2021 (1/2)
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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. -
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.
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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). -
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. -
Using surveillance-based services out of a (perceived or real) position of privilege contributes to normalizing systematic surveillance on a societal level. -
In this final session of the “Conversations on Legal Design” seminar series, Dr. Zohar Efroni introduced the Weizenbaum Institute’s work on “privacy icons” that aim to convey legal information related to internet users’ privacy rights; as a foundation for the […]
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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. […]
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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. -
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. -
In the “Conversations on Legal Design” series’ third session, Prof. Helena Haapio gave an introduction to her work on contract design and — among other things — promoted “proactive law” as an alternative way of looking at law and […]
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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. -
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. -
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. -
“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.
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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 reality, white text on black backgrounds […]
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“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 astigmatism:
Let’s […]
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In this Twitter thread, Frank Elavsky directs attention to a neglected aspect of common data viz accessibility discussions.
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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 Passera, the designer behind the project […]
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If any person behaved like an app—rifled through your address book, fitted a tracking device to your car, obsessively logged what books and TV shows you watched, and wanted to disturb you at any moment of the day or night—you’d throw them out of your house and call the police.
—Tom Morris 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 for anti-social conduct!
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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? -
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, and/or or not reliably, connected to the […]
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Let's do a quick #a11y review of the first website for each voting category for @AWWWARDS' best of 2020.
—Eric Bailey 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. […]
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If restaurant managers handled food safety regulations the same way that a lot of marketers deal with privacy regulations, then restaurants would be bragging on how low a score they could get from the health dept. and still stay open
—Don Marti That’s not just a really good analogy, but an indicator for how morally rotten that industry is!
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While usability and UX have long been obsessed with simplification, following the “Don’t make me think” credo, Ralph Ammer formulates while the reduction of depth and the increased abstraction that comes with that is maybe not the best outcome:
Our decisions have consequences for ourselves and others. A simplified appearance can make us blind to those consequences. […] Simplification is a powerful design strategy. Naturally the button to make an emergency call should be as simple as possible. And yet, we also need further design strategies that help us accept, understand, and interact with complex situations in our lives.
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