pixeldiva wrote in October 2009

Expand the Awesome: Design for a Wider Audience

This is a text version (more or less) of the talk I gave at BarCampLondon 7, because I don’t think the slides will be of use to anyone who wasn’t there. It isn’t exactly what I said, because that was then, this is now, the talk wasn’t recorded and I can’t remember exactly what words I used.

There were 34 slides and I did the talk in around 20 minutes (although writing it up has taken exponentially longer, weirdly), so feel free to grab yourself a cup of tea (or other beverage of choice) before you start reading.

Read the rest of this entry »

About Accessibility Pages

A while ago, I asked a question about accessibility help pages on twitter, and even set up a poll, asking “Where on the page do you put your accessibility help link?“.

I gave four options, and the results were as follows:

• At the top, in the first few tabs/links. 44% (35 votes)
• At the bottom, in the last few tabs/links. 25% (20 votes)
• What accessibility help link? 29% (23 votes)
• Other 1% (1 votes)

I’ve been meaning to blog about it for ages, and was reminded about it again today, when I looked at three or four sites in a row which had accessibility help links as the very last link on the page.

I then posted to twitter that I:

would love to see stats for how many views accessibility statements/pages that are linked at the very end of page get, vs top of page.

I was really pleased when @AndyDBryant replied:

@pixeldiva If it can wait til tomorrow, I can dig out stats for my employer’s site (accessibility link at bottom). What kind of time period?

I wasn’t expecting any particular answers to my tweet, I was really just thinking out loud, but I really would love to know how many page views accessibility pages get, regardless of their positioning.

I have a few theories about them, but I’d like a bit more data before I expand on what they are, which is where you come in.

If you work on the web, have access to statistics and have an accessibility page, I would absolutely love it if you could give me the following info:

1. Where on the page your accessibility page is.
2. How many views your accessibility page has had in a given time period.
3. How many views your home page has had in that time period.
4. What that time period is.

If you can give me the name/url of the site that would be awesome, but if you can’t for whatever reason, that’s fine.

You can also use a fake name along with your comment if you feel the need, but I’d really appreciate it if you used a real email address (it’ll only be seen by me, and I won’t use it for evil, promise) so that I can contact you for further info (if you’re happy for me to do that).

If you really feel uncomfortable posting stats publicly but still want to share, you can email me instead.

Thank you.

Pumpkin Soup

In another time and another life, autumn became more than it had ever been to me. It became a magical time which meant shorter days, longer nights, chilly ears and, often, a sojourn to another country where there Americanisation of Halloween lent its magic to a (mostly) peaceful landscape where I could rest, read and recharge for a few days surrounded by a family that, though not mine, had nonetheless warmly welcomed me.

I wrote that a year ago, almost to the day, in a post on the (somewhat mothballed) previous version of this blog, entitled “Reclaiming Autumn“, where I talked about how I came to love, lose and reclaim Pumpkin Soup as my talisman of Autumn.

I’d forgotten the exact date I wrote that, until I went to look for that post when writing this one, and had a bit of a laugh to myself, because it was exactly a year and one day later that I made Pumpkin Soup again.

This year’s audience was mostly the same as last years (minus a brother-in-law to be) but the soup was extra special, because among it, was the pride of my foray into growing my own veg – a home grown pumpkin.

Of all the veg I grew this year, the pumpkin was special. Yes, fresh salad is nice, home grown strawberries are lovely and eating baby sweetcorn right from the plant is fun, I’d have forgone them all for my pumpkin.

It’s been sitting in the kitchen for a few weeks now, ripening nicely among its larger, shop-bought cousins (a pumpkin a day makes Ann a ridiculously happy girl, especially given their short period of availability) and part of me wanted to keep it, I’d spent so long growing this thing that I had to know if it was actually a real pumpkin inside, so with a wee bit of a lump in my throat, I cut it up, ready to roast, and thence, to become soup.

When I wrote about pumpkin soup last year, a few people asked for a recipe, and at the time I couldn’t provide one, because I hadn’t written down what I’d done, so this year, I paid attention.

I should point out that this is by no means a tested or scientific recipe. I don’t tend to do weights and measures, so your mileage may very well vary.

Pixeldiva’s Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients

Pumpkins (I used 3, around 1kg each)
Shallots (5 medium sized ones)
Garlic (1 bulb)
Stock (I used chicken, but you could use vegetable, if you’re that way inclined)
Herbs de Provence (about 2 teaspoons)
Cumin (about 2 teaspoons)
Cinnamon (about 1 teaspoon)
Salt
Pepper
Butter
Olive Oil
Double cream (for serving)

Method

Cut each pumpkin in quarters, and scoop out the gunk in the middle. Then cut each quarter in half again, so you have eight pumpkin wedges per pumpkin. Lay these out on a baking tray or roasting dish, and scatter about a bulb’s worth of garlic cloves around the pumpkin. Drizzle some olive oil over the tip, scatter some salt, and put in an oven that’s been pre-heated to 200°C for about 30 minutes, or until nicely roasted.

