Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2007 22:20:20 +0200
Have you read my email messages from this thread?
I guess you didn't, because I told that I also don't like what most of the
sighted users consider good looking design, but that design is not very usable
nor very accessible sometimes.
However, if that kind of flashy design is asked by more clients and paid
better, that is the best web design, because we want to make web design for
money and not for pleasure only.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: Littlefield, Tyler
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 8:34 PM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
uh.
thatls like saying a blind person doesn't have a chance.
No, we won't fill the page with flashy pretty graphics, but if that's your
idea of web desibn....
Tyler Littlefield
Vertigo head coder.
"I can only please one person per day; Today doesn't seem like your day, and
tomorrow doesn't look to promising either."
"A life? Where can I download that at?"
Contact information:
email: tyler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
skype: st8amnd127
aim: st8amnd2005
msn: tyler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
----- Original Message -----
From: Octavian Rasnita
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 12:59 AM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
Well, it doesn't matter if you care about the competition or not, because
in what I said I didn't want to prove that your site is not good or something
like that, but I wanted to show that a blind person cannot be as good as a
sighted person in web design.
If we want to compare us with the sighted, we should compare what the best
blind web designer is able to do with what the best sighted web designer is
able to do, and the least good blind web designer with the least good sighted
web designer, because otherwise we compare apples with oranges.
And by the way, speaking about apples and oranges, probably your site has
more sighted visitors because there are more sighted persons on the world, but
if we think in percentages, in order to see for whom is your site more
attractive, for the blind or for the sighted, you might find that even if your
site has a million sighted visitors and only 20000 blind visitors, the
percentage of the blind visitors from the population of blind visitors is
double than the percent of sighted visitors from the whole population.
Many of us (the blind) use to create free web sites with helpful things on
them, but this just prove that maybe most of us don't have the opportunity to
create tens of web sites for money, and it just proves that we might have too
much free time that we want to occupy, because the potential employers do care
about the competitivity but we are not very good at that point, and that's why
most of the blind persons don't have a job. If they would be as good as the
sighted visitors for creating web design as we are in other fields like
massage, the unemployment rate of the blind would be much lower, and very very
many of us would be working in this field, because it would be a very
accessible field otherwise.
Why do I care to say that? I have a very good job, and I also do "web
design" if I can call it that way, but I cannot compare with the best sighted
web designers, and I do really need to compare with the best sighted web
designers, because the financial field in which I work use to attract very good
sighted web designers, and I need to compete with them.
It means absolutely nothing that me, as a blind, I am a better web designer
as thousands sighted web designers. Who care about that, because maybe I need
to compete with the best few thousands not with the worse of them.
Aproximately 2 years ago I asked a sighted web designer to create for me a
good looking template that I needed to use for a site I made, and he made that
template for me, but not only that it didn't respected W3C's recommendation,
but it was really made absolutely incorrectly, using a WYSIWYG editor, and for
example for each field in a form it used to start a new <form ...> element. And
of course, there were other even worse mistakes. Well, I corrected it, and then
after the code was a little clear, I started to analyse it, and I've seen than
in fact that so called "design" was just a simple common type of simple web
page, with a few navigation links aligned by some tables, and a few images,
with absolutely nothing special. Well, I could also make such web page, but
that thing is not "web design" at all. So I renounced finally and I've made my
own design.
For high standards commercial web based applications however, I can't say
that I would be able to do everything I want, because some things that might be
required are absolutely inaccessible for the blind visitors, and it would be
pretty hard to be blind and to create something that's not even accessible for
us as users.
And I just remember a similar story with the one I told you before, when I
needed to renounce to use a template made by a sighted web designer, even
though he told me that he has followed a course for web design, and that he has
a diploma.
He finally created for me a template with some tables and a few image
buttons, and the extraordinary part was a javascript code copied from somewhere
that used to change the images with other images when hovering the mouse over.
As I said, maybe 99% of the web sites don't have anything in common with
"design" but maybe with html craftmanship, and we, the blind, can work for that
kind of web sites, maybe with many exceptions like creating images, choosing
and matching the colors, creating Flash annimations, but we can do it.
Even the worse pages from those 1%, that really involve design,
imagination, talent in visual arts are the ones that can't be made by a blind,
and those are the pages we are talking about.
So if somebody thinks that every page require those talents and some of
them can be made by the blind, please don't confuse the terms, as they are
often intentionally confused by the people or companies that want to show that
what they made is something good.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: Bryan Garaventa
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 3:30 AM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
Ah well, I guess this just proves the point... You can't please everyone.
I really couldn't care less that my site isn't a 'competitive good web
design made by a blind', because that was never my intention in the first
place.
A team would consist of two or more developers working on the coding for
a project, or by taking responsibility for various tasks of that project to
accomplish the goal as a whole. However, all developers, blind or otherwise,
depend on user feedback to enhance the quality of their products. If an
architect were to create a building, and asked someone with a mobility
impairment whether they liked and considered the building suitable for their
needs, would this then make the architect less of an architect? Would they have
to be considered a team?
Moreover, if this hypothetical architect had no knowledge regarding the
installation of plumbing, and thus relied on someone else to complete this
task, or at the least, provide the knowledge necessary for him to complete the
task, would this make him any less of an architect?
All developers have weaknesses in their knowledge and methodologies. The
good ones however, take the extra time necessary to compensate for them by
either learning how to overcome such, or by consulting those with the knowledge
to help them do so. This does not degrade their status as a developer. Saying
that, if you cannot do everything within a specific field, you are somehow
proven to be substandard within that field, is ridiculous. It is impossible for
any one person to know everything.
