Keynote and opening remarks by Gretchen Rubin and Heloise. I have no photos of me in the panel, except the one I found online where I look like a startled rabbit. Which may not be far from the truth.If you’ve paid any attention to my blog (as in, read the…
I will be in Houston this week to speak at the Mom 2.0 Summit (Feb. 18-20, 2010, Houston, TX). To make it a little easier to describe, here’s their description of the event:Talk shop with social media influencers, industry leaders and leading brands as they share best practices. Discuss ways…
There is a well written post over at Smashing Magazine by Louis Lazaris titled The Case Against Vertical Navigation. I have made this argument to my own clients (and other web professionals) many times, often with feedback that implies the client knows how users actually surf. This article wraps up…
Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. wanted to write an article about why it’s harder to read text set in all-caps than text set as mixed case. The argument for this has centered around how people read words — recognizing a word shape from its letters, whereas an all-caps word has no unique…
Nine years ago I had become fed up with trying to explain to clients, users, friends, co-workers, and strangers that screen resolution, browser chrome, and browser size combine to create some unique viewport sizes. What this meant was that whether a user had a display at 640×480 or at 1,024×768…
There is an article over at Practical Ecommerce titled Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There? by Joe Dolson. It is refreshing to see more traditional sites dealing with accessibility, especially when it can so significantly affect their bottom line. As an indication that the author gets it: I…
There is an interesting article over at the WebAIM blog titled JAWS Ate My Tables.The article describes how JAWS (version 10 in this case), a screen reader, decides whether an HTML table is used for layout purposes or as a data table. It turns out that JAWS does not lean…
Trenton Moss over at Webcredible has posted an article, Accessible online video for keyboard-only users. The concepts within are very simple, but require developers to take an extra step or two, which may account for why we see so few sites with these features implemented.One key issue is that developers…
Having stumbled across the article “10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit, I can see that the suggestions are pretty obvious, and the number 10 is probably more arbitrary than based on some natural break in severity. However, there are some things in the article I have been repeating for…
If you were paying attention any of the last few years, you may have noticed that the 24 Ways web site is set up to run as an annual advent calendar for web geeks. Each day the site posts a new article dealing with some aspect of the web, ideally…
Boxes and Arrows has an article titled “Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design” written by a former academic mobile UX (User eXperience) researcher. As the author transitioned to private sector he felt that when mobile UX was discussed it was too driven by the gee-whiz factors and not…
Three years ago YouTube/Google added the ability for video authors to add captions to videos. Over time support for multiple caption tracks was included, the expansion of search to consider text in captions, and even machine translation support for the captions (see my other post about machine translation risks).Even with…