If you happen to have a spare 5 minutes I suggest you check out my friend Carl Hubbers’ blog. He is currently ‘on tour’ with his kiwi mates sailing round the Caribbean following his fellow country men as they surprise everyone with their knowledge of cricket, even beating the English in the first game.
Despite spending every day on a boat he has managed to update his blog daily with tales of their tomfoolery. Check it out…
It’s coming up to the end of the day and we are all sitting round reviewing our sites performance using the IE accessibility tool bar. I now have a reason for using IE. It appears a lot more detailed and useful than the firefox version. Funny considering IE isn’t standards compliant.
All in all today has been very productive and enlightening. I now feel qualified to assess a site’s accessibility compliance and will first put this knowledge in action by reviewing this site. I’ve had a chat to Mike and we will put together a presentation for the rest of the UX team covering the high level aspects of the subject.
I hope I can remember everything. There is a supporting document too which covers everything we looked at and breaks it down in a easy to use format. I will summarise the details on this site shortly too.
The fact is there are so many things you can consider when approaching accessibility but you just need to decide how rigid you need to be for your particular project. As Trenton said, the W3C guidelines are exactly that. They are not law. They are supposed to be there to guide you to produce the best possible site reaching the widest possible audience
Here’s a couple of tips to get you going…
Tip #1
Put a space between home and page when writing the word home page as screen readers can’t pronounce it properly.
Tip #2
Don’t put colons at the end of items such as labels. They become very repetitive and boring.
It has certainly opened my eyes.
It is lunch and I’m taking a break from a day of training on accessibility. Mike Holt and myself have come along for the day to put some knowledge behind our new titles ‘accessibility guru’. Well that is how it has been described within the UX team. I wouldn’t put myself on that pedestal but hopefully by the end of the day I will know a bit more than I did yesterday.
The course is being run by a guy called Trenton from www.webcredible.com. They do a number of courses based around web standards.
We have spent the morning looking at exactly what accessibility is about, who it effects and how to use best practices and techniques.
Going well so far but lunch is over so I’ll update later…
Holy moly! It has finally arrived. The day is almost upon us. Abercrombie & Fitch will finally land this side of the Atlantic on the 22nd of March!
For those of you unaware of this fashion giant, they are an American label which produces what I would class as classic ‘college jock’ clothing for men and women. I discovered their clothes on my first trip to the states and fell in love straight away. The detail and cut of the clothing is excellent. Somehow they always seem to get it right and the quality means it never looks cheap. These days you see everyone trying to copy the style all the way down to Primark. Ultimately though you can just tell the difference. Maybe it has something to do with the people wearing the clothes too. As until now the only way to get hold of the stuff was by going to the states or buy the odd item that found its way in to a random little boutique somewhere. That has meant it hasn’t saturated the high street. It remains to be seen what will happen now they have a store here.
Saying that, it will be on Saville Row which indicates they are definitely targeting a certain demographic, namely that which can afford to shop down Bond St. Which says to me that the clothing will be way over priced. I guess you could say that’s a good thing. If you have the money to pay or, like me you travel to and have friends in America. The bonus of this situation to me is that, given that they stock the same items, I can go in and try things out for fit then have someone send me the same thing from the states, or pick it up while over on business. Perfect!
Knowing me though, I won’t have the patience to wait and will just buy it regardless.
Anyway, only 8 days to go. I might have to make an effort to check it out on the opening day. I wonder if it will be a free for all. They have certainly been marketing it around town these past weeks.
To be continued…
Just spending the evening fiddling with the site and fixing a few bits and pieces on my other sites - Yash is out with the girls so I’m baby sitting.
I was just looking a Mark Rickets’ blog having had a comment from him following the mention of his plugin and I notice he has quite a few photos on there. I have thought about adding pictures to break up the monologue but so far that has just extended to the picture of Hot Fuzz. I guess the main reason is that I have my flickr account so all my photos get dumped there. I have had plenty of ideas of ‘themes’ of photos. Not least a collection of ‘design and function’ photos of which I have a number. That will come. I had thought I’d integrate them in to some sort of Flash viewer - make it all a bit more exciting. Flash is also a pretty good way of dynamically loading images too.
So the reason for the rambling is that the subject just reminded me that me and Yash are on the cover of a new book! It is published by her company and is on the subject of yoga through pregnancy and once your baby is born. Here is the cover:
You can buy it from amazon too - Breathe Your Way Through Birth with Yoga
Things have been buzzing for me since saturday. I went down to the local running track and re-calibrated my Nike+ system. As mentioned before, I knew it was falling well short of the correct distance. As it turned out I was losing 700m over 10km! That is quite a difference. As I was recalibrating I could see it was short roughly 7m over 100. The process actually involves a minimum distance of 400m which is the same as one lap of the inside lane of the track. You have to run it once (I did twice to be sure) and then a walking version.
