Category Archives: Design

Kids Know Best!

A few months ago I facilitated a design discovery workshop with one of the local school districts. A group of internal stakeholders responded to our initial design questionnaire, and from these responses I put together a digital scrapbook. The idea was to narrow down our options and come to a unified concept for our design [...]

Fangs: the Screen Reader Emulator for Firefox

I want to add another tool to Mark’s post on accessibility.
Fangs is a Firefox extension that emulates the output of a screen reader in plain text.
Why would you want to use this instead of an actual screen reader?
Screen readers by their very nature are linear. Testing sites with lots of content would take ages; you [...]

Fun Times at Web Directions North 07

Well, it was so much fun at WDN07 that it’s taken me this many days to recover! No seriously, being my first conference, I was struck by how friendly everyone was, not to mention their passion for the industry. Web standards, fine art design, and clever coding to name only a few of the excellent [...]

Web Directions North: This Week!

I’m excited to be attending the Web Directions North conference this week! There are a wide variety of topics, and the roster is top-notch. Of course, I’m also stoked about the two days of skiing in Whistler :)
Agile application development has been a big topic of discussion at Habañero lately, so I’m very interested to [...]

Open Up, Be Accessible…

A client recently asked about “accessibility” and where we stood on compliance. This is not a question I hear very often, and it made me realize how much of an afterthought accessibility is for most designers and developers. Even though it has been a topic of discussion for years, accessibility still sits ignored at the [...]