As far as my own site goes, I really had no intention of making it a
statement for blind developers, or even making this a focus point for the site.
Nor did I have any intention of creating a competitive blind site to compete
with sites created by other blind developers.
At first it was a learning experience, a place to try out new ideas and
hone my skills in various web design techniques and languages. Within the last
four years or so though, my goal has shifted to attracting more sighted
visitors. My reason? Well, that's fairly easy actually... I'm really a bastard
capitalist at heart, and the sighted market share is much wider than the blind
one.
As it now stands, the majority of my web traffic comes from sighted
users. Also, the majority of services and downloads are also being used by
sighted users. This is not because I prefer one over the other, but rather,
because I did put so much time and effort into ensuring a good experience for
both sighted and non-sighted users.
For being a bastard though, I like to think at least that I'm a nice
one...
----- Original Message -----
From: Octavian Rasnita
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 12:14 AM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
See? I don't consider this a competitive good web design made by a
blind.
Your sight might look really nice, but if you needed much more time to
create it, and then you need other sighted persons to check it now and then in
order to be sure you didn't make any mistake, the result is not a web design
made by the blind, but a design made in a team.
And yes, as I said in a previous discussion on the list on the same
subject, a blind person can be a part of a web design team.
But if you are a part of a web designers team and you can't do
everything, then you cannot be a web designer.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: Bryan Garaventa
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 10:27 PM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
Yes, true enough. The problem that I've come across repeatedly is
that everything is relative, and you can't please everyone.
For instance, it took me a long time to get gutterstar.net to look
visually appealing. My goal was to produce a site that was appealing to both
sighted and non-sighted users, while preserving accessibility. The difficulty
for myself though, was that I lost my site before the internet was ever around
(well the localnet was around, but this was mainly bulletin boards...). I've
never seen a web page of any sort, so when I was learning CSS and various
layout methods, I needed visual feedback to notify me when I was making
mistakes. Mistakes are easy to do with CSS, especially when layering and
overlapping start to occur.
So, I would ask someone to check it out, and they would say "Oh wow!
That's awesome!". That was great, it made me feel all fuzzy inside like I had
actually done something worth while. Then, I would tell someone else about it,
all proud of course, and they would report back "Why are all of your web pages
that horrid brown color? It makes them look like... Well... You know..." And my
first overreaction is "What the hell is wrong with JAWS! I checked the bloody
colors when I wrote the damned thing..." and so on...
Well, it took a lot of trial and error, but eventually I got the
hang of it, and can now fairly accurately determine what the consequences of
various code implementations will be. Unfortunately though, I really wouldn't
have been able to get to this point if I hadn't received visual feedback during
the learning process.
Being blind sucks, but it's a condition like any other. If visual
feedback will aid me in accomplishing a task, I'll be the first one to seek it
out. I've learned the hard way that being too proud to do so, is a lonely and
fruitless occupation.
----- Original Message -----
From: Octavian Rasnita
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
Yes I also like when the sighted or the blind have complaints,
because most of the times I know what I need to change for making the site look
better. But the problem is that sometimes the complaints sound like "Oh, but
that page is not nice. Please make it to looke nicely. Can't you?", or "That
stock chart has the lines too proximate, and I can't see them very clear", or
"those 3 charts with volumes and the other 2 indicators should be put in the
same image below the main candlestick chart", and so on.
Well, those charts are generated dynamicly, by the program, and by
a program that was not made by me, because it would take a very long time just
to make that program that generates the graphic, and I need just to change it
in order to "look better", but I cannot see the distances between the lines or
other things like that, (like a sighted person easily can), and I don't have
the time for making studies about how to do that, because this is a very very
small part of the job I need to do.
I know that a blind person that stays at home the entire day in
front of the computer, has the necessary time and power to study and make tests
in order to do this kind of complicated things, but even in that case, they
won't be able to do anything without having some sighted help for telling them
how the result looks.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: Bryan Garaventa
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 7:33 PM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
That's alright, I haven't actually received any complaints. If I
ever do though, it simply indicates an area for improvement. I've always been
open about this to my clients, and they appear to appreciate it.
----- Original Message -----
From: Octavian Rasnita
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 10:05 PM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
You cannot ignore the complaints if the complaints come from
the customers, because they might choose to work with one of your competitors.
And most of the times the sighted users don't have any
complaints, but just don't like and just don't use a site that they don't like.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: Bryan Garaventa
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
Hey, I'm rather pleased with the layout of gutterstar.net...
I'm pretty sure the layout looks appealing, I know I've put enough work into it
for me to believe this anyway... All I have to do is ignore the complaints?
----- Original Message -----
From: Darragh Ó Héiligh
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:22 PM
Subject: Re: Team Excellence Award Winner
Quote:
> Please tell us where can we see the web page made by
that blind guy, and
I
> will tell you if a blind person can do it without
sighted help.
> I've seen many messages on this list telling how cool
web pages can a
> blind
>
> do, with with no single example.
>
> Octavian
>
take a look at:
www.nickykealy.com
www.kenoheiligh.ie
also look at a cached version of nvm.ie and
digitaldarragh.com
my own website is down at the moment as I'm restructuring
it and the online version was getting in the way.
I'm by no means a designer on par with a sighted person but
it can definitly be done. it just takes a bit more determination.
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