Joe Dolson: Accessible Web Design

If you’re not currently aware of the horrible circumstances which have resulted in Kathy Sierra’s withdrawal from the blogging world, you should make a point of researching them. It’s not fun to read about and it’s not nice to know about — - but it’s important. I’m not going to talk about it, myself. The subject has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere. I’m not even going to link to any of the discussions — - you can find them.

I do, however, want to discuss one of the more significant reactions to this situation. Tim O’Reilly has published a draft code of conduct for bloggers. In some blogging circles, this has been reviled as a bureaucratic reaction to the issue. Fair enough: that’s what it is.

Read more: Pointless Reactivism

I’ve been tagged by Bill Slawski (edit: and also by Miriam Loraditch) in an interesting meme currently doing the rounds of search marketing bloggers. The meme is pretty self explanatory — - tell the world why you blog (listing, ideally, five reasons) and then take a turn tagging five others. Michael Jensen of SoloSEO is once again tracking the meme, so you can wend your way to SoloSEO if you’re curious about where this meme has been.

But, for the moment, here are five reasons that I blog (cross posted at inter:digital strategies):

Read more: Five Reasons Why I Blog

Google’s “new product” TiSP — - all I can say: I bet it’s a shitty service.

Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson run a podcast on practical web accessibility called WebAxe.

Dennis and Russ aim to cover a wide variety of subjects in the basic of web accessibility. Their last podcast discussed the accessibility of CAPTCHAs - and the next podcast up, for whatever reason, discusses me. Well, not precisely. More specifically, it features an interview with me on the subject of the definition of accessibility - a topic which I’ve written on before.

It’s not a topic where there’s a nice neat answer, so I can’t claim that we reach anything vaguely resembling a conclusion. Besides that, an audio interview is rather a new experience for me, and I have to admit that I may have been too verbose to be able to actually reach any kind of solid conclusions.

Nonetheless, if you’re interested in learning more about accessibility via an aural learning method, you should subscribe to the WebAxe podcast. Or, at least, give the next episode a listen!

It’s not up yet; but Dennis tells me that he’ll be posting it sometime this weekend.

It’s available now! Podcast 41: Definition of Web Accessibility

Well, after a bit of thinking, I guess I’ve resolved my popular posts problem. The popular posts plugin I was using had a significant flaw — - largely because I’m also using the wp-cache plugin. Namely, any cached article was not being registered as having been visited. However, any article which had it’s comments feed accessed was registered as being visited. Therefore, the so-called “most popular” articles were actually the articles which had somebody subscribed to the comments feed. I could control this by closing comments — - but this seemed like a highly undesirable way of dealing with the issue. It would only truly be accurate if I closed all comments and reset all counts to zero. Even then, the caching issue would mean that the visit counts would be highly unreliable.

Then there’s the issue of popularity. As I commented previously, I’m not really all that happy with the self-defining nature of popular posts. Once popular, always highlighted. It’s an ineffective way of giving people some access to my past articles. Using the least popular posts really just meant highlighting the most recent posts. Somewhere in the middle? Just kind of a strange way of going about it. Tried it; didn’t really like it.

So I’m now incorporating two plugins: Recent Posts and Random Posts, both by Rob Marsh, SJ. They’re both heavily configurable plugins, allowing me to eliminate selected posts and define the structural code surrounding them amongst other options. I think this will give a more worthwhile glimpse into the “back stacks” of this blog as it continues to grow.

I’m not a big fan of most JavaScript widgets which are added to sites. I have a MyBlogLog account; and I find the statistics to be very interesting. The widgets, on the other hand, I find to be varyingly irritating, obtrusive, and most of all slow.

But there’s one particular widget I’ve seen on many occasions which really drives me nuts: Snap’s “Preview Anywhere”. I really don’t like this. To me, this is information overload. With well-written link text, and good context for a link, I know everything I need to know about a site to judge whether I’m going to go there. Do I need to know what it looks like?

I mean, if I go there, I’ll find out what it looks like soon enough. The suspense isn’t killing me. I’ll admit, there’s the faint possibility that I’ll see the preview and say to myself “Hey! I’ve been to that site before — - I’d forgotten how cool it was,” and I’ll follow a link which I would have otherwise ignored.

But it’s a slim possibility.

If my goal for visiting your’s website was to learn more about their links and visit everything they’ve connected to, I’d probably find this widget very useful. However, since my actual goal is usually to read what you have to say, with the possibility that I’ll also check out what you’ve referenced, this Snap widget simply gets in the way.

Lesson to be learned: don’t get in the way of your visitor’s goals. I’ll be honest - there are a number of websites which I find otherwise interesting but rarely visit because of this very widget.

I’ve been thinking about this recently…on the one hand, I want to provide easy access to the posts which are most popular. I’d like to think that these posts are most popular for a reason, in general. On the other hand, once a post is in this “most popular” list, it’s inclined to stay there.

Giving easy access to the posts which are the most popular pretty much guarantees that those posts will STAY the most popular.

Not sure what I want to do about this…I though about making it random; but I’m not sure that would really serve the purpose I have in mind.

Perhaps I’ll just randomly alter the selection - sometimes the top 10, sometimes the bottom 10; sometimes a group somewhere in the middle. I’ll just introduce some variables, and see what happens.