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At the recent @media conference, Joe Clark challenged web designers to create an alternate version of web sites for those with low vision.

“Go west young (wo)men and create a site that has complete navigation and text wrapping at all font sizes. ”

I’ve spent the past hour or so creating a low-vision version of the web site for Alcala Pet Care in Encinitas.

To do this, I changed the background of the body, wrap, and header. The page now spans the entire browser, text is larger, the page is dark with light text, and link colors have changed. To make it look a bit more stylish, I gave the top nav a background glow and the main content section drops a shadow over the header. These two style elements took the majority of developing time.

The top nav uses a sliding door approach to allow the list to grow and shrink with larger font sizes and screens. Normally, sliding doors require multiple elements, such as a div and a header to anchor the images. I didn’t want to adjust the html on the pages, so I added the right edge of the nav background to the header background. I then added the stretching background to the list itself. If this doesn’t make any sense at all to you, visit the above article.

To get the glow on the main content section, I used a background image with alpha transparency on the maincontent div and gave it negative offset to make the shadow hover over the header. Alpha transparent images have subtle gradations over a transparent background. This gives us the ability to place a semi-transparent image over a variety of background colors with no un-intended conflicts. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not support alpha transparency, so I used a series of filters to give modern browsers the nice shadow and IE gets a simple top border.

I still need to add the link to allow users to select the low-vision style sheet. However, if you have Firefox, you can view it by selecting View>Page Style>low vision.

The CSS is still a bit rough, but hey, I’m in Paris and I’m working on CSS instead of sight-seeing.

I must have graduated to sigm cum laude of the geek world.

I’m in Paris.
It’s a beautiful day.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop, Coffee and Friends, writing in my blog.

There’s an art market down below, a gathering of starving artists pitching their creations to those who walk by. There’s a reason why many of them are starving. It’s really sad to see the horrible state of contemporary art in Paris. Walking down the aisles, you will see derivatives of everyone and very few original pieces. Those that are original are just bad!

There seems to be a belief in Paris that anything that consists of paint or pencil on paper is worth selling. Sketches are like waffles and children. You should throw away the first one or two. Those are just for warming up. Ok, the first waffle can be eaten, it just may not look pretty.

But in Paris, these somehow end up on sale in markets. And for god sakes, do something with a nude woman and you’ve got a gold mine. I walked by one stand of photographs with close-up shots of women’s parts. There was an enormous, glossy, full color, saturated, shallow-depth-of-field monstrosity of pubic hair. Now, I’m not prude, give me Andres Serano, Sally Mann, or Robert Mapplethorpe, but garbage is garbage. It takes more effort, not less, to create an interesting nude photograph.

After walking around, I did find a few stands that were interesting. There was a set of very nice charcoal still-lifes and the photographs of Ben Gamth? I can’t read his signature very well, so forgive my destruction of the name. I purchased a small print of a chicken at his friend’s house near Normandy. His use of cross-processing, full-frame negatives, and odd perspectives were right up my alley.

Maybe I should shut up and actually exhibit my work again. Put up or shut up, they say. Feel the wrath of tourists walking by and saying “uggh, red pubic hair, again?!!?”

As the seemingly token non-presenting american at the @media conference in London, I would like to thank those that put this event together.

It was a pleasure to join the Brits and others as they passed standards-based web design around as easily as the sugar for tea. Speaking of tea, the only bitter element of the whole conference was a particularly nasty cup of lemon-ginger tea. whoa, whoever decided to mass-market this dried paint remover ought to have their head examined. But then again, this is the same country that leaves a jar of marmite on the table for guests.

The @media conference brought standards-based web design and accessibility experts together for a fab confab. Opinions were expressed, debated, rejected, and re-examined. And then Joe Clark put the mike down for the next person. I wasn’t expecting such passion from one of our neighbors up north, a canuck with an opinion or two. Now, I know Canadians are not cold fish, after all, NoMeansNo is from up north, need I say more?

As a veteran of museum conferences, the accessibility points were already rather familiar for me though many in the audience probably felt overwhelmed with the added responsibilities.

On the second day, Joe laid down the gauntlet and challenged designers to begin re-reading his article on alistapart.com about creating big, chunky versions of web sites for the sight impaired. It will be interesting to see how these develop. Why not take advantage our sites’ potential.

I herebt promise to develop a Clark-like site for one that I recently completed, www.alcalapetcare.com. It will also be interesting to see some aggressive designs come out of this challenge. In his closing presentation, Andy Clarke criticized the lack of eye candy on the web sites of accessibility experts. So, can we begin creating these big, chunky, easy to read variations that are also attractive?

other highlights

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Molly Holzschlag. I have been bantying around the idea of writing a book on semantic conversions of existing web sites. A national best seller, I’m sure. Molly gave me some sound advice and I will approach the project with an open mind.

I also had a chance to meet Andy Clarke of All That Malarkey.

When the @media conference was first announced, I thought.. hey, cool, a conference in London the same time that I will be in Paris. What a great opportunity. After the glow dissapated, I had to think twice about going, this was not going to be a cheap trip. Hotel, chunnel, airfare, and conference admission set me back well over $2,500. Sure, I’ve seen Zeldman before and could wait until southbysouthwest to see Molly and others. But Andy Clarke was somebody I wanted to listen to. His site has given me many great tools for building sites. His use of definition lists for form items and building a coding guide to a page have saved me many hours in designing. So thanks Andy for giving us a hell of a presentation.

While I enjoy the geek meetings as much as anyone, I’m not a pub person. So, instead of basking in the free beer at the conference party, I met up with the artist Fraser Diesel and discussed art, design, and posed for some sketches. It was a less geeky, but equally satisfying alternative.

Finally, I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many Canucks and Americans saying wanker and bullocks in two days. Here’s to a great conference and hopefully I’ll see everyone again next year. Maybe they can talk Big John and Holly into coming up from down under.

What can you say?

Sometimes, it’s better to just remain silent and wonder.