The Indymedia makover is excellent in lots of ways, but the font sizes for titles and articles are STILL far too small, despite previous remonstrations about this issue. The fonts sizes on the old site were much bigger so that it was possible to read whole articles online with ease. Now we have these ridiculous little fonts that give anyone with less than 20-20 vision eye-strain after the reading the first paragraph. This is a retrograde step.
Why are we making it difficult for people to read the very important content of the Indymedia sites???? This is true of all the UK regional sites with the honourable exception of the Sheffield IMC which uses larger fonts and is much easier on the eyes.
What these IMCs are actually, inadvertently, doing is discriminating against, not just the partially sighted, but all of the millions of people around the world who have less than perfect vision. I suggest you compare the design of the Royal National Institute for the Blind web-site with UK indymedia and draw your own conclusions:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/code/InternetHome.hcsp
Note the big difference in fonts sizes.
They are also campaigning for "accessible web-design":
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_webaccesseuro.hcsp
I also append an article from this week's "Guardian Online" by Jack Schofield.
This is a very serious issue and it is not the first time that it has been raised since the UK IMC makeover.
Why has Indymdia ignored previous points about this question???
-------------------------------------
Decorators with keyboards
Jack Schofield
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
I would love to see a few web designers thrown in jail. Sadly, the best we can hope for is some small fines and a few marginal improvements to the rubbish that currently masquerades as good web design. It is not enough, but it would be better than nothing.
The reason for optimism is that the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) is backing a number of individuals in taking legal action against various as yet unnamed websites that they say do not comply with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
Very few government and commercial websites are adequately usable by the partially sighted and blind, or offer an equivalent service to disabled users. That is simply not acceptable on social grounds. It is also, as a matter of fact, a betrayal of the principles of the web.
In the old days, a decade or more ago, the development of the whole IT industry was blighted by incompatible, proprietary systems that often couldn't talk to one another, couldn't run the same software and couldn't easily display one another's data. It was hard and often expensive to get at data on one machine from another.
Tim Berners-Lee solved that problem. As long as you could pipe data into the web's simple Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), then you could read it via the internet from any other machine with a web browser. The "core values in web design" are therefore, according to Berners-Lee, the "principles of universality of access irrespective of hardware or software platform, network infrastructure, language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental impairment".
Universal access is not a happy accident: it is what the web is for.
Unfortunately, we have hired a generation of web designers who don't know anything about computing, or the principles on which the web is based, or the reasons for its success. In fact, most of them are not web designers at all: they are graphic designers, or print designers, who have strayed into an area they don't understand. They are just painters and decorators with keyboards.
The worst web designers of all are the trendies who think things should be "cool" rather than functional. However, almost no one will go to a website - or go twice - because it looks "cool", while millions will be driven away by lack of functionality. None of the web's most successful sites looks cool and that includes Amazon, eBay, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo.
Designing sites for accessibility and usability has many advantages. Pages will be smaller and easier to write, easier and cheaper to maintain and serve, they will download faster, and reach a wider market - including the growing number of people with wireless personal digital assistants and phones.
Next time you are invited to see a website - which will be demonstrated on a high-res screen on a fast network - take a PDA along and suggest trying it via a mobile phone connection. Or with a screen reader, as used by the blind. It won't work. Why not?
Why are we making it difficult for people to read the very important content of the Indymedia sites???? This is true of all the UK regional sites with the honourable exception of the Sheffield IMC which uses larger fonts and is much easier on the eyes.
What these IMCs are actually, inadvertently, doing is discriminating against, not just the partially sighted, but all of the millions of people around the world who have less than perfect vision. I suggest you compare the design of the Royal National Institute for the Blind web-site with UK indymedia and draw your own conclusions:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/code/InternetHome.hcsp Note the big difference in fonts sizes.
They are also campaigning for "accessible web-design":
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_webaccesseuro.hcsp I also append an article from this week's "Guardian Online" by Jack Schofield.
This is a very serious issue and it is not the first time that it has been raised since the UK IMC makeover.
Why has Indymdia ignored previous points about this question???
-------------------------------------
Decorators with keyboards
Jack Schofield
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
I would love to see a few web designers thrown in jail. Sadly, the best we can hope for is some small fines and a few marginal improvements to the rubbish that currently masquerades as good web design. It is not enough, but it would be better than nothing.
The reason for optimism is that the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) is backing a number of individuals in taking legal action against various as yet unnamed websites that they say do not comply with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
Very few government and commercial websites are adequately usable by the partially sighted and blind, or offer an equivalent service to disabled users. That is simply not acceptable on social grounds. It is also, as a matter of fact, a betrayal of the principles of the web.
