I found two excellent posts on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog that I had to share. (Unless you’ve already read them, in which case, great!) In one post, he asks the £10,000 question: who benefits most from a tax threshold change? What wonderful real-life examples. Go read the article and see whether you can spot the difference in these charts. Take heed of his point about making the raw data available. The other post discusses the means of presenting data. This builds on lessons learned from Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” and Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”. A rough summary reads: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Remember to think about the content. The content. What are you trying to tell the reader? What is appropriate or suitable for the situation? Are you actually trying to confuse them? Really?? Paul Bradshaw updated his article with…
Comments closedAuthor: marka01
A mini-vacation and some random negative tweets stirred some dusty brain cells this week. As a result, I want to make a constructive call to action. Let’s work on constructive and positive approaches to spreading accessibility awareness everywhere. This is not being cheesy and cutesy. I’m not bringing out the unicorns and rainbows, even though they can correct accessibility errors in one sprinkling of fairy dust. The background Somewhere at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009, I saw Chris Heilman make a similar call. He said something about making positive changes. He proposed that we stop (negative) rants about some inaccessible something. Instead, he suggested taking constructive action. I took that to heart. I recall coming across a website for some spinal injury organization that had a useful-sounding brochure on exercises for people who had spine problems. The brochure was a PDF and it was inaccessible. I immediately…
3 CommentsSometimes there is a bit too much oohing and aahing over the bling and not enough discussion of how the bling got there. Hey, I like fancy gadgets and cool technology as much as the next geek girl. I know that fancy gadget didn’t just materialize out of thin air. There are no replicators around here, either. So how does cool tech get here? Where does bling come from? It comes from the neurons in brains shooting messages back and forth around the brain at lightening speed. Brain activity, that is. Thinking. Wondering. Someone has to think up this bling and do so standing on the shoulders of those who have been thinking and wondering earlier. If we want more cool tech in our lives, we need more people to gain knowledge about these things through learning, teaching, collaborating, and creating. And lots of hard work. We need young children,…
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