The online home and (not so) alter(ed)-ego of Ann Carrier.
Mother. Artist. Designer. Photographer. Calligrapher. Knitter. Gamer. Gardener. Petrolhead. Collector of pebbles and shells.
Never met a museum gift shop she didn’t like.
For the last wee while I've been building a site for my future in-laws, to help them sell their stunning waterfront villa in Crete. It's a really beautiful place, in a location that is totally breathtaking and while it was a really great project (and gave me an excuse to use the awesome Perch CMS), it's still wee bit of a shame it's being sold. I mean, check out the view over the pool!
Anyone want to buy a villa in Crete?
When I worked at RNIB, I changed my default desktop colour scheme because the default windows scheme gave me headaches and eye strain. The department of unintended consequences then stepped in and handed me a neat way to know whether a site was missing it's body background colour without having to check any code, because it changed the default browser background from white to muddy grey. Since moving to using a mac, I've grown used to the white default background in the browser, and this morning, had a moment of panic when I realised that I wasn't sure if I'd specified the background colour in the templates I'd built (and which were delivered to the client) last week.
I had, of course, but I realised in that moment that it'd have been much easier if I went into the settings and changed the background colour away from white (to grey, but you could choose whatever makes you happy), just to avoid that kind of panic in future. So that's what I did.
Disappointingly, the first site to fall at that particular hurdle was the Firefox default Google search home page.
I don't know whether it's just coincidence, but since I've been working in Bristol, there seem to have been quite a high proportion of geek events happening locally, which as well as being interesting, have given me the opportunity to meet some local folk. Last night was the turn of the Bristol Usability Group, which I was completely unaware of until Joe and Laura (separately) told me about it via twitter, correctly thinking that it'd be right up my street.
It was.
Last night's topic was Designing for Old(er) People and Andrew Arch, Web Accessibility and Ageing Specialist for the Web Accessibility Initiative: Ageing Education and Harmonisation Project (WAI-AGE) was presenting.
I've known Andrew for a few years now, since he worked for Vision Australia doing similar stuff to what we did at RNIB, and hadn't had a chance to speak to him in a long time, so quite apart from hearing his presentation, it was really good to get a chance to catch up with him. Especially since he was at the Standards.Next event I was at on Saturday but I didn't get a chance to talk to him then.
I took quite a few notes during Andrew's talk, because he gave a lot of information that I wasn't aware of, including lots of useful and interesting statistics, and assuming I can read my handwriting (not an absolute certainty, and the longer I get from having written them, the less likely it gets) I thought I'd transcribe (and share) what I wrote down.
It was an information packed presentation (and discussion afterwards) and I couldn't physically write any faster and so I know I missed some stuff, so any errors or omissions are mine alone.
According to the UN, by 2050, more than 20% of the world's population will be over 60, however, some countries (such as Japan) have populations which are aging faster than others.
In the EU, it's estimated that by 2010 17% of the population will be over 65 and 5% will be over 80 years of age. By 2050 that number will rise to 29% over 65 and 12% over 80, which is a significant increase.
As we age, our hearing becomes less sensitive and we lose the ability to hear high pitched sounds and distinguish specific sounds if there is a lot of background noise.
Andrew gave figures of 47% of people aged 61-80 having some hearing loss which rose to 93% in users older than 81.
Perhaps the most obvious impairment as a result of aging. As we age we are less able to focus on near tasks, our colour perception and sensitivity decreases, as does our perception of contrast.
Most interesting to me was the prevalence non-correctable vision loss (that is, can't be corrected by wearing glasses or contact lenses). In people aged 65-74 the figure was 16%, rising to 19% of people aged 75-84 and 46% of over 85s.
Quite apart from conditions such as Arthritis, as we age we lose some fine motor control, which makes it difficult to, for example, write or use a mouse easily.
Approximately 50% of the population over 65 have Arthritis and 20% have what's known as "Essential Tremor" (slight shaking, but not as serious as Parkinson's) compared to 4% of people over 85 having Parkinson's (a figure I thought would be higher).
As we age, we lose some of our short-term memory and concentration, as well as suffering from information overload and becoming easily distracted (although some would argue that that's already happening in younger generations due to things like twitter and facebook, but I digress… )
As far as conditions go, (only) 1.4% of people aged 65-59 have been diagnosed with Dementia, rising to 24% of people over 85. However 20% of people over 70 are considered to have a "Mild Cognitive Impairment" (memory loss, etc.).
