Posted: February 15th, 2010 | Author: Jeff Van Campen | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Update: You can now download the Keynote Presentation used at this event. There is also a companion Word Document or PDF.
Introduction
Ben Dodson is talking about how London Web Standards is now family entertainment.
Past Presentations: Web Fonts, YQL / Flickr API, HTML5, Mobile Web Best Practices, jQuery.
Future presentations: Speed / Unit Testing, JavaScript Optimisation, User Experience, Web to App.
Gowalla Spot for London Web Standards.
@media discount for LWS members to be emailed.
Jobs
- Ben Dodson is looking for PHP Web Developers
- Jam is looking for a Mid-senior Web Developer, fulltime roll
- ORM are looking for a front-end web developer, talk to Gavin or Lisa.
Design Competition
The website will be a focal point for London Web Standards. We’ll be sending details to the mailing list tomorrow.
Sandi Wassmer
She’s here to convince us that inclusive design is the way to go.
Accessibility is an overused word. It’s “just not working.” People think that it’s something they just have to do. To be a little politically incorrect: it’s what you have to do to make disabled folks happy.
She wants to give it better PR.
People think of accessiblity as somethign you do after you build a website. It’s something you do when you “get out the checklist.”
Accessiblity as it currently stands is currently very misunderstood.
Understanding the aims of Accessiblity
“It creates an unobstructed bridge between me and the world.”
“But I went to art school and I see things visually, albeit at 10 centimeters.”
Stats
90% of people registered blind have some risidual vision
3% of people registerd blind are completely blind.
Purchasing power is 80 million pounds a year.
What is Inclusive Design?
Same as Universal Design and Design for All.
Seven Principles of Inclusive Design
These are the Sandi-ised, plain English version of these principles (with the original version in brackets).
- Unbiased – everybody’s welcome (Equitable use)
- Flexible (Flexibility in use)
- Straight-forward (Simple and intuitive use)
- Clear, no ambiguity (Perceptible information)
- Sensible when dealing with errors (Tolerance for error)
- Minimises physical effort (Low physical effort)
- Doesn’t stop you from being able to use it (Appropriate size and shape)
You have to know and understand the users that use the product or website.
“We can create different experiences for different users with one website.”
There is no right or wrong. In an ideal world there would be no client, no budget. In a real world we have clients, and we have to make compromises.
It’s a learning process. Someone always comes up with a better solution. We have lots of knowledge and lots of people sharing it.
“We want people who think. We want people who create and user their minds.”
How does the process differ when you’re creating an inclusive website?
The Brief should include a mention of inclusive design.
The Process should use real people . Have an Inclusion Leader on your team, who makes sure the principles of inclusive design are adhered to.
Technical Scoping – backend and frontend people should understand what eachoterh do and how it imacts ont he other. Talk, talk and talk some more.
Testing – even people who “get it right the first time” need to test.
More Testing – you need to make sure the whole thing works together.
The G in WCAG
They are guidelines not rules. They make you think, but don’t restrict you. Allows you to think about what you’re doing and think about the users who will be using your website.
Usability
Different from accessibility.
It’s about specific users with specific goals in specfiic context.
Three key areas
- effectiveness
- efficiency
- satisfaction
Tends to go together because there are so many overlaps.
It Begins With Web Standards
Progressive Enhancement is an extension of Inclusive Design.
Progressive Enhancement is a strategy. Graceful Degradation is an afterthought.
Internet Users are people and people come in all shapes and sizes
Marketers and Analyitics specialists should be listened to, but they don’t really understand human nature.
Peter, George and John
Same to marketers: same demographic, except:
Peter – internet lover. Firefox with all the extension. Loves JavaScript and Flash.
George is a luddite. Has JavaScript turned off.
John – Like Peter, technially savvy, but he’s visually impaired.
One last thought
Inclusive Design brings people together
Q & A
- Q: I have a website that runs well on the desktop, but doesn’t run on mobile. Would you class that as non-accessible, non-inclusive?
- A: Yes. Technology moves forward. Two ways to look at mobile: mobile style sheets (existing content) or repurpose the existing content for a mobile browser. It’s a difficult thing. 65% of people are using mobile to surf the Internet in the UK. In third world countries many people don’t have desktop computers they only have mobiles. Try your best. If that’s a market you want to server, you need to think about that.
- Q: How can I test if my website is actully accessible?
- A: Use real people to test it.
- Q: Where can I find them?
- A: You’ve got a couple blind folk here. It’s about budget. If you client doesn’t have budget, you won’t be albe to do it. The British Computer Association for the Blind has a list of 300 people who will test.
- Q: You’re preaching to the convereted here. How do we get the message of inclusivity to the “boring banks.”
- A: It needs to be brought to the mainstream. Accessiblity talk to another, but we need to mainstream it. The whole point is not having specialised thing, but including everybody. It’s social change. It’s time. Chalenge what blind it. Challenge norms and steotypes. “I’m not what you think blind is.”
