Yesterday, I gave you some advice on making your site more accessible. Today, I’m going to help you wrap things up.

Do the easy things first. Review your highlighted list, and perform the simplest tasks that don’t affect your design. Don’t worry about priority levels just yet. Many of the most basic modifications–like replacing your deprecated HTML tags with new ones, or adding alt attributes to your image tags–are nothing more than markup changes. Even many content-related alterations, like the transcription of video features, are simple and won’t disturb your design. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can make your site more accessible.

Use an accessibility checker. There are free and paid services online that will review your pages and then tell you which accessibility guidelines you have yet to satisfy. Now why didn’t I mention this sooner? Because I think it’s much easier to make the simple changes before using a checker. If you don’t make these changes before using a checker, the checker will return an insufferably long list of things to do, perhaps souring you on to this whole idea of accessibility. These sites offer free accessibility assessments: ContentQuality and Webxact Watchfire.

The HiSoftware Cynthia Says checker at contentquality.com checks for Section 508 and all three WCAG priority levels.

Focus on Priority 1 improvements. Now that you’ve got the easy bits wrapped up and have viewed your results in a checker, (more…)

Web designers are often told that their pages should be made “accessible”, but to many, that just means testing on a few extra browsers and ensuring that the type is readable. These are, without a doubt, important concerns, but accessibility is about much more than that. It’s about opening up your site to all users, including those with vision and/or hearing impairments. After all, isn’t that what the web was all about in the first place — communicating with anyone, anywhere?

A common misconception about accessibility is that it will make your design bland or overly simplistic. However, in most cases, you can have a rich, full-featured design that also meets accessibility guidelines. Still, there’s no question that a complete accessibility overhaul is a major undertaking for some websites. If you’re not ready to dive in and do everything now, consider taking small some steps towards a more accessible design.

Accessible sites can still look great, like this one from the designers at tinderhouse.com.

Decide which guidelines to follow. Standards have been set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium in the form of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). (more…)

Perhaps you’ve seen this story making the rounds: A Texas teenager is suing Virgin Mobile because it used her image without permission in a billboard campaign in Australia.

The girl appears in a photograph which was released under a Creative Commons license. The photographer, via the license, expressly permitted commercial use of his image, as long as he received a photo credit. Virgin Mobile Australia duly credited the photographer when it used his photograph in the ad campaign. However, because the Creative Commons license does not apply to the likeness of the girl, who found her face being used to tout a mobile phone network halfway around the world, Virgin may still be in hot water.

A photographer is free to license his own work in whatever way he sees fit, but unless model and location releases were obtained, that license does not, by extension, cover the likenesses which appear in the image. How many photos on royalty-free photo sites come with model and/or location releases? Not many, last time I checked.

So, next time you turn to the royalty-free sites when sourcing images for your clients, ask yourself these questions: (more…)

Okay, I need a show of hands; how many of you still design your web layouts with tables? Not because you don’t know any better, but because it’s just plain easier. (I’m sheepishly raising my hand.) We do it because it’s almost second nature, and because we assume that learning CSS positioning is hard. But in the back of all our heads (I hope) is a little voice saying, “You know this code isn’t clean, or flexible. You’re so old-fashioned.”

You see what I’m getting at, I’m sure; The CSS Anthology gets you on the right path to CSS-ifying your layouts easily and quickly. Given the subtitle 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks, I expected a Killer Tips-style book, meaning something for those who already know and use CSS, or a very short book with a list of handy CSS rules. I was surprised to find that The CSS Anthology is actually a full-featured CSS guide with something to offer both new users and old pros.

This is Rachel Andrew’s second edition of the book, and it includes techniques geared toward today’s most popular browsers, namely Firefox and Internet Explorer, but potential conflicts with older platforms are also noted. Like any good CSS guide, (more…)

Apparently, some people think the success of online, interactive advertising is all due to blinking lights and sound clips, so they’re bringing the same capabilities to print advertising. Yes, print ads can now sing to you and flash lights at you; they can give you a temporary tattoo, a whiff of black cherries, or a taste of rum.

Take that, internet advertising!