Although it'd be nice to only have one thing go downhill as we age, unfortunately, aging tends to have a cumulative effect and older people often have multiple impairments, although it's clear that most don't consider themselves to be "disabled" (and nor should they).
Being online opens up many opportunities to older people (and everyone, really), such as:
In 2006, the percentage of people online among the different age groups were:
16-24: 83% 25-44: 79% 45-54: 68% 55-64: 52% 65+: 15%
In 2008, those figures had changed to the following:
16-24: 93% 25-44: 87% 45-54: 78% 55-64: 63% 65+: 26%
These figures came from the Office of National Statistics, and counted people who said they'd been online in the last three months as "being online".
Owning a computer lowers the barrier to getting online (as opposed to using a shared machine or going to a library), but there does seem to be an increased fear of "breaking" it (where it might be the computer, the internet or the entire world).
That said, there seems to be a snowball effect where older users encourage each other to use computers and/or get online. Age Concern also offer training for computer skills training for older people.
There's a big overlap with the needs identified and catered for by the WCAG guidelines, but studies done seem to have been done by people who didn't have much awareness of WCAG and haven't built on previous work done.
Some things to take into account when thinking about the needs of older users:
In no particular order:
Andrew recommends looking beyond the sufficient techniques to the advisory techniques for WCAG guidelines, as many of these techniques are more usability focused than pure technical accessibility and may be of particular benefit to older users.
There was a really interesting discussion after Andrew had finished his presentation, with several attendees sharing experiences they'd had of testing with older users (or grandparents).
A site that was redesigned to suit the needs of older users was tested with younger users and when given the choice, the younger users preferred it.
A lot of older users have laptops, and as a result have more experience (and are therefore more comfortable) using a trackpad rather than a mouse.
Buying or owning a laptop increased the likelihood of frequent useage (more portable, easier to use from the sofa, easier to show stuff to other people, etc.).
Older people will join social networks like facebook to keep tabs on their younger relatives, but tend to watch rather than interact.
Older men seemed to use the internet less than women (possible connection to it being women who tend to communicate more than men?).
It was more difficult to recruit male participants for user testing.
I have more notes, but they're less than coherent in the light of day (err, night now) and that's probably more than enough to be getting on with.
I spent most of last year using Subversion via command line at the request of the client I was working with at the time. Because I'm geeky in a different way to those who are comfortable in commandlineville, it was all set up for me, and all I had to cope with were the commands to check out, check in, and occasionally, resolve a conflict.
In time, I got reasonably comfortable with those commands but I had no real idea how to go about setting up Subversion (or any other version control system) for myself, and haven't had or felt the need to do so until now.
I had hoped that I'd be able to find an easy to follow tutorial online, but either my googlefu has failed me, or it doesn't exist. What I did find were several tutorials that assume that you're comfortable with the command line or that you know how subversion works and what to do, and that isn't me, so I figured I'd set out what I did, in the hope that it might be helpful to a) someone else and b) me, when I come to do this again and realise I've completely forgotten what I did.
Disclaimer: This may not be the absolute best way to go about this, but it's what I did and it works. If there are better ways to do any of these steps, I'd love to know, so please leave a comment.
Follow the first part of the instructions handily provided at Ruby Robot's Subversion With Mac OS X Tutorial but stop when you get to "Creating a Sample Subversion Project".
In a fresh Terminal window, I changed directory to my MAMP directory htdocs folder by typing cd [path/to/htdocs] where in my case it was cd ../../../Applications/MAMP/htdocs (because MAMP installs to the Applications folder and I don't know how to/if you can move it without breaking it.
I then created the repository by using the command from the tutorial:
svnadmin create SVNrep
This created a SVNrep directory in my htdocs folder.
You could put the SVNrep directory wherever you like - I just wanted it close to my other working files.
Use finder to go to the SVNrep directory, and find the conf directory. It will contain three files:
authz passwd svnserve.conf
Open svnserve.conf in whatever text editor you're comfortable with and uncomment line 20 (delete the # and space) to use the default password file. Save it and close it.
Open the passwd file and add a username and password by typing:
username = password
on a new line at the bottom of the file. Save it and close it.
