothings in the league who put up with the forked tongue of the Commish for the whole season.
The second league I ran is a money league of friends and co-workers and I’m happy to say I took the title in that one with a 244-139 blowout. I don’t expect any readers to actually care about this, but hey, it was a long season and I’m proud of the win, damnit!
The Cowboys/Giants game just ended a couple of minutes ago which means the fantasy season is now officially over as well. Tiki Barber got me another 34 points. Yay Tiki.
It’ll be nice to have my Sundays back now.
sIFR 2.0 RC 3 is Here… Come Get Some
UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now available. See article here.
Alright, I know I said Release Candidate 2 might be the final release of sIFR 2.0, but hey, Mark and I found some more things to improve on… so we did. Today’s release of sIFR 2.0 RC3 introduces the following new features/fixes/improvements:
- The javascript file has been reduced down to 8.8k.
- Replacement calls now use named arguments so you don’t need to specify parameters in any particular order. The function is backwards-compatible, however, so existing installs will remain functional.
- Newline support (
<br>and<br />) now works perfectly. - Now compatible with Opera 7 and above.
- New support for a “fallback” transparency color for browsers which don’t support transparency. This eliminates the green background displayed in some older browsers when specifying transparency.
- A shiny new sIFR logo!
Since all changes from RC2 to RC3 are contained within the “sifr.js” file, you need only replace your existing “sifr.js” file to complete the upgrade. No .html or .swf work is necessary. You may, however, decide to change your replacement calls to the new named argument syntax if you wish. This is not necessary, but you may find it preferable.
Note: if you are using a version earlier than RC2, please re-export your swfs as well.
Here are links to the new files and updated example page:
Incidentally, it looks like Metafilter has picked up on sIFR today and is sending over a ton of traffic to the original sIFR article. Thanks guys!
Reading the Metafilter comment thread is a bit humorous, however. It never ceases to amaze me how some people will see the word “Flash” and cry about imaginary accessibility issues, imaginary proprietary file format issues, and other imaginary “sky is falling” issues. Look at the code people. Study it. Analyze it. Understand it before you jump to conclusions. And above all else, understand that the entire web as we know it is a hack. I’d respond on the Metafilter thread myself but I don’t feel like paying $5 to join.
This article contains information on sIFR Release Candidate 3 — the latest version of sIFR. For an explanation of exactly what sIFR is, please see the original article: sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.
Ten Votes
So you thought the 2004 elections were over? Not in my state. More than a month after the polls closed, the Washington State governor’s race is still undecided, and you’re not going to believe how close the latest count is: TEN VOTES. The latest returns from the third recount (all by hand this time) have Democrat Christine Gregoire ahead of Republican Dino Rossi 1,373,051 to 1,373,041 with more than 99% of precincts reporting.
Unbelievable.
If this isn’t the closest election in the history of the United States, I’d like to hear what is. I mean, it’s the equivalent of winning a smaller state like Wyoming by ONE VOTE. We’re talking about a difference of .00073 percent. That’s 73 100,000ths of a percent, and much closer than when Bush allegedly won Florida by 400 some votes in 2000. That was a southern asswhoopin’ compared to this.
A lot of people in my state criticized Gregoire for asking for multiple recounts given that she came out behind by a hundred or so votes in both of the counts, but can you really blame her? You could count those votes a million times and you’d get a slightly different tally each time. When the numbers are that close, you’re really within the natural margin of error no matter what you do.
Given that, I wonder why every election in this country doesn’t have runoff provisions for such close calls. Several states do, but not all of them, and no federal elections have it either. It seems only fair to me that if two candidates are within, say, 1 percent of each other, there is a new election with only those two candidates on the ballot. Another alternative to that would be to vote for a “2nd place candidate” on each ballot so that people who vote independent can still affect the balance between the Republican and Democratic voting.
How can you even take office not knowing if you really won? Oh wait…
Hey, Where Did Seattle Go?