- Q: What is the best way develop an accessible website: write the best semantic code or… ?
- A: If you get underneath the WCAG. The solution isn’t technical. You need to understand the people using the website. It’s not technical, it’s about structure. There isn’t one solution.
- Q: Have you ever pushed for exclusive design?
- A: I don’t like exclusivity. I find it difficult to think about that sort of thing. I’m a “human rights marketer.” Exclusive feels wrong philosophically.
- Q: The statistics that you gave at the beginning. Where can we get more information? Your website?
- A: Lots of places. I’m giving the presentation to Ben, so you’ll be able to track that down. W3C. WebAim. London Accessibility Camp.
- A: (Jim) Mike Davies redesigned the Legal & General website. He did a presentation on the business case for usability at London Web Standards in 2007.
- A: (From the audience) We built a better website because the vice-president of BP couldn’t see our website. We’re trying to reach old people. They’re the decision makers. They have visual impairments, but don’t like to admit it.
- Q: As a vision impaired user, what is your experience of the internet like?
- A: Most websites are frustrating. I have frustrations with pretty much every single website I use.
- Q: Contrary to what has been said here, I’ve found that big companies are hell-bent to have their websites “accessible,” but often go over the top. Example: adding access keys to every link.
- A: We do have nice clean, semantic markup, etc. What people think accessibilty is and what it really is are two different things at the moment. HTML 5 comes along with landmarks and ARIA. You have to understand the directions things are going (even if you don’t want to use HTML5 because it won’t validate right now). A lot of people who think about accessibility think it’s a checklist, but if you really look under the hood, it’s not logical. Don’t look at it as a list, as a rule. This is why I’m saying “Inclusive Design.” It’s about including as many people as possible.
- Q: Make it usable by a 10 year old. Average reading age in the UK is 9. WCAG, the C is content…?
- A: Yes, part of the guidelines is that text should be clear. Plain English. It’s about thinking abou the user’s. Not everyone has English as a first language. Be as simple as possible. People scan. People don’t read the Intenet like they’re reading a book.
Posted: January 18th, 2010 | Author: Jeff Van Campen | Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Warning: This is a live blog post. I’ll be typing as it happens. Expect typos, mistakes and my own distinctive interpretation of the night’s events.
A few quick announcements from Ben Dodson
- Next month’s talk is an accessibility talk
- If you’re looking for work, contact @bendodson and he can direct you to someone who is hiring
- We might do stickers so everyone knows one another’s names (next time)
- We are a social group, we’re all about everyone talking to one another (we’re not just lectures)
Ben Weiner takes the stage
(You can find a transcript of Ben’s talk on his website.)
Ben has been waiting for web fonts, like most of us, for some time. He’s going to take us on a quick ramble through web fonts.
What is a “web font”?
Anything that is recognisably a font transferred over the net for rendering text on the page.
Only two people at this event (other than Ben) are currently using web fonts.
What is a “font”?
“A font is a computer file that contains the information to create images of letters.”
Fails to convey some of the essential and intangible qualities of a font. For example, the spacing on every side of a letter.
Thousands of hours of go into the creation of a font. Deciding on spacing is more a question of visual judgement rather than scientific rules.
There are a variety of type forms: diacritics, ligatures and non-Latin scripts.
After character outlines are correct and spacing has been tweaked, there are hours of testing. Type hinting is used to make the outlines look good.
Fonts also come in families. Not just regular, bold, italic and bold italic. There are often 4 times that amount.
Ben recommends Font Bureau.
Why do we want to burn the network with all this extra data?
A brief history of web fonts
FONT FACE only had access to fonts on the users computers. At CERN, a large numer of fonts weren’t needed. But early on designers were coming to web design…
Microsoft provided the first solution by providing fonts with Core Fonts for the Web. They were even available on their website for download.
1999 vs 1866 – there were more fonts available for print than for online (broadside and a screenshot of webmonkey).
An early W3C web fonts draft was incorporated into CSS2.
Idea of using desktop font formats was rejected because the file could be easily copied.
Microsoft had Embedded Open Type (EOT) since IE 4.
Netscape 4 had TrueDoc and Portable Font Resource (PFR). This vanished quickly.
These techniques both failed to take root. What killed them off?
To send a font to a browser, you needed a license. Font vendors temporary licenses made this impossible.
A decade of type hacks
Using a picture of text. Anyone who couldn’t see the image had no idea what was being communicated. He includes Flash-driven sites in this.
Less stupid hack: FIR – great way to create cock-ups when the copy gets changed.
Clever hacks: sIFR – the first mainstream technique that works with content management systems. Recognises that text might change once code monkeys leave.
The cleverest of the hacks: retrieve outline of the fonts from the web server and render them in the browser. (Cufon)
typeface.js
Question (Justin): How much bandwidth do they take up?
