lauri@imke

During the EMIM course “New Interactive Environmetns” we were discussing on the topics:

• what are interactive environments
• how to classify interactive environments
• interactivity in online communities
• the future of interactive environments
• interaction design

At the end we we’re supposed to write a summary and create a graph of the interactive environments classification. My paper can be found here: “Interactive environments” (PDF).

The graph about interactive environments: (a closer look could be also found here in MindMeister)

Web accessibility is a practice of building websites accessible for all people. It means, everyone should access and understand a website in the same way. Accessible web will be achieved by following the standards and best practices of website design. An organisation working on the web content accessibility guidelines is Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). If a website does not follow the standards, it might not be understandable for people with disabilities.

Accessibility needs

In general we may divide disabilities into 2 categories: technical and physical.

Technical issues

• Browser - browsers may read HTML and CSS differently (especially if it has not been written according to W3C standards)
• Connection speed - visitors should access the web with any connection speed
• Scripts - the website has to remain usable, if scripts (like JavaScript) are disabled
• Mobile devices - a website should have a version for mobile devices, that don’t support the same screen resolutions and standards like desktops do. This issue should be taken into consideration very seriously as the mobile segment is growing fast.

Users with disabilities

• Blind users - the screen reader should understand the webpage, so it would be able to read the content of the web
• Deaf users - for any multimedia materials with audio, the explanations should be given
• Color blindness - the color combinations on the page should not mislead color-blind visitors
• Mobility problems - as some users are not able to use the mouse, the website has to be navigatable without a mouse
• Learning disabilities - users with learning disabilities may find confusing working on certain types of information.

According to these needs, special software has been developed: for blind users, talking browsers read the content of the web. Some websites offer a low vision version of the content and the controls to change the size and colors of the text. It’s important to allow to disable the images and banners and to change the layout of the page. Additionaly, services have been created that allow people with disabilities to use the web via proxy servers (Richards, J. T. et al, 2004). The idea is to provide a software that automatically modifyes the webpage according to the visitor’s needs and disabilities.

SEO creates accessible web

The goal of accessibility is to make web accessible to as many people as possible, despite of their technical, physical or other restrictions. Now, lets think a search engine as a visitor of a site: a search engine can not anyhow “see” the images and “listen” to the audio files on websites. A search engine couldn’t understand the content of the website, if it hasn’t been made accessible. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term for making search-engine-friendly websites. In other words, it helps us to understand the need for accessible websites. If a webpage is search-engine-friendly, it means it could be also much easily understood by people with disabilities.

Every website should follow some basic SEO principles:

• understandable text links should be used (if you want to link to a page about semantic web, don’t name the link “click here”, but name it “semantic web”)
• tags should indicate the characteristics of a document (type, language etc)
• website should be usable when scripts (like JavaScript) are disabled
• text should be written in clearest and simplest language
• sitemaps and static links to every page
• accurate alt tags etc

Implementing SEO takes us one step closer to accessible web.

Accessibility and usability

The web usability guru Jakob Nielsen states that accessibility is not enough. I agree. Yes, we may build websites that are designed according to all WAI standards, but when the usability of the site is poor, visitors will be still misleaded and they will not start using the website. If a website is designed, both the accessibility and usability factors should be considered.

“When you want to improve your website for users with disabilities, remember the real goal: to help them better use the site” (Nielsen, 2005).

The future

All the fancy applications and web 2.0 services require the second version of the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0). Web 2.0 keywords like AJAX and “user generated content” kill the accessible web. A lot of AJAX applications have been built that are not understandable for screen readers and not usable for keyboard-only users. Yes, they look nice, but if the JavaScript has been disabled or the user won’t understand the content, the website will be useless. A simplified and accessible solutions should be available as alternatives.

The problem with user generated content is that the users who provide all the content won’t add alternative text for images and videos so the materials could be accessible for disabled visitors. As these sites usually generate huge numbers of visitors, the site itself can’t guarantee accessible content everywhere.

In order to keep the new web accessible, the guidelines need to be improved.

Accessible websites?

Now, take the accessibility validator and try to find a website that does not generate errors. Even Google.com will generate one accessibility error.

References

Dolson, J. “What is Web Accessibility?”