Last weekend, I noticed that the Seattle weather turning to crap has also turned a good deal of the livecam images in the Mike Industries live header to crap. As it turns out, the moisture we get this time of year in the Northwest can turn a scenic Puget Sound view into an indistinguishable blob of grey in about 15 minutes. To make matters worse, the livecam is actually a Sony DV cam and not a proper high-resolution digital still camera, so a poorly defined subject area really makes for a blurry and unimpressive shot.
Here is a sampling of what the header looks like under different circumstances (Note: If you can’t see the live header, make sure you have Flash installed and click the “Live” theme in the sidebar) —
Header on a good day
Header when it’s extremely foggy
Header at night
Header with no image
Now, all of this wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t using the livecam as a masthead for my site, but I quite intentionally am, so I needed another solution. If I could only show something else when the view outside was crappy, then that would be great.
But how can you programmatically detect crappiness in photos? Luckily in my case, it wasn’t so hard.
Contrast.
If the contrast of any given photo from the livecam is not sufficiently high, I can deduce one of two things: it’s really foggy or rainy out, or it’s nighttime. Both of these cases produce ugly livecam images in the header, so if I can detect when low contrast occurs, I can change the header accordingly.
I’d heard about ImageMagick in the past but never actually used it. ImageMagick is basically a server module which lets you do all sorts of programmatic things with images like stretching, rotating, sizing, etc. However, it turns out you can also fetch the standard-deviation of each RGB channel of any given image. The standard deviation of an RGB channel is the range of values which encompasses two-thirds of the total number of pixels in an image. It’s a crude measure of contrast, but it works for my purposes.
The next step was writing a PHP script which would suck in the standard deviation value of each channel, come up with an average, and then output a tiny text file containing only a “0” or “1” depending on if the contrast value was above or below my threshold. Running this script via cron every 15 minutes would give me an accurate indicator of whether current conditions were defined enough to produce a good image. And finally, in order to actually act upon that information, I could simply feed “contrast=0” or “contrast=1” into my Flash header via PHP and the FlashVars property.
So now that I can detect when I don’t want to show the standard livecam image, I need to figure out what to show instead. Right now, I’m simply not loading the image and leaving the header as a block of mostly negative space. The header was originally designed to look presentable without an image, so this doesn’t bother me too much.
But I want to do more. I feel like there’s something more useful I could do in the header when it’s either foggy or night time and I’d love to hear any suggestions. So far, I’ve come up with these:
- Keep it blank.
- Bring back the crappy footage for the sake of it being a “live theme” and that’s what live themes do.
- Show nicer, higher resolution photos of a foggy scene and a night time scene when it’s appropriate (taken from a real digital camera).
- Come up with some sort of other element to load into the header (like an explanatory line of text) when conditions call for it.
Anyway, I have no idea what to do. Someone even suggested doing a panning lighthouse beacon when it’s foggy but that may be over the top. Any ideas?
iPhone Update
Alright, it looks like there’s a good bit of both optimism and pessimism surrounding the upcoming Apple/Motorola phone since the Forbes article was published last week. We’ll never know for sure what this product is all about until we see it, but we can be sure it’s an substantial step closer to what a lot of people (myself included) are craving in a cell phone: the industrial design and user experience of an Apple and the convergence of voice, data, and music in one device.
Some of the reader comments in my previous post rightly point out that we should be conservative with what we expect at MacWorld, and I think this is a good idea. In other words, don’t expect an iPod Mini that can dial… at least not yet. Instead, expect something cool that has Apple’s fingerprints on it.
At the low end, it will be a mere shadow of what I’ve been predicting: A purely Motorola phone with nothing more than a self-contained iTunes application to interface with PCs and Macs. Even the Forbes article expects more than this, however, as it mentions Apple having a say in both the price and overall user experience of the product.
At the high end, the industrial design will be Apple’s, the branding will be at least partially Apple’s, and the entire user interface will be skinned in legendary Mac fashion.
