Unintentionally Blank

Thanks very much to Mostafa Mourad, a 27 year old web designer who recently discovered he was colour blind. People who are colour blind have different needs to most users of the internet, just as blind people do, but this thoughtful post seeks to enlighten the rest of us somewhat in the way that colour blind people see the world.

Yeah, I know for a link it’s taken me a while to post it, but it’s here to remind me as much as it is to show anyone else who hasn’t seen it too.

I have been meaning to create a new design for this blog, to accompany the stylesheet switcher, for quite a while and today I finally got round to it. If you select “Tentacles” (the jury is still out on the name), you will see my latest design. It shows what can be accomplished with different stylesheets and the same basic content, plus has given me practice working with transparent pngs, fixed width designs, absolutely and relativley positioned divs and z-indexes. I think it turned out rather well, what do you think?

Also, it has come to my attention that there are problems using both comments and my contact form. Continue reading “A(nother) New Design and Some Site Problems” »

Inspired by Sam Devol’s Wordpress Tools and Resources and Yvonne Tran’s follow up list of essentials for the Mac, I noticed a few things missing that I could not use my computer without. This in itself is not unusual, but I thought I would share my list because the items on it have become such “must haves” on my computer that I find myself trying to use them even when I’m on someone else’s machine. I reckon if I can get so used to them, they must be good! Oh, and they’re all free too!

Continue reading “Stuff I Couldn’t Use A Computer Without” »

Accessibility is not just about blind users who use screenreading software to hear websites. More than a year and a half ago Joe Clark wrote an article for A List Apart under the name Big, Stark and Chunky. It brought to light a different group of web users that need to be considered when making your site accessible. There are groups of users who aren’t blind, but do have visual impairments, they don’t use screenreaders, instead tend to increase the text size on websites or use magnifiers to view the web. Joe’s article goes on to describe how a site should be designed to accomodate these users and how CSS can help. Light on dark text, single columns, simple navigation and large fonts are the keys to the design we need.

In order to increase awareness of these techniques (and show off my own style sheet switcher) I tore apart my site’s design today in order to come up with a high contrast design that would be more accessible for visually impaired users. Continue reading “High Contrast Design” »