In the old days, a decade or more ago, the development of the whole IT industry was blighted by incompatible, proprietary systems that often couldn't talk to one another, couldn't run the same software and couldn't easily display one another's data. It was hard and often expensive to get at data on one machine from another.
Tim Berners-Lee solved that problem. As long as you could pipe data into the web's simple Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), then you could read it via the internet from any other machine with a web browser. The "core values in web design" are therefore, according to Berners-Lee, the "principles of universality of access irrespective of hardware or software platform, network infrastructure, language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental impairment".
Universal access is not a happy accident: it is what the web is for.
Unfortunately, we have hired a generation of web designers who don't know anything about computing, or the principles on which the web is based, or the reasons for its success. In fact, most of them are not web designers at all: they are graphic designers, or print designers, who have strayed into an area they don't understand. They are just painters and decorators with keyboards.
The worst web designers of all are the trendies who think things should be "cool" rather than functional. However, almost no one will go to a website - or go twice - because it looks "cool", while millions will be driven away by lack of functionality. None of the web's most successful sites looks cool and that includes Amazon, eBay, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo.
Designing sites for accessibility and usability has many advantages. Pages will be smaller and easier to write, easier and cheaper to maintain and serve, they will download faster, and reach a wider market - including the growing number of people with wireless personal digital assistants and phones.
Next time you are invited to see a website - which will be demonstrated on a high-res screen on a fast network - take a PDA along and suggest trying it via a mobile phone connection. Or with a screen reader, as used by the blind. It won't work. Why not?
Comments
Hide the following 16 comments
And using IE's Text size otpions don't work on UK Indymedia
19.07.2003 14:15
Kim
two problems for Kim
19.07.2003 15:07
Adding IE into the equation complicated things.
The font problems are solved much easier than IE's demand on non standard practices.
IE also does not respect your freedoms.
My advice will be to ditch IE first.
gnu
Pixel
19.07.2003 18:38
sceptic
use opera
19.07.2003 19:32
pete
little poetical addition.
19.07.2003 20:54
as such is only hindsight, and we are unsure where we have come from.
All that remains is the gnawing suspicion that we were cheated, robbed, lied to, ignored, enslaved, warped and finally when completely neutralised set to breeding generation upoln century of mediocre feudal submission. o as if it could be but i never an remember that long anyway. myopia is another problem. The tibetans nurture doctrine that when entering upon the threshold of meditative untwining of kundhalini the nose itches.
People say the same thing on the street.
And Lou Reed he made money big
saying the same thing in long yellow cab.
¿Isn't open publishing grrreat?
make that comment bigger.
cut and paste and enlarge.
my ego will be gratified
ipsiphi.
poet's are nameless just like hum along
e-mail:
@poets.org
WTF?
19.07.2003 23:16
jjf
Don't use microsoft!!
20.07.2003 12:53
Changing your browser to something like Opera is easy peasy! An ideal first step. Then make sure you do not use a microsoft email prog - it'll make avoiding getting a virus all the more easy.
os
Mozilla works as well
20.07.2003 15:05
However, regarding Internet Explorer, it's a fact that a sizable majority of people will use this browser to view this site, so the techies should allow for this fact and allow for the site to be enlarged in IE.
Thomas J
Follow up I posted a comment on this but it appeared as a seperate article....
20.07.2003 18:57
Chris
text size does work
21.07.2003 01:40
The only problem is the LH column spills into the RH text of the page - this is because we are using CSS not table - maybe we should return to tables?? Worth thinking about.
But every IMC is different so it's best to get on to the individual sites if there is a problem there.
steve
WTF
21.07.2003 02:33
you are serious aren't you?! Wow.
Try a disability awareness course in your local area (& a bit more thought before opening your mouth, please).
Thanks, Jif
jif
.
21.07.2003 02:40
.
lemmings
21.07.2003 04:42
You have boiled discrimination down and reduced its meaning to a watery, tasteless broth.
Is it discrimination to write using words about concepts that only people with a large vocabulary can understand?
"IMC disriminates against non-geniuses, the less clever and less robustly intelligent, who happen to make up the greatest part of the population."
But mostly, IMC disriminates against the illiterate.
abyss
it IS ridiculously tiny
21.07.2003 08:44
That would dissuade me from reading more than one or two articles in a sitting.
JA
just technical problems
21.07.2003 18:58
So, back to content based discussion rather than quibble about technical problems?
Mark
Yes!
22.07.2003 07:42
jimf