Nine years ago I had become fed up with trying to explain to clients, users, friends, co-workers, and strangers that screen resolution, browser chrome, and browser size combine to create some unique viewport sizes. What this meant was that whether a user had a display at 640×480 or at 1,024×768…
There is an article over at Practical Ecommerce titled Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There? by Joe Dolson. It is refreshing to see more traditional sites dealing with accessibility, especially when it can so significantly affect their bottom line. As an indication that the author gets it: I…
There is an interesting article over at the WebAIM blog titled JAWS Ate My Tables.The article describes how JAWS (version 10 in this case), a screen reader, decides whether an HTML table is used for layout purposes or as a data table. It turns out that JAWS does not lean…
Trenton Moss over at Webcredible has posted an article, Accessible online video for keyboard-only users. The concepts within are very simple, but require developers to take an extra step or two, which may account for why we see so few sites with these features implemented.One key issue is that developers…
Having stumbled across the article “10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit, I can see that the suggestions are pretty obvious, and the number 10 is probably more arbitrary than based on some natural break in severity. However, there are some things in the article I have been repeating for…
If you were paying attention any of the last few years, you may have noticed that the 24 Ways web site is set up to run as an annual advent calendar for web geeks. Each day the site posts a new article dealing with some aspect of the web, ideally…
Boxes and Arrows has an article titled “Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design” written by a former academic mobile UX (User eXperience) researcher. As the author transitioned to private sector he felt that when mobile UX was discussed it was too driven by the gee-whiz factors and not…
Three years ago YouTube/Google added the ability for video authors to add captions to videos. Over time support for multiple caption tracks was included, the expansion of search to consider text in captions, and even machine translation support for the captions (see my other post about machine translation risks).Even with…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. WebAIM is a non-profit organization within the…
An article at UX Matters titled “Usability Testing Versus Expert Reviews” takes a reader question and tosses it to a series of experts to answer:Under what circumstances is it more appropriate to do usability testing versus an expert review? What are the benefits and weaknesses of each method that make…
There is a very good article over at A List Apart today titled “The Myth of Usability Testing.” The article starts off with an example of how multiple usability evaluation teams, given the same task and allowed to run at it as they saw fit, had far less overlap in…
For developers, and clients, struggling with the concept of personas, there is a very easy to read primer in the form of a comic over at the ThinkVitamin blog in an article titled “How to Understand Your Users with Personas.”The concept of personas was first introduced in the book The…