Hagans, A. (2005) “High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization”

Moss, T. (2007) “The future of web accessibility”

Nielsen, J. (2005) “Accessibility is not enough”

Richards, J. T., Hanson, V. L. (2004) “Web Accessibility: A Broader View“

In this short article, an overview of information architectures (IA) will be given. Author describes the concept and the need for IA’s and also brings out a quick way of creating IA’s - the card sorting method.

Let’s define the IA

Some definitions that could clear us what information architectures are all about:

• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability. (Information Architecture Institute)
• How the information (text, images, menus etc) is structured on a website and if it flows and reads nicely. (Web Design & Life)
• The design, including organization, labeling, and navigation, of systems that help people share information. (Microsoft Development Center)

As we can see IA’s are used to structure the data and what’s most important - it must be done in a way that it would be as usable as possible. As the flow of information increases constantly, IA’s play a huge role in the whole design process.

Effective IA must reflect the way people think. (Barker, 2005)

Developing the IA

During our Interface and Interaction Design course (lectured by Hans Põldoja), we we’re designing a web 2.0 application with some social-networking flavor. Our idea was to design a site about finding good, but cheap eating-places and trustful hostels to stay. Just like creating your personal travel-plan in the net.

Although the course was quite short, we started from scratch and even ended up with some code-writing. Ofcourse, working on the IA was the most complicated process, because as we were developing the system, we continously came out with new ideas and ways how to improve the application. The IA was changed quite often.

The IA development will start with a in-depth analysis in order to find the requirements. Also analysing the competitors and already existing solutions is very useful - you can find the good-practices how to solve common situations and take notice of the things that have been designed badly and could be done better.

Writing personas can help the developers to understand the target-group of the application and scenarios tell us about the functionality of the systems. It is important to analyse personas and scenarios just to get an overview of the whole system. Later, it is a good idea to hold some interviews with experts in order to ask feedback (if the scenarios make sense, if they are understandable, how they could be improved etc).

Card sorting

In our course, the next thing we did, was writing down all the functionalities the site must contain. Later, we were categorizing them and it became the basis of the IA. And that is what card sorting is generally all about.

Card sorting is a user-generated inexpensive and quick design method for increasing the system’s findability. The process involves sorting a series of cards, each labeled with a piece of content or functionality, into groups that make sense to users. (Barker, 2005)

Finding the right categories was not easy - as the front page of the site should be as simple as possible, then we wanted to cut down the number of links. Finally, we managed to divide all the labels under 3 main categories and I can say that finding the right names for them can be quite complicated. After making the first versions, always ask feedback if the structure does make sense and if people who will start using the system do think the same way you did.

We used the structure as the basis and draw the first version of the IA, which was later, after several improvements, used in creating the prototypes and simple HTML-pages.

Conclusion

Designing the IA is the most important part in the whole design process - only IA sets if the users will keep using the application you designed or not. It is important to come up with a fully-tested and workin IA, before starting to code. Afterwards making the changes in the IA and re-coding the application can be very expensive.

One of the most important goals on an IA project is to institute a consistent user experience for two key elements: the visible navigation user interface, and the underlying — invisible — structure (where things are found on the intranet). (Nielsen, 2007)

References

1. Barker, I. (2005) “What is information architecture”

2. Maurer, D., Warfel, T. (2004) “Card sorting: a definitive guide”

3. Nielsen, J. (2007) “Intranet Information Architecture (IA)“

Huh, time is flying. Seems like it was yesterday when I started my IMKE-journey in Tallinn University. Now, the first semester has reached to it’s end and I’d like to take a short look back, what has been going around in our lab. In general, the last 4 months have been full of new challenges and learning experiences. I really like the fact, that most of our lecturers are from different European universities - that gives a cool international perspective to our curriculum. Ofcourse, all the Estonian lecturers are top of the class aswell. I find the concepts of new media inspiring and every day I realise more - IMKE is the right place to be.

The beginning of school was a bit intense - in September when we had regular school-classes basicly every day, but since October we have been oriented on team-work and personal research. Besides the traditional classes, I also participated in 2 EMIM’s e-courses, which have been my first e-course experiences. So, I’ll give a short overview of the courses I had in fall 2007.

