Goodbye 2014

The Guardian Interactive Team use Flash, almost exclusively, to create data visualisations and infographics for interactive content on guardian.co.uk. The two main reasons are that it is quick to build and that it looks identical in all browsers.

I recently bought myself Amazon’s new Kindle and whilst I really like it, the only people I’d feel happy recommending it to are those that travel and read a lot! I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and I’ve come up with a few thumbs up and few thumbs down for it:

I think what we all took away from the latest conference is that the Future of Web Design isn’t clear yet. It expanded on a conversation I had with a friend the other day where we decided that in the last few months web standards has hit a lull. During @media2005 everyone was so excited to be there talking shop and swapping ideas that we couldn’t wait to get back to our desks to put into practice what we’d been shown – zoom layouts, microformats, etc. But fast foward 2 years and there just isn’t anything to get our teeth into.

Job Access With Speech

On Monday I went to a demonstration of JAWS screen-reader, that I had heard about through The Web Standards Group discussion list a few weeks ago. It was presented by Steve Green, the director of Test Partners who provide manual testing services (functionality, compatibility and accessibility). Steve had enlisted the help of John (registered blind), who I believe is usually involved in the testing of their clients’ websites/applications, to be the “screen-reader user”.

I found the session extremely interesting and learnt a lot from it. The main thing I wanted to come away with was how to use JAWS myself and to understand how a vision-impaired user would go about browsing a website.

Last Friday (2006-11-08) I was at d.Construct, a web conference held in Brighton. The official tag line was …an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications and discussed …how new technology is transforming the web from a document delivery system into an application platform.

Summary

To summarise, the day included discussions on API’s and web services, tagging and mash-ups with a bit of accessibility and usability thrown in for good measure. This post aggregates any slides that are available, along with the small amount of notes I took during the day (attendees were left in pitch black for the first lecture, so I was jotting blind). It is by no means a comprehensive account of each session, but notes of what I found to be most interesting and useful for the future.