If we hit the high end, I’ll be happy. If we hit the low-end, I’ll definitely be a bit disappointed, but if you told me a year ago that Steve Jobs would have finally gotten Apple into the cell phone game, albeit with one foot, I’d have thrown a party. Does that mean much more significant products aren’t in the works? Absolutely not.
In fact, I’ve learned a few other things this week through readers that make me think things are on the right track. Firstly, the new iPod Photo uses a QVGA display (220 x 176, 65,536 colors) which is the exact same display that appears on many next-gen cell phones. Might some of the interface work being done on the iPod Photo fit nicely on a QVGA phone display? I think so.
Secondly, we learned that Apple, on December 13th, filed suit against unknown individuals for leaking information about unspecified products very recently. This could be one of several things in my opinion: a flash-based iPod, a firewire-based enhancement to GarageBand, the infamous “train conversation” with a Motorola engineer about the Apple/Motorola phone, or something else entirely. Who knows.
And finally, this isn’t really news but some of the comments from the last post got me thinking about the situation that Apple and Motorola will put themselves in even if they merely put iTunes inside a phone. Specifically, there is this notion out there that cell carriers are dead set on forcing users to download music over their networks and that Apple and Motorola would be circumventing that goal with their device. While it is true that carriers would like to impose such a system, that doesn’t mean it will ever be practical enough to actually happen. It takes me two minutes to download an album to my laptop and then another two minutes to transfer it to my phone via SD card. Know how long that would take over a GSM network? Hours. And besides, even if one does download an album directly to their phone, would they not then want it on their laptop as well? The music-via-cell-network plan is a non-starter and the first network that realizes that will probably be the first network to do a deal with Apple. How about it T-Mobile?
“Get the Apple phone for $99 with purchase of a two-year voice/data/.Mac plan, and we’ll throw in a free 1 GB SD card to store all your music.”
T-Mobile could then use their data bandwidth for more important functions like .Mac synching, web browsing, e-mail, news aggregation, and instant messaging. Users could still download music over the network, but maybe there’s an extra fee for that.
I see something like this coming soon, and January will either be a small step or a giant leap towards towards this sort of offering.
iPhone Prediction Confirmed
UPDATE: Uhhh, thanks for the semi-false alarm Engadget and Forbes! Now that we’ve had a few days to absorb things, updated thoughts are available here — iPhone Update
Way back on July 25th, I told you Apple was coming out with a cell phone. This was before any preliminary Motorola announcements, before any recent rumor mill gossip, and a full four months before Russell Beattie’s and Ross Mayfield’s great articles on the subject. I even told you the exact month: January of 2005.
Lo and behold, via today’s announcement in Forbes magazine (which was via this article at Engadget), Apple has confirmed that not only will they be releasing a full-fledged Apple-inspired phone with Motorola circuitry, but it will likely be shown off in January to an eagerly-awaiting public at MacWorld Expo.
I, personally, can’t wait.
While I am very excited about the official announcement, the revelation that it will be a “mid-range” device probably means that I won’t dump my Treo for it. Once you’ve tasted the sweetness that is the high-range, full-featured phone, it’s tough to imagine going back. However, we all know that Apple is not in the business of producing anything “mid-range”, so I’d bet a large sum of money that this initial iPhone release is just the tip of the iceberg. Might we see a “PowerPhone” shortly thereafter? We most certainly will. The only question is when. Want another prediction? Same time next year.
So what is the moral of today’s iPhone announcement?
- I am all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-sure… at least when it comes to technology predictions. :)
- Where there’s a cool product to be made, rest assured Apple will make it.
Now if only Steve Jobs could get over his hatred for television, maybe we’d see a damned Media Center Mac already. I know I’d pay a healthy sum of money for one.
Note: The photo illustration above is obviously not representative of what the Apple phone will look like. It’s the product of two-minutes worth of Photoshop work.