Putting Accessibility to the Test

Wow.  I can honestly say that after doing the WebAIM screen reader simulation, I completely understand why Prof. P. wanted us to have a short navigation bar with clear subject links.  The homepage of the “U of A” website alone had 21 navigation links with at least two graphics.  By the time I was getting ready to listen to the menu for the third time in order to figure out which link I needed to follow to get the necessary information, I was already tired of hearing it.  I can’t image what it must be like to try and navigate a site like that every day!

After following this simulation, one of the things I would have liked Joe Clark to go into a little more depth on (and maybe he does in further chapters of his book now that I think back to the chapters he referenced) is how tedious screen readers are, and how concise web designers need to be when creating things like their navigation bars.  It’s one thing to listen to text being read, but it’s something completely different to listen to a huge list of navigation options multiple times in order to navigate to multiple pages.  I found his discussion on the different terms a little repetitive, and almost a little sarcastically demeaning.  He seemed to present some good problems, but not very many helpful solutions.  Again, the reasoning for all this could very well be that he resolves the issues in the remaining chapters in his book, but we’ll see.

Photoshop, Oh Photoshop

So I started out this week by playing around with putting my own image in the background of a page, playing with the lasso tool, and such like we did in class.  I came up with a product that I kind of like, and was planning to make the new background for my typography page.  However, a recent poll of friends and family has come to the conclusion that it’s nice, but it doesn’t really best display my information.  You can see the revised page here if you like, and feel free to way in on the debate of course. The page the most seem to like is here so that you can do a proper comparison.

As far as the readings for this week go, I thought they gave some interesting techniques and tips for using Photoshop.  I particularly liked the site on creating gradient backgrounds, although that had more to do with proper mark-up than Photoshop.  Also, I found Karen Eismann’s restoration and retouching techniqures in Photoshop to be incredibly helpful, but a bit overwhelming.  Like Sherpa John said, I’m glad that Spring Break is coming up so I will have more time to play around with Photoshop and discover its various functions and techniques.