May
04

Accessibilty of desktop applications

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Accessibility is all about ensuring that applications can be used by all people, and specifically that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with them. This is often mandated in law e.g. in the USA, Section 508 established binding guidelines for technology accessibility; as did the UK's DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), which is mostly now superseded by the Equality Act

When discussing accessibility, most of the time we focus on web accessibility (understandable given its global reach). For website accessibility, the W3's WCAG 2.0 guidelines are the first port of call and are referenced by most accessibility guidance.

A good question was raised yesterday on a project about the applicability of accessibility guidelines to desktop applications, specifically relating to software being supplied by a 3rd party and the level to which they can (or have to) prove it meets the law. The intent of the legislation is agnostic of the delivery method, and the WCAG guidelines can easily be used for checking non-web accessibility, which is a good start. Having 'web' in the name is unfortunate however as it's easy to point at that and say "this isn't a website".

Also it does seem that the focus in general is on the web because of the large potential reach, rather than desktop which typically will concern a smaller group of people, often internal to an organisation, (although who still need to be able to use the software they are given!) For desktop application accessibility, I haven't found any UK guidelines that refer directly to desktop rather than web.

In the US however the legislation is split into separate sections for web and desktop. The desktop guidance here looks very applicable to all sorts of desktop applications and a good guideline for any desktop software suppliers to be referring to. The benefits from following this are not just compliance with legislation and meeting the needs of a small part of the userbase, but can have a usability benefit to all users of an application

There's also a useful round-up of accessibility tools and guidance on the Paciello Group website

When developing desktop applications, it is recommended to refer to the user interface guidelines for that platform as well e.g.

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Jan
22

Digital obsolescence vs JavaScript emulators

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Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle has an interesting post asking ‘if you have an obsolescence recovery plan for PC games?’

Thanks to emulators, games from 30 years ago can still be played on modern hardware. However he notes that:

This unusually fortunate circumstance may not persist forever though. Technology will probably move on eventually to devices that are sufficiently different in form that even emulation is no longer feasible. Many are now predicting that mobile tablet computers will replace desktops and that closed architectures will prevail over the open general purpose architecture of current desktop PCs. Emulation may no longer be possible on these devices.

I’m not sure that the death of the PC is on the cards anytime soon, but it’s a good point that alarmed me somewhat. After all, we take our digital memories and content as being permanent when in reality they’re incredibly ephemeral as anyone who’s suffered a harddisk crash without a recent backup can attest to.

Then it struck me. “Atwood’s Law“. Based on the Principle of Least Power from Tim Berners-Lee (the creator of the web) that

The less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language.

This principle was part of the reasoning behind HTML to be simple and not a programming language and latterly a similar design of RDF for the sharing of data.


Jeff Atwood proposed an extension that:

any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

So that got me thinking, how long before the various emulators that are used today to run 30 year old games start being written in JavaScript. The web would then deliver openness to closed platforms and preserve the lifespan of games (and all sorts of other applications of course!). Seems quite apt for a theory inspired by Tim Berners-Lee.

So I googled it. Turns out that I was right in my thinking. And more so, that people are already way ahead of me (nothing new there!). A quick search has already revealed a JavaScript Commodore 64 emulator and a JavaScript SNES emulator. And a Linux emulator!

The web: continuing to deliver on Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of openness!

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Jan
08

WordPress Custom Menus

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I decided I wanted to change how the top menu on this blog was working, so started in my usual manner: look at source code of header.php in the theme and start altering the WordPress calls to wp_list_categories to include or exclude certain categories. My intention was to separate my posts about HTML5 elements into separate menu link so they all appear together, then have Home showing all posts except the HTML5 ones to avoid them overwhelming the rest of the (infrequently posted!) content.

Poking around in the Graphene theme though things weren’t so obvious (no calls to wp_list_categories), so I headed back into the WordPress admin menus and spotted custom menus. This lives in Appearance -> Menus. Enter a name and create a menu – I called mine TopCategory.

After this if the theme supports custom menus you can choose which menu placeholder to use your new menu in place of. Graphene supports three menus and I selected the header menu. From the side panel particular pages, categories, posts etc can be added to the menu and then arranged. I went for Home (in the pages section), About (also in pages) and then the HTML5 category. This then added the menu as I had hoped. Click on the screenshot for a full-size view of this.

WordPress custom menu screen

The final step was to stop the HTML5 posts appearing in Home. A Graphene setting (Graphene options -> General -> Front page options) allowed me to select which categories to show on Home, in my case everything except HTML5.

I need to do some digging to understand how the custom menus hook into the theme so I can add them into themes that I create from scratch, but it has certainly made customising menus a much easier proposition without resorting to hardcoding of particular category ids to be specifically included or excluded.

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Aug
05

The importance of being skeptical

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Internet Explorer users have lower IQs than other browser users. It’s true. It must be: it was in all the papers, and on the BBC news website too, so it must be true. Except that it was a hoax.

