Left Brain Right Brain

All in all, a mixed Christmas here. Both Megan and I have had bad colds, mine culminating in a temperature of over 100 degrees last night. It broke (I hope) about 4am but still, it didn’t make for an ideal Xmas. Naomi has also been unwell suffering from a 3 day headache and sickness brought on by a combo of being pregnant and the fact that when Megan wakes up in the night she only wants her Mum. My son Anthony and I were also shocked to hear that yesterday morning my ex’s (Anthony’s Mum) partner had had a heart attack!! They released him the next day with a battery of pills but it was still a bit of a shocker. Of course the most terrible event over Xmas was the ongoing disaster in South East Asia. I’d urge everyone to help as much as they can.

In slightly more upbeat news, Megans Nan bought her a ‘Leapster’ for her Christmas present. We were unsure how much she’d get out of it as its a fairly advanced toy and not one she was used to playing. However, her experiences mastering DVD/VC controls and a PC interface (sort of) have obviously given her a good grounding in the world of interface design! She got straight into it and was soon playing away to her hearts content. Her ability at the games was also pretty jaw dropping, showing us a level of perceptual ability we just didn’t know was there. Sounds a bit silly maybe but it was a real lump-in-the-throat moment. Its very difficult sometimes to see a measure of the progress your child is making, especially when the potential is masked by autism and things like this are a God send.

Speaking with my designers hat on it was also fascinating to see how easily Megan navigated using the animation based interface. It all serves to convince me even more than pictures and animation could well form the core means of addressing the needs of perceptually and learning difficulty based users of web sites.

As I talked about recently I’ll be starting a new project next year to provide help to new designers and those designers struggling with making the transition to standards based design. I’ve outlined a syllabus on what I’d like to cover.

1. Introduction
   1. To the Web as a Design Medium
   2. To Web Browsers
   3. To Users
   4. To Clients
2. Things Designers Design
   1. Information
      1. Content
      2. Navigation
      3. Usability of Information
      4. Accessibility of Information
   2. Semantics
      1. Codeable Accessibility
      2. Web Standards
   3. Aesthetics
      1. Branding
      2. Culture
      3. Artwork
3. Using Tools
4. Bringing It All Together

I haven’t yet got a complete article list to match the Syllabus but I have made a start:

1. Taking an Accurate Brief
2. Identifying User and Business Goals
3. Building Personas
4. Sectioning Content and Building a Site Map
5. Performing Usability Testing
6. Wireframing the Content
7. Deciding on Accessibility Strategies
8. Contingency Design
9. Building Unstyled Markup Templates
10. Building a Concordance of Existing Client Styles
11. Using Colour and Type Effectively
12. Sourcing Imagery
13. Using Web Validators to Test Reliability
14. Using Firefox as a Designers Tool
15. Invaluable Software
16. Online and Ofline Recommended Reading
17. Building a Design Concept
18. Using your Wireframe, Design Concept and Markup Templates to Iterate Through Prototypes
19. Efficient Communication with your Client
20. Getting Good Feedback After Deployment

This is quite rough but it covers all the major areas. I’d be very interested in hearing some feedback and suggestions on the Syllabus and article list. I’ll also be very open to contributions along these themes from others. All that I ask is that they are written for an audience of those totally unfamiliar with the concpets under discussion.

A recent air (no doubt partially influenced by the year end) in the standards community sees a number of influential members of the international design community identifying something amiss in the community. Well, not amiss exactly, but maybe absent.

Molly E. Holzschlag has reported back from Web Design World 2004 on how well the conference went but notes how there are several key areas of concern that need addressing.

Unless you’re among the fortunate (and growing) group of web designers that have never had to build a web site using tables, it seems that it’s been very difficult for all of us to begin thinking outside of them. Having worked with tables for layout for the majority of my web career, it’s proving to be quite difficult to get past thinking in such restrictive terms. I’m wondering what ideas other folks might have in terms of breaking out of the tabular approach from a mental standpoint. There’s no doubt that when we get past this barrier, and are armed with a fair amount of CSS knowledge, that we can do much more progressive work.

This is a direct quote regarding the use of tables for layout but the whole article is riddled with concerns about a number of key concepts of modern web design.

