Left Brain Right Brain

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.

Due date:
June 22nd 2005.

Score:
3 not out ;o)

Woo-Hoo!!!

Following on from my post about accreditation for UK web designers, I decided to take a look around at some of the big name web design associations on the web with a view to getting their views and seeing if they would be interested in taking this forward.

I should explain at this point that I have heard of the Associations discussed before but had not, up till this point visited their web sites.

I have to say I was truly alarmed at what I found. Of the three sites I visited before giving up in horror, not one of them would be fit to be the public face of the sort of accreditation scheme I’d envisaged. Lets take them in the order I visited them.

First I went to the International Webmasters Association site.

Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? Yes
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.

Bad enough but the design. White text on a jet black background, a javascript driven image map as the sole source of navigation – and this was just the home page! Once inside it got marginally better, at least the main content was black text on a light background. However, any evidence of a style was totally missing.

Next please.

So I went to the International Association of Web Masters and Designers.

Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? Yes, but with warnings.
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.

This is terrible. Seriously. Just awful. It looks more like a big spammy affiliate site than an association for web professionals. They’ve even put a Javascript right-click ban on the site, although why they think anyone would be interested in stealing their source I cannot imagine.

Lastly I tried the British Web Design and Marketing Association. Surely we Brits would do the job right?

Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? No.
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.

Not only does it not do the job right, it is probably the worst of all 3 I could stand to look at. Squashed and haphazardly resized images, a terrible scatter-gun approach to layout and a bewildering yellow header scheme for the navigation that barely contrasted against the white links.

Its fair to say at this point that I was aghast. Each of these organisations have mission statements that claim to hold dear the pursuit of excellence and ethics in web design and are incredibly easy to find using very obvious keyphrases (‘web design news’, ‘web assocations’ are two examples) in a wide variety of engines. I’m very worried that these web sites are what the public see as the face of web design professionals.

Take any basic list of important things to consider when designing and building a web page and these three Associations have totally ignored it. Basic structure, colour theory, branding, usability, style, accessibility, CONTENT (unless you like endless offers of training courses), navigation – all missing.

I’m left with a sense of urgency that we as a profession need to do something about this. More than ever I’m convinced that the people who are best able to represent us are ourselves, not some Association that clearly doesn’t care about or doesn’t know how to represent us. How we start going about that is another matter. After seeing that little lot, I’m really hoping people out there have a lot of ideas.

Dr Temple Grandin is an Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She’s also a high functioning autistic. Her writings on the nature of autism have provided me with lots of interesting food for thought over the last couple of years since Megan’s diagnosis.

I recently read a fascinating article on her web site entitled My Mind is a Web Browser: How People with Autism Think. It provides an interesting viewpoint into the mechanics of cognition and thought process from an autistic perspective. It also started me thinking about the emotion associated with design and how it leads us to percieve the world around us. Autistic people find it very difficult to associate concepts with emotions:

Only by interviewing…(non autistic)… people did I learn that many of them think primarily in words, and that their thoughts are linked to emotion. In my brain, words act as a narrator for the visual images in my imagination.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of how we as designers should come to terms with the possibility that by creating interfaces designed to stimulate an emotional response we are possibly excluding a whole range of people, the more exciting possibility is that there may finally be a way to get a truly impartial test group for web site usability testings. What I’m suggesting is that if some autistic people are unable to easily (or even in some cases at all) associate concepts with emotions or have any kind of emotional response to a concept then we have a set of people that can give us totally impartial, unemotional, honest feedback on how usable our designs are.

Researchers have learned that people with autism have a decreased metabolism in the area in the frontal cortex that connects the brain’s emotional centers with higher thinking (the anterior cingulate)…[T]he emotion center in their amygdala is not activated, for example, when they judge expressions in another person’s eyes.

The trouble with NT users (NeuroTypical, the term autistic people use to describe non-autistics) is that we’re incapable of ignoring the impulses from the amygdala – we are emotional and design, either good or bad, will provoke an emotional response in NT’s. How many of you have been sorely tempted to leave in a stylistic element because it look great when you know it distracts from the impetus of the overall design or impacts negatively on the usability of the site? I know I have.

Obviously, I have to declare an interest in autism since my daughter is autistic. Because of this I know from experience that autistic people, like NT people, come in varying shapes and sizes – and abilities. I’d recommend that all designers think about employing some high functioning autistic people next time usability testing is needed. We’re talking about a group of people who are very analytical, very literal, very honest and won’t be swayed by the emotional hooks you used.

Don’t expect a lot of tact, autistic people don’t see the point of tact. You can however, expect a great deal of high quality feedback I’d think.

Megan’s been at mainstream school since September now and by and large is settling in well. By far the best aspect of her schooling is the willingness of the staff there to learn as much as they can about both Megan and autism. The school’s SENCO today came around with one of Megan’s Support Workers and spent an hour with us at our home – all to learn as much as they could about how Megan operates outside of school and how we deal with her, the aim being to try and replicate the methods we use in the school. Next week, she’ll be coming around again with Megan’s other Support Worker.

I know how lucky Megan is to have such a dedicated team. Today the SENCO told us that she’d booked Megan’s Support Workers on a day long course so they could learn even more about autism. Its fair to say that we’re totally blown away by the level and depth of support we’ve been offered and have recieved from this school and these staff.

Believe me when I say that a lot of kids with autism don’t get such good staff. I know of a case where a Mum with an adopted son who has autism was told (by a headteacher with no medical training) that he wasn’t autistic (despite his medical diagnosis) and that it was her fault he was so disruptive. Its impossible to explain to people who don’t have autistic relatives or friends just how hurtful remarks like that can be. It demonstrates the inability of most of society to look past the surface behaviours and see the person underneath. That an educator has failed this child so badly is inexcusable. In the case of this child, it turns out he was being bullied every break and meal time over a period of years. It came to a head when he fought back and floored the bully. Ironically, it was the disabled child who was threatened with expulsion. The bully was threatened with nothing at all.