The result has been astounding, and inspiring too. Having got things set I left the track and did 11km over a fairly flat course. On that run I broke the 40 minute mark. I knew I could from my run in Battersea Park. That was good.
On Monday I went out at lunch and did a river circuit, holborn - temple - tower - westminster - temple and back to holborn. It worked out about 15.3km and I finished in 59min something. Wow! That was sweet. I was averageing under 4 minutes per km over 15km! Previously it was taking me that long to do about 12.5km.
So I went out at lunch today with the intention to just clock up some distance for one of my challenges but didn’t think I was up to a big or fast one. As it went I felt better and better although I didn’t think I was pushing it. This time I went out as far as Vauxhall Bridge and back. The distance when I got back to the office was (I think) 17.1km. The time was just over 1hr 5min! When I uploaded my run it clocked my 10km at 37′37″. Holy shit. That is unbelievable! I remember when I was happy to do a 10 minute mile, which seemed a long way at that! My 5km was 18′31″ too. If I can keep this up I’ll be well happy. The other thing was that I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself either so I hope there is room for development yet. If I can translate that time in to a triathlon I feel confident I could break the top 10.
Anyway, that’s enough of my bragging. Sorry. I am just buzzing about it. If you didn’t know, 15 years ago I weighed about 18 stone (252 pounds) and did no excercise to think of. I could just about muster the strength to run for a bus!
Here I am working away and, I have to admit, dancing at my desk. The people in the office must think I’m a muppet but there are some tunes that you just can’t help but move to.
I have a Powerbook along side my desktop which essentially acts as a tunes server (and testing machine). It has a 90gb harddrive which pretty much maxed out with music. Recently as I’ve been listening to albums I been dropping individual tunes in to seperate playlists to create favourites by genre. I’ve been sat here listening to the dance track list on shuffle. It is just one classic after another. I’m on track 9 now and it has played out as such:
There’s 27 in the list - not one filler. Well. We’ll see…
I pity people who can’t listen to music while they work. Man, I feel like going clubbing!
Talking of clubbing. It has been a very long time since I saw a dancefloor. That’s what happens when you turn 30 and become a father… Anyway, looks like I’ll be going to see John Digweed at Heaven on Good Friday with my friend Ade. I think the last time I saw him almost 10 years ago in San Fransisco along side Sasha. Quality night dancing on the podium in my tight white sailor boy bell bottoms, top off… Ha ha! That was the city to do it too.
So, I’ll have to report back on the night. Maybe get a few photos.
BTW, we’re on to Ture To Form by Hybrid now…
Have you noticed? I’ve now got my Nike+ stats appearing in the right-hand column. Sweet! Thanks go to Mark Rickett for the creation of the plugin.
I had some trouble getting it to work initially. First I didn’t notice it was pointing to a different directory to the one it needed to. That fixed I then had to manually add the php in to the sidebar. No problem though. So now it is all working I just need to go in adjust the code out put to match my style sheet. It currently uses strong tags which I have set to Georgia and don’t use in that context. Hopefully that should take long. Beyond that I might even fiddle with the php to see if I can get the average pace of each individual run to show. Another great feature would be surfacing my challenges. You can show your goals but I don’t have any. I just have a bunch of challenges which I’ve got going with some friends.
I’ve also come across another Nike+ piece of php which pulls your info from the site and actually presents each run in the format of a graph. When I get a chance I thought I might create an actual Nike+ page to hold this too. If can remember where I got the script I will add a link.
So I finally got to see Hot Fuzz. Had the in-laws staying so me and Yash could slip off for the afternoon and check it out.
There has been a lot of buzz about the film and having seen it I’d say it is justified. It is full of laughs, the woman next to couldn’t stop all the way through. That’s good because atmosphere in the cinema was infectious and had me laughing out loud too. Not something I do often. Simon Pegg was good in his role but Nick Frost was the star of the show. Amazing to think he’s had no formal training and just got in to acting through Pegg.
I hadn’t read any reviews of the film so didn’t know anything about the story line. It is pretty ridiculous but then that all adds to the comedy value of the film in the same way as it does for Shaun of the Dead. I won’t go in to details of the story, that’s like seeing trailers (such as Die Hard 4) in which they clearly show you the climax of the film when the bad guys croak.
If you haven’t seen the film then I say go. It is one you could watch on dvd because the nature of the film doesn’t demand the big screen, but it is worth going for atmosphere. It has been along time since I went to the cinema and this was worth the wait.
conceptual