Introduction and theoretical foundations to new media

An interesting course lectured by Prof. Mauri Kaipainen. The course was basicly about introducing the concept of new media. We had the classes in our fancy media-lab, where we discussed on topics concerning digital media, the learning environments, knowledge-sharing services, web 2.0, digital art and virtual communities. Loads of new information.

Official description of this course.

Academic writing and hypertext

Another course by Mauri Kaipainen. As there are a lot of essays and academic papers to write, we were introduced the technics to use. We studied the academic text, learned about referencing and did some cool exercises.

Official description of this course.

Game interactions

An unbelievably fun course about gaming history, research and development. The course was lectured by 2 guys from Sweden: Ulf Hagen and Jon Manker. It was also quite practical, because at the end we had to come up with a game-conception and a design paper. A post, I’ve written in September about this course.

Official description of this course.

Open source management

Also, a enjoyable course that was about working with open source software development tools like TRAC and SubVersion. In the beginning we were divided into 2 teams and we had to start developing a campaign for an open-source game called Battle for Wesnoth. Actually, today we had the final lecture and we had to present our campaigns. The campaigns, which at first seemed too difficult to develop, came out pretty funny, I guess. The course was lectured by Kaido Kikkas.

Official description of this course.

Interactive TV

MPEG2, HD, IPTV, HDTV were only some of the keywords introduced us by Artur Lugmayr. We studied about the development of TV and the TV’s digital future. Although, this course a bit too technical, we had a cool teamwork project, which was about combining classical TV and the fabolous Second Life virtual world. Some day we’ll make it come true.

Official description of this course.

Digital culture

Digital culture was one of the e-courses I had. It was basicly about chatting in an online-forum with co-students around Europe. Every week we had a new topic - we discussed over web 2.0, emerging technologies, e-commerce, social issues etc. There was also an interesting teamwork, which was about creating a wiki about the digital revolution in the South-Asian countries. The course was lectured by Melissa Lee Price from Staffordshire University, UK.

Official description of this course.

Project management

My second EMIM e-course, that made us to practice some project management methods. Besides, different project management tools were introduced by our lecturer Carina Roels from ITIN, France. The main scope of this course was to organise the promotion to the EMIM module and that was done in small international teams. Ofcourse, all the communication was online, that made the organisational work a bit complicated.

Official description of this course.

Spring 2008?

Spring 2008 will serve the following courses:

• Interface and interaction design
• Digital interactive audio
• Research methods
• History and visions of interactive media

Also, there are some interesting e-courses to take:

• New Interactive Environments
• Creativity and Innovation
• Visual Communication
• E-learning

New friends, new knowledge. I’m happy with that:)

Free culture in the software developments world can be associated with free software and open source: everybody should have the access to the source code and have the right to modify the code according to their or the society’s needs. As Richard Stallman said: “Without source code the software has no value”.

Besides open source software movement there are other projects around that carry the “free culture” spirit. There is such a organisation called FreeCulture.org, that connects students and young people who have the mission to introduce the free culture movement to their peers. The organisation was founded already at 2004 and since then has been connected with several projects (althougn mainly only in North-America).

The manifesto of the freeculture.org states:

The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure.

We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption.

One project they initiated “Pledge to Boycott DRM” was about to pledge to boycott CDs with DRM (Digital Rights Management). DRM is basicly about limiting the usage of digital media. The CDs with DRM could only be played on certain players, so that people couldn’t make illeagal copies and easily share the music with the rest of the world. For example the big companies came up with CDs that could not be played with Windows Media Player. Since 2002 many law-cases have been handled about the DRM policies and due to that companies started to give up using DRM. EMI was the last one to say in January 2007, that they have stopped publishing audio CDs with DRM.

Anyway, about the project now. Elizabeth Stark and Fred Benenson from FreeCulture.org stated: “I will pledge to never purchase a CD containing any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will do the same.” The campaign was highly succesful and alltogether 4562 people signed up (it’s 9 times the people they expected to sign up). They could only achieve these because of the community - students and young people wanted o express their feelings against the DRM policy and were ready to sign their name on the public website. This all happened when the topic was still hot and I’m pretty sure this project somehow helped to make the next step towards the DRM-free world.

It’s interesting that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has also pointed out his thoughts about DRM and music. Apple and Steve Jobs are in opinion that music should be DRM-free and that’s why the popular iPods an iTunes support the music that is encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC.

The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.