So, we thank our lovely school and our wonderful educators every time we possibly can. We’re aware of how much difference a good teacher can make because we’re aware how much difference a bad teacher can make.

The Disabilty Rights Commission released a report earlier this year detailing the lack of understanding of accessibility amongst web designers and made some suggestions on how to counter this. Amongst these suggestions was…

The Government should..[snip]..promote a formal accreditation process.

This prompted a flurry of activity in the blogosphere detailing the overall findings and generating articles on the subject. The reaction to the idea of accreditation was mixed. Amongst accessibility advocates, this recommendation was mostly very favourably recieved. Amongst designers who care about web standards, it was generally accepted that this may be necessary and no bad thing and amongst non-standards advocates and non-design web professionals (such as search engine optimisation specialists) this recommendation was generally seen as unecessary and divisive.

I thought at the time that a formal accreditation for web designers was a great idea and I still do. Web design is still seen by the majority of decision-makers in business as a slightly lawless and mysterious field and designers viewed with an air of distrust. Some of this probably stems from the fact that in the old dotcom boom/bust saga a lot of designers paid no attention to responsible design and churned out beautiful, yet totally unusable web sites. Gradually, as web design as a profession has matured, designers are slowly coming around to the fact that successful web sites deal appropriately and responsibly with their visitors. However, in the business sphere, the old image of the web designer who plays on his X-Box all morning and knocks out a bit of fluff in the afternoon still holds true to a certain degree.

Its also, sadly, true to say that there were and still are a lot of bad designers out there. I’ve (rightly) got into trouble in the past for referring to these people as ‘bedroom designers’, which is misleading and unfair to those designers who do good work and yet do work out of their bedroom (or study). And yet, as soon as I used that phrase you probably had a good mental image of the type of ‘designer’ I’m talking about. I’m not going to stereotype them further.

There are bad designers out there and unfortunately, for awhile there, they were firmly in the majority. So much so that business people (who love to have meetings and ‘network’) spread the word amongst themselves about how terrible web designers were and how their new web sites didn’t do what they thought it would.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years and we now have a situation where designers are getting used to the idea that web sites need to be more than just pretty, they need to actually fulfill a function for their owners – even if that function is merely abstract rather than practical – and a large part of that is creating a site that has sound foundations. In fact, the situation has progressed so far that we’ve almost come full circle recently with leading designers saying that we’ve moved too far the other way and we should go back to letting design drive designers (in all honesty I can’t remember when this didn’t happen but thats another story). Unfortunately, the web design field is still very insular and doesn’t speak to business except in an accidental occurance and so the duckling-to-swan maturation of the web design field has largely gone unnoticed by the world of business. We’re still the X-Box playing superiors who sneer at their ideas and curse their lack of soul every time they mention ROI or the bottom line. Of course we’re not, but thats still the perception.

So whats the best way to let the world of business know that web design and web designers have changed? That we’re growing and maturing as an industry and we now understand the tools at our disposal and can apply them appropriately. Well, we can make ourselves accountable for a start and we can do that with an accreditation scheme.

Just like builders or travel agents have their bad apples, so do we. Just like them I think we need an accreditation scheme where a web designers competence can be checked. This would go a long way to restoring confidence in web design and web designers and allow business people to take heart from the fact that an accredited designer has had to demonstrate an ability in a number of concepts and skill areas. This idea is appalling and exclusionary to a lot of people and I’ve been accused of elitism many times when I’ve brought it up in the past but these people always missed the point: No one is saying that web designers have to be accredited or that non-accredited web designers couldn’t ply their trade. What I’m saying is that if a web designer wanted to become accredited then that can only be a good thing for them, their skillset, their future web sites and clients and not least good for the web as a whole and the reputation of web designers overall. Emphasis on inclusion rather than exclusion is what I’m saying.

That said, I think any accreditation process should be reasonably difficult to get. Too easy and its meaningless. So what areas should an accreditation process cover? What should a web designer be ‘tested’ on?

1. Validate a web site to either XHTML or HTML 4.01 Strict
2. Validate styles to either CSS 1 or 2
3. Make a web site accessible to at least Priority One (A) standards
4. Demonstrate an ability to work to a workflow that gives power to the client at key stages of the design process

Thats my ‘basic’ list. Thats what I’d like to see an accreditation scheme cover. It should be noted that I’m not suggesting that every web site a designer has built/will build should adhere to that criteria, more that a designer has shown they are capable of achieving that criteria. Its about giving web design back its credibility by helping business to have confidence in web designers at the end of the day, its not about a beauty contest for web sites.

Since implementing this redesign, I’ve recieved a few emails from people asking where my old site design is. This is the design that got a mention on CSS Beauty and on CSS Vault.

For those interested in perusing its grassy goodness, you can find it here. I still like it quite a lot which is rare for me – usually after a week or so I tend to end up hating the stuff I’ve done – and I do wish I could’ve carried it on into this blog layout. The reason I didn’t was due to the structure of the page. Its a ‘bottom heavy’ design which tends to impact negatively on a workable blog interface. I did try a variety of things to make the textual content appear over the top of the grass image which worked with varying degrees of success but none worked well enough to make the content consistently legible, which is kind of the point of a blog. I’m still trying to find a way to recycle this design as its very striking and I do like it freshness and simplicity a lot. Until then, a pink blog semed a nice, unobtrusive, calming sequel!

For, um, reasons beyond my ability to control I’ll probably not be updating the blog much over the next week or two.

Its just that, er, I’m really really busy and simply can’t spare the time for non-essential activities.

Or something.