A: Could be over a megabyte, could be 48K.
They render with the canvas element.
Someone in the audience makes the point that web fonts are probably better supported than canvas.
There is agreement that the way to specify the font you want to see on the page is via CSS. Cufon introduces its own techniques and this is a bit naughty.
Cufon doesn’t handle non-Latin fonts very well, but typeface.js seems to do a better job. Same goes for Latin ligatures (but this actually turns out to be Firefox understanding ligatures).
None of the above use real fonts.
@font-face does and is a W3C recommendation – same technique recommended in CSS2.
Interesting that OSX tries to use a font already on your file system rather than downloading it from the web.
You can pull in a font from a web server and back it up with a web-friendly font stack.
Example New York Times Skimmer uses Cheltenham.
Is there an impact on the server? You can add access restrictions (e.g. referrer checking) to prevent people downloading your font.
Cross Origin Resource Sharing – use “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” in Apache.
BBC’s Urdu site is real text, but some browsers struggle to render it.
But… Foundries still aren’t playing ball.
Mark Pilgrim isn’t happy.
Licensing is an issue.
Other issues
Adding webfonts can significantly change the bandwidth profile of the site. Average size of a Latin font file (35K). One for each font family variant (regular, bold, italic, small caps, etc.).
Flashes of unstyled text – Firefox displays a fallback font. Safari displays no characters until the font file downloads.
Font families: use font-weight and font-style to distinguish between family members.
Guess what? IE doesn’t seem understand @font-face at all (just font-family and src). You basically can’t build a font-family.
Teething problems are attracting attention:
- Flash of unstyled text – Paul Irish has a solution
- Deciding which font family is selected – Firefox knows what it’s doing, other browsers struggling
No established business model for selling web fonts. Some startups are addressing this.
“Crap fonts are not impressive creative works, they are just crap.”
Free fonts don’t usually compete with professionally created fonts, so it’s worth paying for a font.
WOFF
Web Open Font Format – proposed in the summer of last year.
What about Microsoft? prepared to commit to WOFF when foundries support it as well. Feels like progress.
Web Fonts Working Group at the W3C is expected to support WOFF.
WOFF obfuscates itself, unlike desktop fonts.
Spiekermann and the FontShops endorse the WOFF specification – this is a major breakthrough.
WOFF is compressed, but not encrypted.
Where can you get good web fonts now?
You can get good fonts now:
How do I get started?
Expect things to degrade, but not always gracefully. You can use Font Squirrel’s generator.
You can fiddle with heading styles. Just one font family member gets around IE’s failures.
Flash of Unstyled Text – Mark Boulton on 24 ways and Paul Irish
Appreciate difference in size in Microsoft Core font (Georgia is the worst) and your chosen font or it will bite you in the arse.
It may be best to forget about supporting IE altogether.
Good light touch introduction: Spruce it Up by Jonathan Snook.
You can use a CSS cascade to include Embedded Open Type, WOFF, TrueType files. Again, see Font Squirrel’s generator for a good example of this that works (even in IE!).
Final point: unless you license allows it, you can’t reencode a font file.
Widely predicted: a rash of poorly chosen fonts with missing characters. Ben doesn’t think this will happen.
Browser vendors should agree on how the @font-face rules should be interpreted. IE 9 may be the first full implementation from Microsoft (there’s apparently a rumour floating around to this effect).
Maturing of font hosting services – typotheque, typekit, Open Font Library.
Question and Answer
Q: Didn’t microsoft submit EOT to the W3C to become a standard? What happened with that?
A: There were issues with it being proprietary. By the time it got the W3C, they were looking at something that wasn’t EOT anymore.
Q: Can I overwrite a user stylesheet that specifies Comic Sans.
A: An edge case, but it would be nice to have a whole evening when we could discuss ways to dick people over.
Q: What is the WOFF standard like? Sounds like it’s binary and not very easy to inspect.
A: WOFF takes all the tables from an Open Type font and replaces them in a new file. It’s a very light obfuscation.
Q: Do you think there will be take up of WOFF?
A: I think there will be more and more younger foundries that offer web fonts because that’s the world they grew up on, that’s the air they breath.
Q: Can I get properly hinted fonts for the web (as good as Core Web Fonts)?
A: There aren’t many fonts out there. They tend to be the fonts commissioned by the operating systems. For example, Droid fonts. But there’s no reason that a good font can’t work well on the screen.
Q: There are two approaches to font rendering the Microsoft (ClearType) way and the Apple / FreeType way?
A: ClearType tries to render a font taking into account the limitations of the screen. Apple and FreeType, on the other hand, try to represent the shape of the within the pixel grid.
Q: Cufon splits the letters of words into span tags. This means that Apple VoiceOver reads each letter.
A: I thinks that’s correct. Letters in a span tag are separate things.
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