This week I had an assignment to hand code a minimal personal web page, Including a heading, picture and some formatting. It reminded me a lot of the personal web pages I hand coded in the mid 1990’s. While I understand the benefit of knowing what the HTML “under the hood” actually does, the experience was…..frustrating.

My difficulties included being careless about closing quotes on attributes, and having to do lots of page reloads to get things like image borders the way I wanted them.I resolved them the same way I did in the 1990’s, by saving and reloading in the web browser frequently. This was frustrating because it’s not 1995 anymore and there are better ways. Even a basic IDE with auto-complete would make sure all the brackets and quotes were paired, and a cascading style sheet would make formatting changes easier to manage. I also had to cope with the changes between HTML 4 (in the 1990’s) and HTML 5. I ended up having to look up more attributes than I expected. Things that used to be separate attributes (font-color, text-align, etc.) are now all varieties of the style attribute for example.

What did I learn? First of all, that I now appreciate user friendly interfaces at which I used to scoff, When you’re young, you do things the hard way because it shows off your expertise. As you get older you discover you have better things to do with your time. I’m also beginning to suspect that going tag by tag and attribute by attribute may not be a good match for even small real world web projects. I think hand coding is better for tweaking a website than building a website. Hand coding a web page is like driving a manual transmission car. While there was a time when doing that was necessary, that time has passed, and those who still drive stick shift or hand code HTML do it for very granular control. For most people it’s not worth the trouble.

Accessibility was unfortunately not a primary consideration of most early web design.  This is perhaps ironic, as the one of Berners-Lee’s design principles in creating HTML was that information was that things were to be tagged semantically (<em> and <strong> ) rather than styled (<b> and <i>). Semantic markup allows browsers to  display material in a way appropriate to the limitations of software and hardware or according to user preference.  For example, a browser designed for a monochrome monitor would choose some formatting other than color to indicate hyperlinks. The rejection of Berners-Lee’s semantic markup perhaps reached its apex with the introduction of the infamous <blink> tag in the mid 1990’s. Not surprisingly, although standard bodies such as W3C have created guidelines, much of the improvement in web accessibility has been driven by government regulation of both government websites and those produced by entities receiving government funding. 

While accessibility is an ongoing process, there are a few aspects that should be a high priority , because of their frequency in web design:

ALT-Text – Since NCSA Mozilla, the web has been a visual medium.  A page filled with only text comes across as quaint and even retro.  However, this means that images need text descriptions.  The HTML standard addresses this with the <img> tag alt attribute, if designers take the time to use it. See below for a site with do’s and don’ts for writing good ALT text.

Color choices – There are many ways to combine colors on a web page. Some of them are not effective. Beyond the difficulty caused by low contrast pairings (such as a pale pastel on white), there are five different kinds of color vision deficiency (see Resources below). Put that all together and you have several ways you can make your site difficult for some of your users to read.

Transcripts / captions – If your web site includes audio and/or video, transcripts and/or captions are important for any users who might have a hearing disability.  The general advice to write a script is helpful, as this should end up being very close to your transcript.  Auto-captioning/ transcripting is improving, but you still need to review and correct the output before adding it to your media.

Resources

• Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA
  • https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/ 
  • This site, from the USDOJ,  provides a detailed overview of web accessibility requirements which derive from the Americans with Disabilities Act

• Harvard Digital Accessibility Alt-Text guidelines.
  • https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images
  • This page provides helpful suggestions on how to make your ALT text useful for your site’s visitors.

• WAVE
  • htttp://wave.webaim.org
  • This suite of tools, from Utah State University , helps web designers test for accessibility.

• Types of color vision deficiency
  • https://www.nei.nih.gov/learn-about-eye-health/eye-conditions-and-diseases/color-blindness/types-color-vision-deficiency
  • This page, from the US National Institutes of Health , describes categories and types of color vision deficiency.

• European Commission Web Accessibility Resources
  • https://commission.europa.eu/resources-partners/europa-web-guide/design-content-and-development/accessibility/testing-early-and-regularly_en
  • While US developers will naturally focus on US legal requirements , the web is a global medium and it’s wise to be aware of requirements wherever your users might be.

Since January, I’ve been enrolled in the M.Ed program in Educational Technology at the University of Arkansas. As is not uncommon with such programs, I’m being asked to blog as a course requirement. It feels a bit odd to write the 500 word bio, since this is actually the third iteration of my personal blog. When you put them all together, they run to just over 250 posts and 19 years. For those 19+ years, I’ve been involve52103d in educational technology in some capacity. Almost all of that involvement was at the two-year college level.

While there is some tendency to think of blogs and the things that grew from them (podcasts, email newsletters, substacks, etc.) as a broadcast platform, I’ve always leaned more toward the “outboard brain” model (Doctorow, 2002) It says something about the transience of all the ed tech we’re busily doing that I had to pull that link from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but I suppose we can’t all be Ea-Nasir.

It’s probably also a tell that I’ve named this blog in hypothetical West-Saxon (explanation here – It does have the advantage that a search using the actual blog title will find it, even amongst all the AI) and I labeled my various attempts at web based bookmarking Πίνακες, after the lost catalog of the (also lost) Library of Alexandria. This has something to do with wanting to understand all of this new stuff as part of a long tradition of organizing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge.

Part of the rubric for this post expects something about purpose and topics to be discussed. In the short term, topics to be discussed will derive from course blog assignments. I’ll use a category so those who need to can find them. My non required posts tend to focus on two broad questions:

• How can technology allow learners to shape their own learning?
• To what ends aspires this whole education enterprise and how does the availability of various technology shape those ends?