Author: Jeremy Clarke

Seeing as I had some dollars that weren’t allocated for something else and hadn’t bought anything cool in at least six months I bought my first cellphone a few days ago (Siemens m55). Already I am a far more popular guy.

Best Part: Ridiculous flashing lights on the side of the phone that strobe with a total disregard for logic or usefullness.

Other best part: the German engrish (ünglish?) on the manufacturer’s web page…

“With its extraordinary design and convincing functionality, the M55 is the perfect all-round talent for individualists”

(if you think you should have the number and don’t email me.)

[received at a show/film festival, link to the site]

In the world of internet building, one of the biggest issues you end up dealing with is web accessibility, an aspect of web standards and design that deals with the necessity of developing web content that can be clearly understood by those with dissabilities. Example: Images used for navigation (links) that aren’t properly labelled (with a tag of text for when the image isn’t shown) mean that a blind person is unable to get where they’re going within your site, and text that is too rigidly sized cannot be made bigger for the hard of seeing.
Thing is, the whole concept of designing whole chunks of code for the disabled is that they always seem more like a concept than a reality, like they are just these ghosts that the W3(a standards consortium) uses to scare us into behaving properly. But the other day I met a blind guy in my Presocratics class who’s JOB is going from website to website (public/government sites only) and evaluating their usability with a screenreader (software that reads the text out loud a la Stephen Hawking).

He said that a lot of them were awful. And this was only sites that are REQUIRED to comply to accessibility standards, let alone the whole internet.

Obviously most people reading this are not web designers, but anyone who is should definitely take a look at that page and try to be as accomodating as possible to those less web-fortunate when you’re coding. It seems that the handicapped have even more to gain from electronic media than the sighted/well do (as newspapers don’t come in brail in the morning), so why not give them the best chance possible?

(image credit: The Blind Leading the Blind – Seamus McKinlay)

Finally finished the design for Alyssa’s fancy new blog, thought I’d share.

The Interesting Part: This is the first blog I’ve created using WordPress instead of MovableType for the publishing aspects. This is important because WordPress, like Linux, and unlike MovableType is a distributed open-source project, which means it is free (both as in beer, and as in speech), and is created by volunteers in their spare time. Deliciously ethical and utopian.

This blog, and all the underblogs, will probably be migrating as well in the near future. Maybe some of you have noticed that the site has been particularly gimpy lately, and it will be easier to migrate the site to a new server with WordPress blogs than MT.

(note: there is still a kind of open invitation to anyone who wants to blog onto my site (i.e. simianuprising.com/you), you can do it with Blogger or with wordpress if you wanted. Really it’s no better than the free services in any serious ways, only ridiculous ones. E-mail me jer at simianuprising dot com if you are interested.)

This website for Zephyr Consulting is almost certainly the most amazing and beautiful piece of web art I have ever seen. It creates an atmosphere thick enough to taste, and even seems to tell a story about what the company stands for and believes before you’re even sure what it is they do. The animation is flawless, and the imagery alone radiates an aura of awesomeness.

Normally I’m turned off by the clunkyness of a flash interface (not to mention the nightmare it constitutes in terms of accesibility, interoperability and reverse compatibility) but this piece is just so well done that I can’t help wanting the whole internet to be just like it. Where’s the movie this thing should be becomming? How can I get a job with these guys? (yes, I realize they offer courses, if only I lived in Chicago)

(via. warren)

Lately I’ve been noticing that more and more people are aware of the problems with and discussion about copyright than even six months ago. At this one party I met three different people who had to some degree read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (one of whom I had the day before convinced to buy it, though it is available at that link in dozens of formats for free) and were excited about it and the ideas it represents.

Whether catching the interest of university students constitutes an actual change, especially concerning the mass public, is obviously up for debate, but increased awareness is always the first step, right?

[for anyone interested in the things happening: Deep Links (blog of the EFF), Copyfight, Lessig Blog]