vortex dot net dot en zed

Do not stop to think or edit
You must be the first who said it.

recently the helpful phone book delivery people dropped the 30cm high stack of auckland directories on our doorstep. they’re still sitting in our hallway encased in yellow plastic. we don’t use them at all - not even for laptop stands.

if i need a phone number generally i head for my nearest browser and go directly for a website - whitepages.co.nz isn’t even that much use if you’re guessing at the correct name of the entity you are looking for.

if i want to buy things i often like to look at the range of things available before i actually have to go somewhere. this is simply lazy efficient!

however, two destination stores i often visit don’t have a website (shock) or have one of the worst 1997-esque sites ever. as below:

videon - for an amazing destination video store like videon, with awesome titles, staff and ethos to not have an online catalogue much less a WEBSITE is hideous! i had to use the whitepages, and then i had to call them to see if what I wanted was in!

the vault - this is almost as bad though at least they have a web “presence”. It’s not quite whatiI would call a site *cough* http://www.vault-designstore.co.nz/ *cough*. it has a broken image on the front page and it only gets worse from there.

come on… just TRY. please. if not for the shoppers, for the children. anyone.

PS: does anyone want our phone books?

Last night at the Auckland UPA meeting, Neil Jarvis from the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind spoke. Neil provided very eloquent & useful demonstration of how three well-used websites differ in their levels of accessibility, using JAWS, a well-known screen reader.

The demonstration was similar to one I saw at Webstock last year by Darren Fittler which served a similar purpose. For those who have never seen JAWS or similar in operation (especially used by someone who is an expert user), it’s a very very worthwhile thing to see.

To summarise Neil’s points:

• Tools only show you how good or bad your code is. You can run as many tools over your code & hypothesise about your usability/accessibility as much as you like but the end user will tell you how good it is
• Assistive technologies differentiate between information - they can pull out the essential, the good and the “who cares” content - it does help users prioritise information
• Screen readers are not a new technology - they were being developed and in use back in the days of bulletin boards. They’re always trying to catch up and even though penetration of new versions can be slow if people are using standards it really helps.

JAWS

• JAWS is a $2000 extra cost above the outlay for a normal PC - upgrades are a couple of hundred dollars each time, so don’t always expect that users are going to have JAWS, and if they have JAWS, that it will be the most up-to-date version
• Users can get a “headings list” dialogue, which will list the headings in the page out, e.g. H2, H3, H4 etc - not that I would think that many people would have an issue understanding that this kind of hierarchy is important!
• JAWS also allows an “HTML features” list, so using the right element for the job is important - more users of assistive technologies understand these than the general population. Sometimes browsing this way can help Neil jump to where forms are, for example.
• JAWS can read to you in different voices for different elements like headings and links - you can change the speed, pitch & sex of the voice. You can also have sounds to represent different elements.

Examples

• Neil showcased the Radio NZ site as an excellent example of an accessible site,
  • He pulled up a list of the links in a dialogue box there were several “find out more” links with no surrounding context. Which “find out more” would you choose?
  • I know that a lot of content management systems do put in things like “find out more” automatically - how to do this kind of thing for a sighted person and not have it be useless for someone needing assistive technology? For example, on sites I’ve worked on we’ve linked the full name of an article but then after the abstract there is often a “read more” or similar. How to get around this?

• CDnow.com was Neil’s medium example - though it’s machine generated image names were completely useless on the homepage.
  • If it’s important enough to showcase on your homepage, why would you let the identifier be something like PVB0000R12WW_01_PE32_0401_SCTZZZZZZZZZZ_V180697172_?
  • This is also what comes up as a browse link in JAWS - how would you choose what to use?

• The Burger King site was an example of a bad experience - it comes back with the text “no links on the homepage! It’s a site for the sighted only as the Flash isn’t accessible either. Apparently there is a way you can export code for embedding Flash which is more accessible but developers do need to seek it out.

Accessible AJAX?

• Screen readers can’t deal with AJAX yet as tt’s a relatively new technology (and who knows if it will be lasting)
• Neil and a colleague have written pages which ARE accessible so there are ways forward with this
• Again, whether it can be accessible going forwards relies on developers as much as any assistive technology

Neil summed up by pointing out that creativity without responsibility is not necessary - you can be creative with your web work AND still be accessible.

I do! I do! And I’m about to tell you why.

email

I now use Gmail for all my mail - I can send from all my domain email addresses and the labels really work nicely for the way I think. No more looking to see if I put it in this folder…or was it that folder…uh oh, maybe…? No, it’s actually somewhere else because it referred more to that subject than the original one I’m thinking about at the time…I can always find it.

There’s the storage - not that I’m a big storer of most personal email these days - but of course, what I have stored I can search.

reader

I used to be a big Bloglines fan, but Google Reader redesigned and it’s so minimalist. It’s so integrated with everything else I have with Google. When I’m not using my own laptop, I can login to my email & also my feed list at the same time - no need to log in to several places on a foreign machine.

I don’t know what I did before RSS and feed readers came along - oh wait, I must have wasted a lot of time checking websites to see if they’d updated. Since I had to check them all manually I didn’t have as comprehensive a list as I would have liked because then you’d have to check them all! Now I can list everything from web comics to personal blogs to nerd blogs to the Guardian arts blog - and if they don’t update, no time lost.

