2021 (p. 1/2)

Assisting editors to keep a website accessible: Sa11y and Editoria11y …and a plugin for Kirby

No matter how thoroughly a website is checked for accessibility by its creators, content editors play an important role in keeping it that way. Two little tools assist editors in their work, alerting them if content added through the CMS breaks certain accessibility principles. As a key building block in an inclusive publishing strategy, I look at the options and provide a turnkey solution for Kirby.
#design-for-all
2021

Douglas Adams: Hyperland

Available on the Internet Archive, this somewhat trippy, and for sure visionary documentary on hypertext from thirty years ago still keeps to inspire; what with Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and all those other pioneers in it.
2021

Training that technical writing muscle

Many think of designers as those restlessly creative, artist minds whose work consists mainly of producing ever new ideas and concepts. While that kind of work is genuinely fun to do, I have always seen design mostly as the work of digging ever deeper, working out the details, and most importantly taking the perspective of somebody unfamiliar with the subject.
2021

Minus

minus.social

This piece is actually relevant in so many ways; not only does it reverse the logic all of today's media appears to be built upon, but it generally provokes to reconsider the assumed infinity of resources in this world (here: attention of human beings).
2021

Crowdforcing: When What I “Share” Is Yours

uncomputing.org

Every "sharing" interaction in a digital system has externalities – costs to somebody not involved in the transaction themselves: whenever an individual shares a resource or information about themselves, they are likely also sharing something that isn't theirs.
2021

Luxury Surveillance

reallifemag.com

Using surveillance-based services out of a (perceived or real) position of privilege contributes to normalizing systematic surveillance on a societal level.
2021

Conversations on Legal Design (4/4): Privacy icons, and reflection on the series

Previously: In seminar session three, Prof. Helena Haapio provided insight into her work on contract design and promoting “proactive law” thinking. Before diving into the topic of privacy icons Dr. Zohar Efroni, from the Weizenbaum Institute for […]
2021

“I, Obscura,” a dark pattern zine launched from Stanford and UCLA

pacscenter.stanford.edu

Scholars at Stanford and UCLA assembled this zine (on Issuu.com or as a 45MB PDF) on deceptive patterns, primarily to make them more tangible to non-techy people.
#design
2021

Contract design for humans: preventing cognitive accidents

simplificationcentre.org.uk

In the report "Contract design for humans", Rob Waller presents an interesting perspective on contract design that could easily be translated into other areas of legal design, or even to UX at large.
2021

I am Definitely Manipulated, Even When I am Aware of it. It s Ridiculous! -- Dark Patterns from the End-User Perspective

arxiv.org

This study, based on a survey of 406 individuals, shines light on the fact that end users very much notice when they are misled by deceptive design patterns, yet they still feel manipulated even after noticing that.
2021

Conversations on Legal Design (3/4): Designing contracts

Previously: In the second seminar session, Prof. Monica Palmirani introduced the complex but valuable topic of legal ontologies. After the throught-provoking general introduction by Arianna Rossi and the deep dive into legal informatics with Monica Palmirani […]
2021

Conversations on Legal Design (2/4): Ontologies in the legal design process

In the second seminar of the "Conversations on Legal Design" series, Prof. Monica Palmirani introduced the concept of legal ontology -- more specifically the requirement for legal design artefacts to maintain the detailed information of the legal context.
2021

International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising

forbrukerradet.no

This report not only summarizes and categorizes the harmful consequences of surveillance-based advertising (manipulation, discrimination, misinformation, underminding competition, security risks, and privacy violations) but presents surveillance free alternatives ...along with a call to policymakers to ban surveillance advertising.
2021

Conversations on Legal Design (1/4): A multi-faceted discipline

In the first of four "Conversations on Legal Design" seminar sessions, Dr. Arianna Rossi challenged participants to consider legal design from different perspectives: legal design is not just a problem-solving methodology, but also a framework for empirical research in legal and design challenges alike. Yet, its true potential may actually lie in envisioning alternative futures at large.
2021

Birds and prey in the forest

2021

A simple approach to improving form design

clearleft.com

“The question protocol”, as suggested by Richard Rutter, is a handy heuristic to evaluate the data fields of a form:
When designing a form, you can ensure you are gathering only pertinent information by always invoking the question protocol. The question protocol forces you – and your organization – to ask yourselves why you are requesting a piece of information from a customer. Getting to the bottom of why you’re asking a question means determining precisely how you will be using the answer, if at all.
2021

Accessibility for People with Astigmatism

essentialaccessibility.com

While high contrast is important for accessibility, this article is a good reminder why overdoing it is not a good idea:
There is a myth about white text over black backgrounds being the best color contrast combination for accessibility, but in […]
#design-for-all
2021

Why dark mode isn’t as accessible as you might think

codeenigma.com

“Is dark mode impacting your users”, Maygen Jacques asks in this article about some less-considered aspects of designing for “dark mode” — specifically the impact of fuzzy vision from white text on black background for users with […]
#design-for-all
2021

Frank Elavsky on Twitter

twitter.com

In this Twitter thread, Frank Elavsky directs attention to a neglected aspect of common data viz accessibility discussions.
#design-for-all
2021

Why CMSs should not send the FLoC opt-out header by default

Google claims to have found a possible solution (actually it’s just one of many ongoing explorations into this sphere) to replace third-party cookies with a supposedly more “privacy-friendly” alternative, but — while indeed eliminating […]
2021

Open source privacy notice design patterns (juro-privacy/free-privacy-notice)

github.com

If you’re working with privacy notices for the web, chances are that you have seen the privacy policy of juro.com, which rose to fame during the 2018 spring of GDPR panic as an example of legal design applied in a real-world project. Juro and Stefania […]
2021

Reposting a Tweet by Tom Morris

twitter.com

What happened to our culture that this kind of abusive behaviour became so normalized it is not even questioned any more by most? Here’s a free and simple design heuristic for you: Don’t design any artifact that you would throw out of your house […]
2021

Skipping skip links

vasilis.nl

Such a refreshing take by Vasilis van Gemert: why do we make people "skip" over navigation links placed at the beginning of a page instead of putting them to the end and offer a "jump to navigation" skiplink?
#design-for-all
2021

Minimum Viable Basic Human Decency

exple.tive.org

In this 2016 post, Mike Hoye presents a “Minimum Viable Set of User Stories” as a baseline of what software needs to enable to qualify as an MVP. It includes items such as User changes gender User is managing an addiction User is not always […]
#design-for-all #design
2021

Favouriting a tweet by Eric Bailey

twitter.com

This Twitter thread by Eric Bailey points at an issue that the inclusive design community is well aware of, but that is ignored at large by the audiences of these “Best Websites of …” competitions and top-lists: A lot of (I’d go as far as to say: the majority of) websites celebrated by design agencies and decorated with “design awards” are lacking even the most basic consideration of accessibility. Eric is not doing thorough a11y audits, just some quick and improvised testing of keyboard accessibility (focus styles), colour contrast etc. – these are issues even a junior web developer could notice within a few minutes.
#design-for-all
2021