For many people however, that first ‘fact’ about ‘stupid IE users’ will remain long in the memory, regardless of the subsequent debunking. Get ready to correct ill-informed know-it-all’s at parties for years to come.

The story ran that research had demonstrated that Internet Explorer users who completed an online IQ test were less intelligent than other browser users who completed the test. Internet Explorer users were claimed to have an average IQ of 80, compared with 110 for most other browsers, and in some cases 120 for Camino and Opera users.

Warning signs

The story was extensively reported, including on the BBC news website and in most UK national newspapers, despite a number of ‘red-lights’ in the study, suggesting that this story was too outrageous to be true. But because it was a good story, which reinforced people’s expectations, it ran, without the fact checking that (in my opinion) would be expected of professional journalists. Read the rest of this entry »

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Apr
28

Bad IT day (the olympic ticket sale, PSN hack and optional alt tags)

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Three IT stories came up earlier in the week that show how IT problems and decisions can adversely affect end-users – I’ve had a quick look at each in turn to understand the problems encountered and to try and learn lessons.

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Apr
10

No Return – Facebook & StackExchange ‘break’ textarea expected behaviour

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tl;dr

Comments in Facebook and StackExchange sites now make enter submit the comment rather than enter a carriage return. In Facebook using shift-enter will force a carriage return. In StackExchange this will still be ignored as carriage returns aren’t rendered. Read on for full analysis of why these changes have been made and follow-on implications.

So what’s the problem?

Facebook and the StackExchange (SE) family of Q&A sites have both recently ‘broken’ the expected behaviour when typing in a textarea (a multi-line textbox). A notable feature of both sites is users commenting on questions or posts, entering their thoughts in a textbox with multiple lines. Upon pressing enter the comment is submitted. At least, now it is. How it used to work (and indeed how it works on most of the internet) is that enter inserts a carriage return to allow multiple paragraphs to be typed or lists to be created and a separate button submits the comment. The sites have taken a different approach to the changes, so I’ll examine each in turn.

StackExchange was first to make the change. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mar
13

Service disruption

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The importance of data centre security and disaster recovery (DR) planning was highlighted following a recent incident at a Vodafone facility leading to a mobile network outage for customers in some regions for most of the day.  The accepted version of events at the time of writing from Vodafone is that “We had a break in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage done to some of our equipment“.

Disaster Recovery

Reflecting on what happened brings a few interesting thoughts to mind.  My first instinct was one of sympathy for Vodafone who didn’t directly cause this to happen and are the victims of the burglary.  Having worked in electrical engineering and seen the problems of thieves taking copper from sub-stations (and in the process interrupting the power supply) I naturally had sympathy.  

Disaster recovery (DR) then came to mind along with the fact that Vodafone appear not to have had any. When considering DR, organisations need to make an assessment of the likely frequency and cost of outages and consider this against the cost of having duplicate redundant facilities running, ready to pick up the service in the event of an outage. Read the rest of this entry »

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Feb
07

Q: When is HTML5 not HTML5?

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A: When it’s HTML.

New HTML5 logoConfused? After the announcements of the last few days you have every right to be.

I mentioned in my ‘about‘ page that I intended to write a series of posts looking at HTML5. To set the scene I had intended to start with a brief history of browsers and HTML implementations, working forward with detours into XHTML along the way before arriving at HTML5.

Given the HTML5 publicity relating to the new logo, I think it’ll work better if I leap, Tarantino style, into the middle of the story, before a few flashbacks explaining the events that led us here. As for how it all ends: who knows… I think we’ll have to do a ‘Kill Bill’ and leave that for part 2.
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Jan
13

Who owns your data? (Is the public cloud losing its silver lining?)

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Who owns your data?

A large part of the hype about Web 2.0 is about the ‘cloud’ i.e. allowing a 3rd party company to look after your data for you (e.g. Hotmail, Google Documents) and potentially add value by allowing you to connect socially with others (e.g. photos stored in Facebook or Flikr). Your data is always available to you, from any PC (or mobile device) no matter where you are in the world and you’re protected against losing your data if your PC has problems.

This cloud is turning out to have a dark lining, brought to attention by Yahoo’s leaked slide indicating that social bookmarking site ‘delicious’ would be closed as part of Yahoo’s streamlining of its services. This sent a wave of fear across the web, as people began to contemplate that the thousands of bookmarks that they’d built up over years of use could be summarily deleted as part of a corporate restructuring. It seems that our cloud based data may not be as permanent as the hype suggests. A similar situation occured with Google Wave, which has ceased active development: although to their credit Google have introduced a feature to export waves (albeit 10 at a time), and is looking for alternative hosting for existing waves. And back at troubled Yahoo, yet another similar situation is developing in Yahoo Video, which is set for closure. All user uploaded content is due to be deleted on 15th March 2011. Again to their credit Yahoo have introduced download functionality as a result, but users must retrieve their content by the expiry date to avoid deletion.
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