UX

Canadian government to appeal web accessibility ruling – “do as we say, not as we do”

by Jason on January 12, 2011 · 0 comments

Photo of a Taiwanese wheelchair sign by codepo8The Canadian government was recently ordered by a judge to make their websites accessible to the visually impaired, which surprised the hell out of me, because so many of their websites and programs are so painful to use, in my opinion, that I figured that they had to be that way to comply with someone’s misunderstanding of online accessibility.

Of course, I’m not terribly surprised that they’re appealing the ruling, though I’m disappointed in the potential precedent they might set by arguing that there are other ways to get at the information without using the internet.

To be clear, it’s 100% possible to make modern, efficient, and even attractive websites that comply with accessibility guidelines for the visually (and otherwise) impaired, especially for government sites, which aren’t exactly pinnacles of web 2.0 or gaming.

The thing of it is, if you’re applying for a federal grant that involves online work, they make accessibility mandatory.  That’s a requirements doc I pulled from a random government program (Heritage Canada in this case) but I’ve seen it before in client work proposals.  It doesn’t explicitly say accessibility, but when it says things like “All core website content and functionality must be accessible in any browser, although its presentation may vary… all users, regardless of their browser, must have access to the site’s basic content and functionality,” well, that’s kind of what this lawsuit was about…

It’s always kind of amusing to see companies and organizations get hit with their own rules, like when Bell Canada got nailed for violating the do not call list that they maintain or record labels being charged with piracy, but as I said earlier, I hope this appeal will get squashed, or better yet, never get filed.  Yes, I realize that it’s my tax dollars at stake, but it’s also a significant beachhead in the online space that needs to be protected.

Photo by Christian Heilmann.

5 ways to improve IMDB

by Jason on September 22, 2010 · 3 comments

IMDBIt looks like IMDB has finally gotten a bit of a facelift, and there are some things I like about it, but I’ll be honest, it’s not working for me yet.  Good marketers and designers try to envision their product’s users as imaginary people so they can figure out the use cases and make sure the value’s there, but I guess I’m the odd one out for being the guy who just wants to see where else I know the actor from in a given movie or TV show.

Anyway, if they’ve got any money left in the development budget, here are my 5 wish list items:

Where have I seen that guy? Like I just said, I’m always going to the site to figure out where else I’ve seen an actor (I’m bad with faces but good with voices.)  They’ve added a “best known for” feature on the actor profile page, which helps, but would it kill them to put that in the cast list?  Don’t tell me it’s a scaling issue (and let’s put aside the rant about database-driven UI design,) just denormalize the sucker and move on.

Deep data. Why can’t I get a list of every actor who’s ever played an American President, and better still, can we break that down between fictional presidents and actual ones?  There’s some capacity for the concept of characters, but usually each president is a different one.  There are tons of queries like this that a basic cast and crew list just doesn’t cover.  Maybe tagging would help this, I don’t know.

The damned Kevin Bacon game. There’s got to be an exec in the company who keeps asking about this one.  Or maybe it’s the “don’t hire” flag in interviews because they’re tired of hearing about it. (And of course I mean the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game, not some weird version where he’s been damned to hell, though that would be something.)

Audio fingerprinting. Here’s my dream app: I’m watching something on TV, don’t know what it is (maybe the TV guide thing is down) or just want to pull the cast info in a hurry.  I fire up an app, it grabs a sound bite, and just like the music identification services, the movie gets identified.  Granted, probably not something in the current data set, but that would be cool, and if it could use that to tell where you are in a show, the commerce options would be amazing (click here to buy that gun Schwarzenneger’s using!)

An API. Sites that do valuable stuff with their data are more likely to provide APIs.  Sites that have DB in their name and are basically front end browsers tend to restrict data a lot closer.  C’mon IMDB, start the race! (I think they do have an API, or at least feeds, but it’s not cheap.  Amazon, which owns IMDB, probably provides a good chunk of what you’d need through their commerce API anyway.)

When IMDB came out, it was one of the maybe 5 reasons that the internet was actually interesting.  It’s probably still in the top 10, and the new facelift is nice and all, but I’d love to see it grow even further.

A better, more honest EULA experience

by Jason on February 20, 2009 · 0 comments

Random thought while installing the latest ASP.NET MVC build (latest to me, the latest one to the party, that is).  Here’s the usual EULA acceptance form:

That's not fine print; I shrank the image

That's not fine print; I shrank the image

Now, this form doesn’t do it, but I’ve seen some (the WoW EULA, for example) that make you actually scroll down to the bottom before accepting the terms, which thankfully doesn’t have a timer attached to it to ensure you actually made the pretense of reading them.

As a compromise, I’d like to see a form that shows the “I accept the terms in the License Agreement” checkbox regardless of the status of the scrollbar, but if the bar’s at the top, adds the word “blindly” to the label.