Finely chop the shallots, and gently fry them with a wee bit of butter and olive oil in the bottom of whatever pot you intend to make your soup in.

Peel the skin off the pumpkin (it should come off reasonably well with the aid of a reasonably sharp knife) and put the mushy pumpkin bits in the pot with the shallots. Then grab the roasted garlic cloves and squeeze their innards into the put too.

Throw in some herbs de provence (or mixed herbs), cumin and cinnamon and mush the whole lot up, before adding enough stock to cover the mush, plus about half an inch of water above (sorry, I know that’s not a very exact description).

Let this simmer for a while until it goes even more mushy, and then taste. Season with salt and pepper (and more cumin or herbs) if you feel it needs it. Otherwise, get your hand blender out and try not to cover the kitchen in soup while you get carried away with the joy of blending.

Serve with a dribble of cream and a grind of black pepper, and enjoy.

This makes enough for four people, with enough left over for a large bowl later, when lunch or dinner is a distant memory and handknit slippers and crocheted lap blankets (or your equivalents) aren’t quite enough to keep you warm.

Hand-written Business Cards

A few weeks ago, just before I headed off to Bristol, I decided to go a bit earlier, and catch FOWD Bristol.

Then I realised that I was running out of Moo Cards and had absolutely no time to order any more.

Disaster.

After casting around a bit, I remembered that I have craft supplies and quite the collection of pens, and decided to just make something.

I grabbed my hypotrochoid art set (which I did actually buy from the SFMOMA gift shop (I love a good museum gift shop, oh yes…)), some white cards (I think they were supposed to be place cards for a wedding or somesuch), my round corner cutter and my set of Stabilo Pens.

That was the easy bit.

Deciding what to draw, where, using what colours was the easy bit. I grabbed a bit of scrap paper (back of an envelope I think) and tried out a few patterns until I found the one I liked best. Then I chose the colours. Purple first (because its my favourite colour), granny smith apple green next (because I have developed an inexplicable fondness for this most difficult of colours) and finally, pewter grey (because I like it more than black). Sorted.

I’d decided to make thirty cards, ten in each colour, but hadn’t considered the possibility of cramp from doing so many spirals. My hands and arms started to cramp up by the fourth card. Doing thirty perfect spirals is harder than it looks.

Once the spirals were done, I realised that I needed something more and added the “Hello!” and it was then that I hit upon the idea of using the fold in the card to get around the problem of figuring out which card to give people at these kinds of events, business or personal. I used to carry around two sets of cards, particularly when I worked at RNIB, and was never particularly comfortable with the decision making process of who should get what card when the event wasn’t strictly a work event. It didn’t get any easier when I went freelance either. I have a set of Moo cards that I made when I first set up my business site, but I then changed the branding so I couldn’t use those, and anyway, I’m more than what I do for work.

So, whatever I did needed to work as a business card and a personal card. A me card, if you will. Some people might want to know more about my work, some people might want to know more about me. Some people might go from one to the other. Best to give them the option rather than making that god-awful networking deliberation about how “useful” people might be in terms of giving you work.

It was at that point something went ping in the back of my head, and I remembered having books which could be read from either side. One story started from the front, one from the back. To read either, you just turned the book around and started whichever one you wanted.

So I turned the card around and wrote “Hello!” on the other side. It felt like it needed a bit more, so I added the little arrow.

At this point, I started getting that little buzz of “y’know, this might just work…”

It was decided. You could open the card from either side and get either my work or my personal contact details like one of those start from either end books.

Then I got to the hard bit. The actual words. This probably took the most time of the entire process. Even though my handwriting is terrible (as a result of typing for a living for more years than I care to count), it actually took longer to decide what the words were going to be than it took to write them out twenty times. You’ll notice that number differs from the number of cards above. That’s because it hurt my hand so much that I just couldn’t write any more. So I left the apple green ones and figured I could find a quiet moment to write them up at the conference or whenever, and anyway, I wasn’t likely to hand out more than twenty cards, even taking into account the speed networking session.

Job done, I took a photo and uploaded it to flickr to try and stave off any chance of me deciding, in the cold light of day, that they were crap and should be consigned to the bin.