Over on Derek Featherstone’s A Box of Chocolates in a recent article on the wider subject, Derek says;

There are still a lot of developers out there that don’t know how to build sites any other way than with font tags, spacer gifs and multiple nested tables. Why? Two reasons: they don’t know any other way (after all, these old methods are what they grew up with – it is what they know, just as we know web standards and would have a difficult time going back to old school methods), and there aren’t enough good resources on doing things the “right” way.

So we seem to have a situation wherein the small minority of designers are on board re: web standards/accessibility/usability/branding/etc and the sites they are producing reflect this ethos. By contrast there is a sizeable majority who, for whatever reason (quite probably the reason Derek Featherstone gives – a lack of resources) are doing things the old fashioned way. This, in my opinion, is one of those times when retro ain’t so good.

All this is to say that I’ve decided to go some way to redressing the balance and start producing a series of articles about all things web design that are aimed at the new or inexperienced designer. The articles will be bundled together under the (tentative) title ‘Project: New’ and will be available online and as PDF/DOC downloads. I’m thinking of doing approx 5 in depth articles every month to complete a syllabus of work. I’m aiming to start at the very very bottom and keep things simple to start with. Giving a good grounding in not only web standards but also looking at developing an eye for design, using good tools, sourcing quality imagery, dealing with clients nd understanding the medium in which web designers work.

My next step is to produce a syllabus which I’ll post for discussion when its done.

Web accessibility: one of the big topics in web design circles this year. If you’ve been living on Mars with Elvis for the last 18 months or so then web accessibility is the process of ensuring a website is accessible to users with a disability. In the UK, it is the law that business websites must be accessible.

I wrote an article awhile ago on my feelings that web accessibility wasn’t truly inclusive. There are big pushes within the design community to work on the easy side of web accessibility (providing accessible content to those with a physical or sensory disabiity such as Motor Neurone Disease or blindness) but there is little input about the more challenging side of web accessibility (providing accessible content to users with a learning or perceptual disability such as autism).

At first glance it might appear to be a simple impossibility. After all you cannot make someone understand. It might also seem totally idealistic – we should just accept that those users with a learning/perceptual disabilty cannot be effectively catered to and stop trying to force the issue.

Firstly, to some extent, I agree. It is simply impossible as far as I know to make someone with profound brain damage understand beyond their potential. However, what we must realise is that just as not all physical disabilities mean the same solution, not all learning/perceptual disabilities have to be excluded due to their overall pigeonholing. Autism is not the same as brain damage. Downs Syndrome is not the same as Dyslexia. It is not logical or necessary to ignore accessibility for all people with learning disabilities because some of the people that definition encompasses are profoundly mentally handicapped beyond the ability to comprehend.

I believe that it is definitley possible to apply a series of design principles to provide accessible content to this user group but we first have to admit that we are working under some stern limitations.

One of those limitations is the WCAG. Its my contention that by and large the guidelines give precedence to accomodating users with a physical/sensory disability and this precedence is by and large carried through by designers who have (quite rightly) started learning how to make a page accessible. An example is how Flash is percieved. Going by WCAG 1.0, Flash is not accessible at all. Macromedia have worked hard to give Flash the ability to pass Section 508 (the US law covering accessibility) but the truth is that accessibility using Flash is pretty much reliant on what software configuration the end user has installed. Thats not to knock Macromedia – something is better than nothing – but accessiblity as laid down by the WCAG 1.0 can’t truly be said to have been met when content is displayed in Flash.

A closer examination of the full WCAG 1.0 checklist reveals (in my interpretation) a few checkpoints that either support or hinder the ability to provide accessible content to users with a learning/perceptual disability.

For:

14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

12.3 Divide large blocks of information into more manageable groups where natural and appropriate.

14.2 Supplement text with graphic or auditory presentations where they will facilitate comprehension of the page.

Against:

3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists, use markup rather than images to convey information.

7.3 Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages.

Its important to explain why I feel the ‘againsts’ are harmful to the idea of providing accessible content to users with a learning/perceptual disability. Firstly, checkpoints 14.2 and 3.1 seem to me to contradict each other to some degree. Overriding that though is my belief that pictoral and animated content can be integral to providing accessible content to users with a learning/perceptual disability.

