Archive | Usability

Captioning your YouTube videos with CaptionTube

20. April

8 Comments

I’m an accessibility advocate and one thing thats been bothering me for a while was the lack of an easy way to caption videos uploaded to YouTube. They clearly explain they support closed captioning:

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If People Can’t Find It, Does It Matter?

13. April

13 Comments

Last year I hit up the Higher Education Conference circuit asking the question “If nobody is visiting your site does it matter?” in my web analytics presentations.  This year I’m really digging into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and as I am thinking about the SEO Best Practices presentation that I’ll be giving at eduWeb this [...]

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Redesign once, increment forever.

8. April

10 Comments

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about web site redesigns and what a ridiculous process it can be in higher education. Even a simple site (40-100 pages) at my University takes anywhere from two months to a full year depending on how many people are involved.

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Large Sites and Information Architecture

20. February

18 Comments

I apologize in advance, because this is going to be more of an article of philosophy, than a technical how-to.  A while back I wrote a piece on the subject of breadcrumbs.  In it, I made a comment about how breadcrumbs are a tool that helps expose the information architecture (IA) of a site to [...]

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User Experience and target=”_blank”

6. January

17 Comments

Despite how much people don’t want it to be true, using target="_blank" when coding pages is becoming less and less of an accepted practice.  But don’t take my word for it.  There’s a reason that strict (X)HTML has dropped the target attribute from valid specs, and really, it’s a good one:  designers/coders should not be [...]

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Tasty, Useful Breadcrumbs

15. December

36 Comments

Did you by chance read User Interface Engineering’s article “Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs?”   I’ll admit that I am a little bit late getting back around to this topic, which I originally read sometime back in… oh… August?   October?  Regardless, right after reading it I knew that I needed to offer a counterpoint, because [...]

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Why Do We Fall Down? So That We Can Learn How to Pick Our Self Up!

21. November

2 Comments

The following is a guest post by Paul Prewitt the Electronic Communications Coordinator at the University of Arkansas Alumni Association.  Paul was kind enough to share an inside ‘FAIL’ that they recently fixed and is hoping you can learn from it too. You can contact Paul online at (www.draftmotif.org) or connect through twitter. This is [...]

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