A while ago our good friend Dave gave us a very nice old record player. One of the things that I noticed when I started playing records again is that I was much more conscious of the music I was playing. Putting up a record involves quite a few — rather random — actions. You need to physically browse through all these large pieces of coloured cardboard. Then you select one of these pieces and from it you take a piece of paper. From within that paper you take a large plastic disc. You flip the disc a few times to take a good look at the coloured labels in the center. Then you lay the disc onto a machine, turn a knob which makes the disc spin, gently swipe the disc with a brush, place a handle over it, turn another knob, and finally close the lid of the machine to start listening music.
In a few weeks time I will teach a new three week course called Responsive Typography. In this course my students will give emotion to closed captions. The idea came from a conversation I had with Marie van Driessche. She explained that she needs closed captions to understand movies, like all Deaf people do, but that many fine details in the audio track are lost. The neutral sans serif, and the neutral descriptions of sounds doesn’t cover the complete experience. So I will ask my students to create a typographic experience of a film scene that’s more complete.
Those of you who managed to read my master thesis about designing with real people with real disabilities, and managed to read all of it, may remember that one of my conclusions is that we need an exclusive design master program in The Netherlands. Together with my colleague Irene Kamp we’ve started the bureaucratic journey of setting up such a master. I think it’s important that everybody knows what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. And as always, I would love to hear your ideas.
Last Friday I successfully presented the conclusions of the research I have been doing for that past two years. I have researched web accessibility by flipping the ability bias: instead of designing exclusively for people like myself , I have designed tailor made websites exclusively for people with disabilities.
My father sent me a support email: all of a sudden he couldn’t log into his account for the newspaper he reads. The error message he read was not Greek to him, because he speaks Greek fluently. It was in some other language. It resembled Dutch, which he speaks fluently as well, he knew the words, he just didn’t understand what they mean. Here’s a translation:
A while ago Jan Wessel Hovingh gave me a Raspberry Pi Zero as a thank you gift for a talk I gave at the University of Applied Sciences in Leeuwarden. I decided to create my own streaming audio speakers with this Pi. After quite a bit of DuckDuckGoing, quite some help from many wonderful people and some work it’s done: two hifi speakers made out of layers of corrugated card board, powered by a Raspberry Pi.
I created a new research blog. That’s where I’ll be documenting my master research. Which means that I will be mostly publishing over there. This blog will probably be even more sleepy that is has been. So if you’re interested in the research I’m doing in accessible web design you can better move over there. You can subscribe to that blog via RSS if you want to.
In the past year I recorded conversations with an eclectic mix of 40 designers and published them on my site under the moniker The Good, The Bad, and The Interesting (mostly in Dutch). This summer I decided to invite all my guests for the very first The Good, The Bad, and The Interesting Exclusive Design Challenge. This weekend 16 people showed up for this event. I’m probably biased, but it was fantastic. (A more detailed report of this event can be found here)
I learned from Jeremy Keith (who learned it from Cennydd Bowles, who learned it from Jared Spool) that good design principles are reversible. To test if a design principle works, the exact opposite rule should work as well. I decided to put the Paciello Group’s Inclusive Design Principles to the test. What happens if you reverse all these principles? They should result in something that you could name exclusive design principles.
I read quite a few books about designing for accessibility in the last few months. Most of them were about so called inclusive design, and most of them were focused on designing inclusively for the web. While I learned a lot, and while I thoroughly enjoyed all the books I read, there was one book that stood out: Design Meets Disability by Graham Pullin. It stood out because of its different approach to designing for accessibility.