Accessibility and Usability – Part 3: Tools

This is part of a series on accessibility and usability. See the contents page for more. Now that we have talked about Code and Navigation and Design, I’ll talk briefly about a few tools you can use to help you do a mini accessibility study on your website, and briefly point to some resources on doing [...]

Accessibility and Usability – Part 2: Navigation and Design

This is part of a series on accessibility and usability. See the contents page for more. Design and navigation are important aspects of your site’s accessibility. Clear, concise navigation helps users that must use their keyboard to get around, and a clear, clean design helps users find your content with a minimum of fuss. A good [...]

Accessibility and Usability – Part 1: Code

This is part of a series on accessibility and usability. See the contents page for more. The first step to creating accessible and usable websites is to create clean, semantically marked and validated up XHTML. Well formedness, doctype, and validation First, code should be well formed, and adhere to the doctype declaration at the top of the page <!DOCTYPE [...]

Accessibility and Usability

This series of posts is in preparation for a talk I am giving Thursday at the Nebraska Library Association on Accessibility and Usability. Accessibility and usability are hot keywords right now, and usability testing is a hot new money making venture. What one doesn’t often hear is that much of what makes a website usable and [...]

Computing in the clouds

This post in in response to Cory Doctorow’s recent column for the Guardian, “Not every cloud has a silver lining.” I think many of his points are well spoken, but I’m playing devils advocate here on a few things. Here’s something you won’t see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs [...]

Software development in Digital Humanities

One of the topics that greatly interested me from THATCamp 2009 (which really wasn’t addressed at Digital Humanities 2009) was software development/process of digital humanities projects. I’m interested in questions of workflow and task distribution—what does the team look like, and what does it actually do on a day to day basis? I had a [...]

Digital Humanities and THATCamp 2009

So I have an overdue post due from DH09 and THATCamp09. Maybe I should first explain what those are. Digital Humanities 2009 Conference Digital Humanities is the web conference for those involved in (wait for it…) digital humanities. This was the first academic conference I’d been to, adhering mostly to 1.5 hour sessions with three papers each, [...]

Poetry meaning and folksonomy flaws

In my Electronic Texts class this semester, we have decided on a class project: a poem illustrator. The idea is simple enough: input a poem and the program will pick a flickr picture as an illustration. But how to pick the picture? You could analyze the poem, remove stop words, find the most common words, and search [...]

with a little help from my friends

This is a sort of follow up to yesterday’s post. Steve posted a nice comment, assuring me that “In the end, you’re better off developing a relaxed attitude toward the fact that you will *always* feel a bit stupid in this business.” I completely agree, and on some level I know this—at the same time, the [...]

The learning curve

I’ve been busy these last few weeks. Though I dreamed of having lots of free time to read and relax post grad school, free time has been hampered by two things: Geoff and I decided to look for a new house, and I’m having to learn a LOT for the new job. If you want [...]