Well, I have two comments. First, the power of web-based marketing lies not in its audiovisual smack, but in its vast capacity to deliver individual customers authentic brand experiences of their own choosing. To focus on the smoke and mirrors is to miss the essence of the trick.

Second, and this saddles me up on one of my favorite hobby-horses, all advertising must be interactive. Advertising is a dialog. Granted, we can only fully control half of it, but there is always a customer response.

If the customer’s response is to turn the page, leave the room, or navigate away, then the ad has failed to engage, and it’s not interactive no matter whether its online, or in a magazine with a sound chip and flashing lights.

Regardless of medium, interactivity in advertising is not an option. It is mandatory.

The National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) has organized a contest. Contestants are asked to submit logos and branding designs that both inspire interest and represent the mission of the museum. The winning design will be used on stationery, the website, and in brochures and PowerPoint presentations. The winner will be recognized in NWHM’s publications and on the museum’s website.

Contestants may submit multiple entries.

The deadline is October 26, 2007.

Details

In my previous post, I suggested that contemporary designers are increasingly responsible for “designing” the contexts in which their designs occur, and I gave two examples of what such contextual designing might look like. Here are three more instances in which context is not merely taken into account, but rather purposefully altered in order to enhance a designed experience.

Service Design

In his excellent book Interaction Design, Dan Saffer defines a service as “a chain of activities that form a process and have value for the end user.” By way of example, the cashier in a grocery checkout line performs a service. A service can be thought of as a system of events. Service design is the art of designing the entire context around this system of events. In the case of the grocery checkout line, a service designer would script the interactions between the cashier and the customer. She would also design the cash register interface, the signage for the checkout aisles, and dictate the physical layout of the aisles themselves.

In order to properly design such services, a service designer must take into account the size and nature of the shopping carts, the dimensions of the parking lot, the number of store employees per shift, the store’s hours of operation, the location of the store within the city, the amount and types of products on sale in the store, etc. In other words, a service designer must necessarily concern herself with the totality of the context in which the service occurs, and she must design (or at least negotiate) that context appropriately. (more…)

I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but October is here. Walk into any store and you’re greeted with pumpkins, mums, and heaps of Halloween candy. In another month or so, shops will be covered in fake snow and sparkly snowflakes and will be packed with trees up to the rafters.

In a brick-and-mortar store, holiday decorations draw attention to the seasonal items for sale. They also give the store a fresh look that might entice customers who would otherwise just pass by the store.

How can you do the same in a web environment? Let’s look at some tips.

1) What holidays, if any, should you “decorate” for? Think about what your site sells and the content it presents. If you sell golf clubs, you might consider winter themes for holiday shoppers, or perhaps some Father’s Day features. Halloween decorations, on the other hand, probably don’t make a lot of sense. If your blog contains craft tips and recipes, a large number of holiday schemes may be appropriate. The point is that you’re not decorating just for fun; you’re trying to get visitors excited about your offerings.

At marthastewart.com, Halloween is on display both in the content and in the overall look and feel.

2) How far should you take it? For a site with only a tangential relation to a holiday, use subtle touches, like a fall color scheme in the background or a tiny pumpkin in a corner. (more…)

Up until the late 1800s, a painter could concern himself solely with what occurred within the borders of his canvas. In the biannual Paris Salon art exhibits, paintings were hung floor to ceiling and side by side, piled upon one another. Nobody considered the implications of hanging a painting of a virile bull directly above a painting of a reclining woman, and the artist certainly was not responsible for the overall context in which his work appeared publicly.

The Paris Salon of 1799

It’s not that artists in the 1800s were technically unable to control the contexts in which their art appeared, it’s just that there was, as yet, no historical precedent for doing so. However, when Marcel Duchamp entered a signed urinal into an art exhibit in 1917, everything changed. From then on, artists have been forced to consider the context in which their work is presented.

Likewise, there may have once been a time when a designer could be concerned only with what occurred within the borders of her cleverly composed layout. However, with the advent of interaction design and ubiquitous computing, that time is passing rapidly. (more…)

Something funny for you on a Monday: This video by the New York-based sketch comedy group Free Love Forum is a much-needed parody of the smug, wonder-filled Apple product launch videos. Listen as they extol the virtues of the year’s hottest design application: Microsoft Paint!