To add the site I wanted to be version controlled to the repository, I typed the following into Terminal:
svn import [sitedirectory] file:///[path to SVNrep directory]/[sitename for respository] -m "Initial import"
Then held my breath and hit return.
Because I'm a version control moron, I thought I could check out the files to the directory I'd imported them from and they'd be version controlled, but you can't, so I used the following command to check them out to a different directory.
svn checkout file://[path to SVNrep dir/sitename from previous step] [newfolder]
Then held my breath and pressed return again.
If you're setting up a new site once you've done all the previous steps and you choose the [newfolder] you set up in the previous step, it should detect that it's version controlled and the details should appear in the Source Control panel at the bottom of the new site dialog.
If this doesn't happen automatically, put the full path to your repository (the bit immediately after checkout in the previous step) in the Repository URL field.
It also works if you put the localhost url in (e.g., http://localhost:8888/[checkout folder]).
Then enter the username and password you created in Step 3.
Open your new site in Coda, find a file, open it and edit it.
When you save it, an M icon should appear next to the file name. Click this and a dialog should open up asking you to type a comment.
Type a comment, and hit commit.
With help from O'Reilly's Version Control with Subversion free ebook if you need it.
Obviously, having spent ages writing all this up, I did a quick google for coda subversion guide to see if there were any good tutorials for subversion commands within Coda and found what I wish I'd found to begin with:
A designer’s guide to installing a local copy of Subversion for use with Coda
Typical, eh?
Still, I've done all this now so I'll publish and be damned (or roundly mocked as a moron).
I'd heard good things about the Wordpress iPhone app so I thought I'd check it out. So far, so good. It may even help get me writing here more often.
I was delighted last month to spend a couple of days with Leisa Reichelt and Mark Boulton looking at the work they're doing for the d7ux project from an accessibility point of view. During that couple of days, we got to talking about how to make it easier for people who make Drupal themes to make them accessible, and we came up with the idea of writing a kind of hints and tips document that could be viewed online or downloaded and printed.
The resulting document - Designing Accessibility Into Themes - is now available from d7ux.org and I've been overwhelmed by the positive response it's received on twitter so far. I'm even more pleased that it's in the queue to be included in the Drupal Handbook.
It's not an exhaustive guide to everything you should do to make a website accessible, because that would take many, many more words, but I hope it strikes the right balance of information, pragmatism and tone and gives a good overview of the main things to keep in mind if you're designing a theme for any kind of content management system - not just Drupal.
If you've got any feedback on it, I'd love to hear it, and please feel free to pass it on to anyone who you think might find it useful.
In 7 hours, a taxi will (had better) turn up outside the house, ready to take us to the Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. In 11 hours and 3 minutes, our flight is scheduled to take off.
In 21 hours and 53 minutes, our flight is scheduled to land in San Francisco.
In less than 24 hours, I will be on the holiday I've dreamed about almost my entire life.
I, quite literally, cannot wait.
I was 7 years old when the school secretary pulled me out of the lunch line and said I should go out front of the school, because my parents were there. I panicked a little, but when I got there, it was nothing to panic about. My dad's cousin, who'd emigrated to the US when he was a wee boy, had come to Scotland for a visit with his wife, looked us up and popped in to say hi. They only had a day because they were off to do some golf sightseeing, but I'll never forget the hour we spent sitting in the back of the car in the school car park. They promised they'd take my sister and I to Disneyland if we ever made it over to California, and a seed was sown. Sadly, they passed away several years ago without my sister or I having made it to the US, never mind to California, and it's one of my biggest regrets. I don't remember what age I was when I saw Tales of the City on TV, but it must have been when I was around 16 (I got my first telly when I passed my exams at 15) and it made an incredible impression on me. It was at that point that my vague "California" wanderlust settled firmly in San Francisco.
A few years on and I've discovered wine and am well on my way to becoming a potential "wine ponce". I've also had good friends telling me tales of Sonoma County and Napa Valley wineries and how much fun (and good food and drink) they've had. Throw in a bit of Sideways and Oz and James and my San Francisco wanderlust has expanded to cover Wine Country too.
So, with the background set, you can imagine how excited I was when HFBB phoned me this morning to say that he'd booked flights for us to go to San Francisco, leaving on the 1st of July and coming back on the 17th.
Reader, I may have shed a tear.
My California dream is coming true.
