Christie Mason

I find it odd that the same people who would recoil in horror at using static, px, font sizes have no hesitation in recommending static, px, sizes for screen/div widths. As long as *some* have different preferences and needs, then the best idea is to not assume something as *all*.  Less is better.  Less format control means more people will be able to access and use the content.

I really hesitated to post the link to the line width article because

1. It's old - 2002 is old in eTime.
2. It's stating CPL which is a print unit of measurement.(So is em but at least em is used as an online measurement and it resizes well).
3. It doesn't say what monitor sizes were used at what resolution.
4. It doesn't say what colors where used or even if it was white text on black background or black on white (many people "assume" that dark text is best but several informal tests by web designers have shown that preferences are almost evenly split.  Does anyone remember using a CRT? They were all light text on dark backgrounds. DOS/Command Prompt still presents white text on a black background)
   
5. It doesn't say what font was used
   
6. It doesn't say what font size is being used
7. It doesn't say how many characters were in a paragraph - short or  bulleted is best online, not long wordy paragraphs
   
8. It doesn't say what line spacing was used
   
9. It doesn't say what level of language is being used (did they use the same text for young and old? 18 - 61 is too wide of a range to determine *all* preferences.  Different decades have different exposure rates to different media.)
10. It doesn't say if the study used people who read text on monitors often, or never before. (*I* have never liked print materials with 1 - 1.5" white space on each side but that's been a common format that most generations of people have learned to EXPECT in printed material.  Expectations create preferences.  I have an impression those types of margins were originally set to make it easy to bind pages together and allow wear from page turning to occur outside the text area.  Those aren't issues with online presentations.)
    

Compare the readability of Device Independent Authoring Language (DIAL) vs Patent for Accessible Blackberry (which uses NO CSS and only has an embedded body background color) I admit that to even scan the patent article I reduced my browser width because of the presentation's density and lack of visual clues.  Online, people scan - they don't read unless the content or need is compelling.

Christie Mason

Another of my pet peeves is the cascading, JavaScript dependent menus where if you mouseover the exact right spot a submenu opens and then you have to very carefully move the mouse again and click on the link you want to use.  Oops, if you move the mouse too much, the submenu disappears and you have to start all over again.

Christie Mason

Another of my pet peeves is the cascading, JavaScript dependent menus where if you mouseover the exact right spot a submenu opens and then you have to very carefully move the mouse again and click on the link you want to use.  Oops, if you move the mouse too much, the submenu disappears and you have to start all over again.

Christie Mason

You bring up an interesting issue.  Since eLearning is increasingly using RSS, blogs, with occassional emails.  What are the accessibility and usability issues of those channels?

One thing I've noticed is that adding "SCoPE: Seminar:", it's not just "SCoPE:" , to the email subject and RSS Feed Description results in a long line where the topic/seminar description is cut off.  (Click here to see RSS screen shot) It reminds of when eGroups/Yahoo etc started offering their free forum services.  Each service offers a literal that goes in front of the subject to identify the forum.  It took a couple of rounds before people realized that shorter is better. Click here to see email screenshot and notice there are 2 Yahoo forum messages in my Inbox.  One is tagged with [of] instead of "Online Facilitators" and another is [eAll] for "eLearningAll".

Since both the emails and RSS Feed are database generated (it looks like they reuse the same code notice the "Re:" in the RSS feed which is something I didn't expect)  my fingers just itch to either embed a literal like [SCoPE] in front of each email subject or RSS Feed, or for a more generic solution use a variable for the site name or add a "tag" field.  All site names may not be as short as "SCoPE" so adding a specific field to be used for RSS and emails would probably be a better choice.  That way the site owners wouldn't have to add "SCoPE: Seminar:" to each seminar's name.

Just thinking out loud,
Christie Mason

You bring up an interesting issue.  Since eLearning is increasingly using RSS, blogs, with occassional emails.  What are the accessibility and usability issues of those channels?

One thing I've noticed is that adding "SCoPE: Seminar:", it's not just "SCoPE:" , to the email subject and RSS Feed Description results in a long line where the topic/seminar description is cut off.  (Click here to see RSS screen shot) It reminds of when eGroups/Yahoo etc started offering their free forum services.  Each service offers a literal that goes in front of the subject to identify the forum.  It took a couple of rounds before people realized that shorter is better. Click here to see email screenshot and notice there are 2 Yahoo forum messages in my Inbox.  One is tagged with [of] instead of "Online Facilitators" and another is [eAll] for "eLearningAll".

Since both the emails and RSS Feed are database generated (it looks like they reuse the same code notice the "Re:" in the RSS feed which is something I didn't expect)  my fingers just itch to either embed a literal like [SCoPE] in front of each email subject or RSS Feed, or for a more generic solution use a variable for the site name or add a "tag" field.  All site names may not be as short as "SCoPE" so adding a specific field to be used for RSS and emails would probably be a better choice.  That way the site owners wouldn't have to add "SCoPE: Seminar:" to each seminar's name.

Just thinking out loud,
Christie Mason