UX seems to be everywhere today. Large and small companies are learning the importance of it trough achieving better success if they dedicate more time understanding the user needs.
But personas, wireframes and workflow prototypes are not enough when you start UI implementation. Everything will end up in code, and if that segment of the UX is not taken care of, your hard UX design work might be wasted.
Although, the interactivity and desired visual appearance can be achieved with non-accessible client side output, or at least with screen-reader friendly or ARIA equipped markup, the final experience we are offering for accessibility is still poor and not of much help for users in need.
It is not enough to just read the navigation or page. It might be good enough for a blog or news page with static and linear content, but for web applications, tablet and mobile applications (direction it seems we are heading to) – it just doesn’t work.
We need designed workflows and audio interfaces that offers smooth experience for the users in need. Bombarding the user with audio output by just reading the whole page word by word is totally useless. Closest we should get in desigining and implementing accessible user experience are the traditional telephone bank services (the best practices, of course, there are some bad ones out there as well). Your markup should be able to offer this alternative layer of accessibility and user experience, you just need to write it with accessible user in mind, or develop alternative audio widgets for your framework.
Writing, or should I say tracing this post on AndroidwpToGo app. Since i moved from G1 to N1, only thing I miss is the fast typing physical keyboard. Soft keys are not cutting it for me.
When I say physical, I mean full qwerty keyboard in comfortable landscape model. Small squeezed keys found on some devices are even worse then the soft ones.
But, a friend suggested Swype to me, and I was amazed from the creative approach by the developers, implementing an oldish but valuable IBM research introducing new way of typing by tracing your words on the soft keyboard. Writing the post with this input method I’m more then impressed with its usability. The learning curve is very short, just after writing two tweets you get familiar with it. Word accuracy is excellent, offering choice of suggested words if your trace was a bit crazy.
Small downturn is you have to switch off autosuggestion if you want to type in different language then English. There are many users like myself using English as first language but with need to communicate with second language without switching keyboard layouts, although if your language is supported on the device, Swype offers very easy switch between the available keyboard layouts.
Turning your device to landscape mode will give you an error, but this is still trial version and not official release, so this iI completely forgivable. Having said that, I’m thinking how tracing can be implemented with two thumbs combination when turning the device in landscape mode. I leave that challenge to creative developers of the very usable Swype keyboard.
This input method is also a good accessibility potential. Adding TTS and speaking out selected keys while tracing and speaking out the word to be inserted, can make this keyboard a good companion to apps designed to utilize assisting technology available on the latest Android releases.
The new SVG-Edit 2.4 release candidate, codenamed Arbelos, sports great improvements and brings this web app very close to standard vector graphics editing desktop software like Flash (drawing only) and looks like it will have features like path-finding and FX effects (shadows) found in more mature apps like Illustrator very soon.
This is a quick retro magnetic tape artwork I designed testing the new features. Open it with any modern browser (IE too, if you have Chrome Frame or Google Toolbar installed). Here is a screen-grab with the SVG-Edit and the artwork:
Svg Edit
Almost all features designers need to create vector artwork are there: Layers, Raster Images, Bézier Curves, Transform positioning and re-size with pointer or forms, Arrow keys nudge, Align, Grouping, Transparency… to name a few. Using Flash or SVG-Edit to produce the image above made no difference to me. There are few bugs like; you can’t see gradients when you hit Save, or you can’t start multi-select or resize objects when your pointer is outside the canvas, but this is only alpha release and all this will be fixed soon I believe. Double-clicking to reset Zoom tool to 1:1 ratio or entering curves edit mode is very intuitive. Colour pickers are working good. Maybe live preview missing when you try to fiddle your colours and transparency, but this is minor bug comparing to the great usability the SVG-Edit already achieved with this release.
SVG-Edit Team shows great commitment and I look forward for the new releases. Will be great if they consider adding simple object transitions, animation and JavaScript editor capabilities for developing custom object behavior for advanced users. I really wanted to make those tape reels rotate.
You can learn more and see release notes on the SVG-Edit developer’s YouTube Channel.
Side note: this is also a great implementation of jQuery, the revolutionary JavaScript library.
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