Happily, they went down quite well, and to my immense surprise, I actually needed the apple green cards. So much so that by the time I came back from Bristol four weeks later I was all out of cards and needed to make some more.

I’m not sure these cards would work in all situations, and I may yet wind up getting “proper” business cards printed up, but for the moment at least, I think I might continue to use these for situations where the lines between business and personal aren’t entirely clear.

What’s up with #missingbodybackgroundwatch

I wrote a post the other day sharing a tiny tip that makes testing websites easier (go read, it’s short, I’ll wait), and in that post, called out the first site that I found that had a missing body background colour.

Since then, I’ve spotted a quite surprising number of sites that have the same affliction and have (mostly for my own edification, and with half a mind on a blog post further down the road) been posting each site to twitter using the hash tag #missingbodybackgroundwatch and today, a couple of people asked what it was all about.

So. A bit of explanation.

Working with a changed colour scheme was, for the most part, not a problem… unless the site in question had specified the text colour to be a similar shade grey (or anything else that was quite light) at which point the entire thing became almost entirely unreadable as the colour contrast all but disappeared. Doh!

A better example would be a site that specified black for its text and neglected to set white as the background colour. If anyone visits using a browser set to the default colour scheme (or using Windows or Mac default colour schemes) that’d be fine, but if, for example, someone was using a high contrast reverse colour scheme, the default browser background colour would more than likely wind up being black, combine that with black text, and it just doesn’t work.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are three screenshots that illustrate why it’s a problem.

The site in question is the New Statesman (I can’t remember why I was looking at it – probably followed a link from twitter).

Example 1: New Statesman viewed using the standard Firefox (cos that’s what I use) default colour scheme. Looks fine, right?

Example 2: Viewed using a different background colour (to imitate a different colour scheme). I chose pale green because it illustrates my point better than grey. It doesn’t look too good, but at least it’s still readable.

Example 3: Viewed as it would be if a user had chosen a high contrast reverse colour scheme. Some text is readable, but lots of it isn’t (which is a bit of a problem for a newspaper/magazine site.

It’s such a tiny thing, but the impact can be huge.

So, if you’re going to specify a text colour, make sure you’ve specified an appropriate background colour too. That doesn’t mean that you have to specify a background colour on every element. Provided that somewhere underneath your text you’ve specified a background colour that has sufficient contrast against the text colour, you can let the cascade do its thing.

Obviously, if you decide to change to using light text on a dark background in an area where the rest of the site is dark text on a light background then you’ll need to specify both.

Oh, and make sure that wherever you use background images that you back them up with an appropriate background colour as well. Otherwise, all that lovely contrast disappears if, for any reason, images are not available.

I’m going to keep collecting sites with a missing body background colour, do a bit of research and write a post about it in a wee while, so in the meantime, if you feel like it, change your background to something else (in Firefox, you’ll find it in Preferences, Content, Colours, then click on the box next to Background and just pick something else from the handily provided swatch) and if you spot any, it’d be ace if you’d post them to twitter using the #missingbodybackgroundwatch hash tag.

Eight Years in London

All this Bristol malarkey has taken over my brain to the extent that my eight year anniversary of moving to London passed without thought or remark.

So much has happened since I got in that van with my sister on the 28th of September 2001 and we set off for points south (me to London, her to Dover).

I realise that I’ve now spent almost a quarter of my life in London, and until recently didn’t see a life outside of it, but it’s funny how the world turns…

If you’d asked me six months ago where I thought I’d be living in eight years time, I’d probably have said London.

Now?

Who knows. I certainly don’t.

I’m looking forward to finding out though.

This moment in this place

It’s the 1st of October.

I’m not entirely sure how that happened. It seems like only a minute ago it was July and we were off to San Francisco on the holiday of a lifetime.

I’m in Bristol, doing some work for a local digital agency. I’ve been here for three weeks now and those three weeks have exceeded any and all expectations I had on accepting the contract.

As I write this, I’m sat on a bench at a picnic table alongside the SS Great Britain looking across the floating harbour. The sky is blue with only the merest hint of fluffy cloud and the sun is warming my back. A light breeze stirs the weeds between the cobblestones below and gently ruffles my hair. Some workmen at the next table are laughing and joking and the noise from the construction nearby is barely audible over my music and the hum of the Matilda of Bristol’s engine as she putters in to the side to pick up a passenger before moving off again.

A picture may be worth a thousand words but there isn’t a camera in the world—nor are there enough words—to fully describe the myriad of details that make this moment in this place so perfect.

Life is short and moments like this frustratingly few and far between. Sometimes the most important thing is to stop.

Take a breath.

Look around.

Do whatever it takes to be fully in the moment.

It really is a beautiful world.