Building in accessible navigation from the beginning

Academics mimic life: building site accessibility in the real world This is a good topic to be analyzing while on the cusp of building a new set of list-based horizontal and vertical navigation schemes. I made sure to do my research on accessibility before starting the nav menus that are on my deliverables list, and […]

Using Apple’s VoiceOver: CNN and ESPN quick and dirty accessibility eval

First, some really helpful resources for getting the finer points of Voice Over: (http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/downloads.html) (http://images.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/pdf/VoiceOver_Getting_Started_Leopard_10.5a.pdf) There’s a lot more to VoiceOver than I thought. It seems to be quite controllable, but there are many, many keyboard shortcuts to learn. I downloaded an eval document that helped me narrow down the keystrokes for the following tasks. […]

Some enlightening Web accessibility survey results

Thinking about Web accessibility, even as briefly as I have been, opens up a large chapter in my understanding of Web technology and how well or not well it is working for all of us. While many of us comment on what information overload is doing to our lives, there are many people for whom […]

Creating my first eBook

A new client asked me to format an eBook for him to market on Amazon and iTunes. I was pretty excited. Having been a book designer for years, I’ve been watching the rise of the eBook (and the decline of the print book) with alternating feelings of fascination, dread, and excitement. I had done a […]

Installing Joomla for my MSM610 Web Applications course

This is now my third installation of Joomla. The first was on my Macintosh and was preceded by an installation of MAMP so that Joomla! could run on my Mac. I used that site to tool around a bit in Joomla! and practice the process before installing on an actual Web server. My second installation […]

Web Accessibility

Issues of Web accessibility don’t just affect people who have vision challenges. And since time-based content such as video and audio is common on the Web, there are now temporal pitfalls that affect a broader audience including the hearing impaired as well as the vision impaired. Common accessibility challenges include: Motor ability challenges from spinal […]

Exploring motivation with a game controller

Although I haven’t played them very much lately, I am a big fan of video games. I remember late nights being up until 3 a.m., my mind buzzing from the virtual spaces I had just spent the past five or six hours in. They were incredibly compelling mental environments. My favorite game types were first- […]

I Puffy-Heart the Portable Document Format

Being a graphic designer, I’ve had a huge appreciation for the Adobe Acrobat PDF format ever since I first had the opportunity to version a design with it. My fondness has only grown over time. First off, I thought it was a great thing to be able to send someone a file that looked the […]

Feeling light and fluffy here in the human cloud

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying the Internet has changed the way we work. It’s altered the business landscape, and it’s changed the way we shop, advertise, and do business. Where we work has also changed because of the Internet. Many of us — including myself — work from home. I […]

Visualizing Data with PivotViewer

I had to watch the TEDTalk a few times before I got the gist of what Gary Flake was getting at with his Pivot demo. It wasn’t until I tried a few demos available on the Web that it started to sink in how interesting a tack on data this tool takes. Some of the […]