The most amazing thing about Google Reader though is how the experience is automatically sized for my imate. It knows when I’m on my laptop and when I’m using the imate - and one of these days I’m going to have a screenshot (if I can do that on the imate…maybe that’s the learning curve they were talking about) or a photo of it. It’s just that good.

search

yadda yadda blah blah. ALTHOUGH: with their new toolbar at the top of the page they have chosen what I can easily click through to (news, videos etc) and yet I am not able to customise this. I can’t have Reader in my toolbar?!? I have to use a menu to get to it!?

chat

Finally, a way to get rid of MSN. That thing plagued my laptop and me with all it’s windows. I am a multi-chatter and sometimes I like to leave windows open all day, even if the conversation is not continuous (see: chats with Darren & Steve, one of my coworkers as exhibits A & B). I can search the chat logs, but they’re also securely locked behind my password and stored in with email results should I search.

documents

Microsoft, take that! Google docs is again placing a tool everyone needs in a place that is not environment dependent. I can edit my budget at my mother’s house, or at the mortgage broker’s office (as the case is likely to be right now - the house purchase is a new way of looking at my salary!). I can share these docs and most importantly work on them collaboratively with people.

calendar

How could I have forgotten calendar? This is one of my newly adopted Google features, as Outlook at work has usually sufficed for what I need. However, now Darren & I share a “food” calendar in Calendar with the plan for what we are going to eat during the week (i.e. will it give us leftovers, what needs to go on our shopping list) - as well as social engagements. It’s fantastic.

wishlist

Customising my toolbar, which may come since the toolbar only launched today. Some way to integrate with Flickr (I know, hah) and at least, Youtube. These are the services I prefer for my images and videos.

and, so?

Overall, the Google apps and services are doing a fantastic job. I know lots of people are worried about Google having their info/indexing their personal info/stealing their soul but in a lot of ways I also wonder if those people keep their savings under their mattresses. In New Zealand we’re lucky enough to have a government who aren’t interested in my emails to my mother about dinner next week (at least, not yet) and really you have to give in a bit to the internet and enjoy the best parts of it where you can.

Overall, nice one Google. You’re doing it right in my book.

A subject close to my own heart, as various past times I’ve been quite enamoured of (zines, crafts) have relied a lot on mail order products or me ordering them from overseas.

You can have all the design or the best product in the world but if you don’t communicate properly, I’m going to be a disgruntled customer.
Some things that I have struck (and please, feel free to add to this list if I’m missing things):

• Although hardly as common as when I first started to wield my credit card online, forms which don’t allow me to choose my country.
  • A subset of this: forms which INSIST I must have a state, and usually a North American one is the only abbreviation which will do
• Sites which don’t make it apparent that they:
  • Don’t ship outside North America or the UK
  • Don’t automatically calculate international shipping but don’t highlight this - unexpected charges or being contacted about my lack of shipping payment can be annoying
  • Need me to do something to add international shipping charges, but don’t let me know (esp. if it isn’t highlighted in the purchase process)
• Sites which don’t advise around separate shipments - i.e. part of my order is coming from HQ, but some of it is going to be shipped separately
• Companies who send form letters instead of customer service replies
  • Or even, send me an automated reply that someone will get in touch but then no one ever does
• Sites that don’t give ideas around customer service reply or delivery timeframes
• Long emails sent about my account or order which don’t really provide me with any real useful details

Those are my most recent gripes - but I’m sure there are more, unfortunately. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of giving information and tips around the ordering and delivery process.

Online experience shapes offline experience more often than not for me now; any time I am away from easy access to the interwebs, I notice times when I would have used it.

There are several ways “real life” could be well enhanced by the internet, and some of them not too difficult to actually put in place if the organisations in question saw the value of these as much as I do…

• An RSS feed for my PO box, alerting me to what has arrived (i.e. package/letter, sender details) and whether it is a “parcel card” and therefore requires me to visit the post office during opening hours to collect my item
• A kiosk or very light WAP-type website that you could query from a mobile at the video store - say if you want a movie like “X” then it would spit out movies that were similar to “X”
  True I could use my mobile for something like this - but how well would something like Amazon run on it? And is the time it takes to load Amazon worth it when I want a quick fix?
• Shared tags for our memories - although this could turn into a futuristic “Gattaca” kind of societal threat to privacy - it would be very useful and cool

I’m sure I will think of others that would be useful - and also, if anyone reading this has any weight with the NZ Postal Service, please let me know. We could chat!

When the web first boomed, there were the people who got rich quick. Some of them then got poor quick, but after the first boom people were a little more reticent about investing and a little more sceptical - if it smacked of something that had been done, it wasn’t going to work.

Lately however, there have been a rash of people making the most of the new internet - where the money is thinner, the idea has to be better and where people admire you the most for making it big out of something that already exists.

The flipside of this of course is more user-focused - we are no longer limited by the choices of the publishing or music industries as to what is produced or broadcast. It is the end of dominance of the one-to-many media / broadcasting model and the upsurge of the popular many-to-many system we began to see go big with applications like Napster back in the 90s.

The examples are plentiful - and we watch these people with avid interest to see how far this can and will go:

• Anshe Chung - the woman who made her millions from selling herself and property in the virtual world of Second Life
• Lonelygirl15 - the fictional video log created by an American agency of a 16 year old girl, played by Kiwi girl Jessica Rose, which has led to success and talk of a movie deal
• Lily Allen - the British singer who rose to fame through her MySpace profile, which promoted her music and upon which she also kept a blog detailing her day to day life
• Ze Frank, without who any list of this kind would be incomplete without some mention. In 2001 the viral bug hit Ze Frank’s birthday invitation, and suddenly everyone had seen it. Now, his daily video blog is viewed worldwide.
• Noah Kalina, a photographer who took a picture of himself every day for 3 years. The popularity of the set lead to a Flickr photoset where he posted pictures of himself with celebrities.

I love this phenomenon - and perhaps it will become so commonplace that we no longer remark on the way the internet is changing media consumption. It will be the way things are.