This blog post by the German privacy blog “Datenschutz-Notizen” poses more questions than it provides answers, but I find it noteworthy for bringing together three of my core interests: legal design, accessibility and privacy. The text refers to a court ruling from Italy, where the […]
Category "Design" (1/5)
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Sometimes, an article from 18 years ago can still be of great relevance and inspiration. That’s what happened when I encountered Clay Shirky’s essay on “Situated software” (by way of an equally interesting personal project by Robin Sloan) today. […]
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This is a 9 years old article. Yet, while the quantitative numbers may have shifted in one direction or the other, the qualitative statements stand unchanged: it cannot – and must not – be assumed that all JavaScript code is executed for every visitor of a website. […]
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Stuart Langridge presents this simple, yet convincing flow chart to illustrates all the various things that may go wrong as users request a web site requiring JavaScript code. […]
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Molly Holzschlag called for more attention to the UNESCO’s ROAM principles, a United Nations policy framework for an internet for all: Rights, Openness, Accessibility to all, Multistakeholder participation.
Never once can I recall a discussion with any Web colleagues about The ROAM Principles. They are a framework for Internet (and #Web) universality and we need them. We're too fragmented and without unity and discourse, we will lose what's left of the idealism and hope born of Web.
This Miss Molly 2022-02-19 […] -
This academic paper is based on a systematic content analysis of legal texts, building a statistic on how often flowcharts and similar visualizations were used to make legal concepts more approachable. The result – astonishingly, but maybe not surprisingly, an almost complete absence of […]
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This looks like a very interesting impulse for more inclusive UX research:
Fable released a tool called the Accessible Usability Scale , which we have made freely available. It is specifically meant for conducting research with assistive technology users. The AUS is a 10-item […]
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While WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 are the current standards demanded by many legislative frameworks, work is well under way towards the next version, WCAG 2.2, which can also be expected to become the overall baseline at some point. Hence, this review of the drafted requirements is an interesting read. For UI […]
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As with any fields of design, confirmation bias can stop us from seeing the reality. Eric Eggert points out how (in this field of design, too, one may add) only verifying solutions with real users – in this case people with disabilities – will lead to good results. […]
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Not just due to my long-standing research interest in technology non-use, but as the ever-critical luddite in regards to “social media” adoption, I always enjoy reading so-called “silo-quit” stories.
I was moved to retire from engaging with my social drug of choice, Twitter. After tens of thousands of tweets across more than a decade, I vowed to stop responding to – let alone arguing with – strangers in that particular thunderdome of despair.
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Starting with an analogy to tech in orienteering sports, Lawrie Phipps looks at the excluding factor of the growing reliance of a certain stack of technology:
[…] practices in education have shifted, and we now have more technology as a default. That technology will have a […]
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She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — […]
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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. -
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 “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. -
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. -
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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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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Terence Eden tells the story of a young woman who, forced by circumstances, has to use a public website using a tiny gaming device’s browser. And it works. Because designers did their job:
The PSP’s web browser is – charitably – pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of […]
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I’m always happy to randomly stumble upon accessibility updates on websites — today I noticed that caniuse.com (the most comprehensive resource for web developers to assess feature availability in different browsers) updated their colored tables with new cell backgrounds: […]
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As I am currently working on an inclusive project with a focus on reaching disadvantaged populations, last week’s Creative Mornings Berlin meetup featuring a talk by Lena Alfter on typography for dyslexic people could not have come at a better time. Lena Alfter, a young designer from Germany […]