In three weeks time I'll be in my seat on the plane, somewhere over the East Coast of the US on the way to the one place in the world I've always wanted to go. I was beyond excited when I went to Austin for SXSW two years ago, but this has caused my excitement levels to go stratospheric.
Currently we plan to spend a few days in San Francisco when we arrive, then take off for a wee bit of a tour round Wine Country (maybe even in a convertible!) and then back to San Francisco for the last couple of days before we come home.
Thanks to twitter I've had some great recommendations already. I especially have to give a massive shout out to Jason Reed who has gone above and beyond the call of duty for recommendations. He is a total legend.
That said, I'm still open to recommendations. So, is there anywhere in SF/the Bay Area/Wine Country that I'd be a complete fool not to visit?
Along with (and possibly related to) my love of oratory, is my love of poetry. It's not something I talk much about, or actively pursue, but it's there nonetheless, and likes to creep up on me occasionally, to remind me it's still there.
Most recently, this was in the form of some absolutely wonderful trailers for the BBC's Poetry Season, which feature various folk apparently going about their daily lives as usual, but with a short interruption for some poetry, before continuing as if nothing had happened.
The first trailer I saw featured Lauren Laverne, then I saw the Phil Jupitus one (which I think is my favourite so far) and the Frank Skinner one. I'm not sure whether I've seen/heard the Hugh Dennis one, and I know I definitely haven't seen/heard the Robert Webb one. I enjoyed the ones I've seen so much that I wanted to see them again (without having to watch the BBC 24/7 to do it) and made my way to the microsite on the assumption that the videos would be online.
They weren't, and for two days, I couldn't even find any kind of listing of who/what/how many until a chance glance at the description of a google search result revealed their presence and the information was found at the bottom of the TV & Radio schedule page with no kind of identifying information around it.
So for the benefit of other frustrated googlers and because the List of BBC Poetry Season Trailers (scroll to end) doesn't include links to the poems, I've included some links here:
The presence of the listing gave me a small spark of hope that the videos might be around on the site somewhere, just badly placed, but it doesn't seem to be the case, and nobody seems to have youtubed them either, which is a disappointment. If you've seen these up online somewhere, I'd be very grateful if you left a comment pointing me to them.
Anyway.
It also reminded me of something that happened a couple of months ago.
I'd gone for a meeting with a new client and was killing time in Euston station because I was early, when I spotted a crowd of people around some camera equipment and boom microphones. Being the curious sort, I ambled over and tweeted thus:
no idea why, but just happened across Griff Rhys Jones reading WH Auden's Night Mail (youtube) on the station concourse. My favourite poem.
I then took and posted the following picture:
After standing around and listening a bit more, I finally asked someone what was going on and followed up with:
has discovered it's for a telly programme to be broadcast at the end of May. Will have to keep an eye out to see if I stayed out of shot.
In true form, I completely forgot about it until tonight. On checking the schedule it turns out I missed the programme by a mere two hours. Luckily, the programme - Why Poetry Matters - is available on the BBC iPlayer. If you're viewing this after the 27th of May 2009 or can't see it because you're outside the UK, my apologies.
Last year I started to do Project 365 but I fell by the wayside quite early, managing to only upload 21 photos in 34 days. This year, I started Project 365 again on January first, and fell by the wayside before I'd even got that far and it really bothered me.
On the basis that doing the same thing and expecting a different result leads to lunacy I decided that there was no point in shouting at my inner dustbins or beating myself up about it. So, on January 31st, I started over again.
While there may have been the odd day that I forgot until a few minutes past midnight, and that one day where I did something different for a good reason, I've stuck to it and am incredibly proud to have made it to 100 days.
It just reinforces the notion that if I really want to, I can do whatever I set my mind to. In an ideal world, we'd all believe that, but we don't live in an ideal world.
So I'm taking some time to acknowledge that taking a photo a day for 100 days is an achievement. Yes, I've lacked inspiration. No, every photo isn't a masterpiece, but that isn't (and hasn't been) the point of this exercise.
I've been creative and created something every day for 100 days. That's got to be worth celebrating.
So, to celebrate, I put together a desktop wallpaper and rather than just use it myself, I thought I'd share it. It's only available in one size - 1440 x 900 - but shouldn't look hideous at other resolutions.
If you desperately want this in another resolution, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
Last but not lease, I owe huge thanks to everyone who's left a comment or encouraged me to keep going via twitter. It really has helped when the motivation has taken a dip.