What we do as designers is provide (hopefully) an interface to content. Something that helps someone to use the content and that stays out of the way when not needed. Obviously thats not all we do but thats one of the basic tenets of web design. Therefore we share certain core design goals with other non-web interface designers such as multimedia designers who design DVD menu’s or the designers who design TV screen layouts for news programs (there’s a lot more on the screen these days than just a talking head reading an autocue). I’m not pretending these examples work in the exact same way as the interface to a web site but they all share common goals (how to get a user to the content that they want to get to and how to present it to them once they have found it) and therefore maybe they share (or should share) certain methods.

My 4 year old daughter is a big fan of the kids TV show Bear in the Big Blue House (its the sniffing!) and so we bought her a few DVD’s. One of the things I find fascinating (I should explain that my daughter is severley autistic) is how she uses the interface of the DVD to get to the content. Autistic people indulge heavily in ‘rewind moments’ during which a few second burst of the DVD (or videotape) is watched, rewound, watched, rewound and so on and so on. This behaviour can go on for hours sometimes. Megan has become an adept at manipulating the interface of her Bear DVD’s to get at the content she wants to rewind (usually the sniffing!).

Two things are very striking about how this has affected her interface browsing habits. Firstly, she only seems to find it necessary to deliberate at the junctures where there are text-only options to base decisions on. When she drills down to the scene choices, which are represented by either little animated snippets of the scene or still pictures she makes the decision instantly and confidently. Over time she has learnt the text-only options by rote so the deliberation process is considerably lessened.

Secondly, she has learnt to transfer these decision making skills where pictoral and animation menu’s are presented to her to other DVD’s. On DVD’s where there are no pictoral or animatory menu options she doesn’t learn the interface as easily or quickly.

It would be a mistake to infer the behaviour of a whole group of people based solely on one persons experiences but that doesn’t negate the fact that there does seem to be something to the idea that pictoral or animatory interfaces can aid the speed and confidence of browsing. Its something that I intend to follow up as much as possible.

The difficulty is/will be attempting to meet these needs whilst still adhering to web and accessibility standards. I hope to be able to bring some ideas to fruition in this respect too.

One of the concepts that Megan has difficulty with is communication. She doesn’t speak much at all and most of what she does say is echolalic. This obviously presents quite a lot of difficulties when attempting to engage with Megan both at (to a lesser extent) home and more particularly at school.

Megan has been attending her local primary mainstream school now for nearly a full term and yesterday Naomi and I went for a meeting with her SaLT, the SENCO and her case worker from the Autism Outreach Team. The purpose of this meeting was to get Megan onto the next stage. At the moment the school still consider her to be in a ‘honeymoon’ period where she’s given a lot of space to aclimatise to her new environment – a nursery/pre-school is a very loud, bright and well-lit environment and Megan in common with a lot of autistic people doesn’t always cope with these things very well as autistic people are not able to process sensory input in the same way as those of us who aren’t autistic. To them, certain sounds and colours actually physically hurt.

Anyway, its obvious she’s fairly well settled and is confident in her environment so we all needed to meet up to think of how we move Megan into a more traditional scholastic environment e.g. she starts to be told there are things that must be done at certain times of the school day.

How to approach this is tricky. As Megan doesn’t speak, talking to her doesn’t always yield good results and time for someone with damaged sensory equipment is a very difficult concept to grasp. Saying ‘in 5 mins its time for a drink’ to Megan means nothing. However, if we say ‘it’ll be time for a drink when we’ve read all the words on the last page of this book’ then its an easier comparison to grasp. This is nothing to do with intellegence and all to do with perceptual ability.

So what the school are going to do is start a pictoral timetable. Basically, the AOT worker and Megans speech therapist have been around taking photos of all the different things in the classroom – the toys, the wendy-house, the class register, one of the toilets etc. These will be used to demonstrate to Megan what the next thing will be. This will give her time to prepare for the change. Its a great idea and is a sort of ‘cut down’ version of PECS which is a more comprehensive pictoral communication system. Why aren’t we just using PECS? Megan’s SaLT doesn’t think Megan needs that. There’s no doubt she knows the words, she just doesn’t know how to use them as communication tools – this system will help with that and Naomi and I will be backing its use up by implementing a similar scheme at home.