I have a particular bee in my bonnet when it comes to accessibility, my wife is registered blind and I am constantly frustrated when she is unable see things (like text on a screen) especially when I know that this is avoidable. It was this frustration that prompted me to email Steve Jobs about the iPhone’s SMS functionality last year. True to his word users can now change the font size for those 2 apps.

What I don’t understand is why there is no way to change font size system wide, or why app developers don’t provide that facility.

Yes I know that you can switch on zooming, but honestly – have you tried using zooming on a phone? My wife uses screen magnifying software at work, so she’s used to that – but she can’t get on with the iPhone implementation & I can understand why. It’s awful. There’s also Voiceover. This must be a massive boon for people with incredibly poor eyesight but for most users it’s not appropriate, who wants their texts or other private data read so that others can hear it?

I’m sure many iOS developers have come from a web background & will be familiar with WCAG. As far as I know there’s no similar guideline for developing accessible apps, but a developers are still obliged to ensure that their apps comply with disability discrimination legislation such as the UK’s Disabaility Discrimination Act. The act says that service providers (and as a developer that’s you) must “make reasonable adjustments to ensure blind and partially sighted people can access your service”.

So for a moment, let’s just pretend that WCAG does apply to smartphone apps and look at guideline 1.4.4 1.4.4 Resize text: Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality. (Level AA) That seems like a reasonable aim to me.

I have spoken to a couple of developers about this, the general consensus seems to be “I’m not sure if that’s possible” or “it would be an awful lot of work for not much benefit”. This makes me sad. Not being an iOS developer myself, I don’t know if it would be possible for someone to write a text resizing library that they could open source? If it is possible, think of all the people that could be helped by including that in apps. After all, it’s not jst cronicly badly sighted people that struggle with small text, many older & long sighted people do to.

I’d be really interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this, especially from the Dev community.

They forecast snow but it looks like hfail.

Just over a week ago twitter and facebook were buzzing with news about a competition that Nokia were running to bring snow to five UK towns. The way to make your town to win was to get the most votes.

So the people of Worthing duly installed the facebook app & invited their freinds, the retweeted the link and advertised it on their blogs. They nagged everyone they knew to vote until the competition closed. After a few days the results were announced & people were delighted to find out that Worthing was one of the winning towns. Again people tweeted the good news & talked about it on facebook & bebo. “Good old Nokia, they’re bringing us some snow!”

Once again a few days passed and then an email started popping in to peoples in boxes. “Your five free tracks are waiting” it said. “eh?” said the people of Worthing “what about our snow?”. This was followed by another mail

Welcome to Nokia Music Store. Enjoy the music you love on the move.

This email is to confirm that you’ve successfully joined the Nokia Music Store. Your username is *******. You will need these details to access Nokia Music Store, so keep them safe.

The thing is, no one knew they were registering for the Nokia music store when they entered the competition.

Why had nokia registered people for a service without telling them? This is not good for trust.

More time passed. Then, Yesterday an email arrived “You’ve received this because you entered the Nokia Win Snow competition, and you’ve been selected for special VIP tickets to your town’s event!”. The email linked through to a survey which asked which session you wanted to attend and how many tickets you wanted. After completing the survey users were dumped back to the Nokia Christmas website with no idea what was going to happen next. When would the tickets arrive? How would we get in to the event? Everyone settled down to do a bit more waiting.

Then today, this:

Thank you for the overwhelming response from Worthing to the email we sent out!

We’re sorry for any confusion we’ve caused over the wording of the email and the instructions we provided. Unfortunately we can’t reply to you all individually to explain the process, so we’ll outline it in this email.

By filling in the online form you’ve registered your interest in getting tickets for the event.

Worthing Council have informed us that we can only have a maximum of 500 people at each session, so we’ll have to limit the attendees to a fixed number of invitees and a limited number of guests for each invitee.

If you didn’t fill in the form in time and the form was closed, I’m sorry, but we have had to limit the number of applicants.

We’re going to randomly select a number of invitees from all who applied, and send them an email to confirm that they are invited to the event, how many guests they have, and what they need to do to gain entry.

We’d love you all to come, but unfortunately the response has been so overwhelming that we will be unable to fit you all in and still comply with the Council regulations.

If you didn’t complete the form fully or correctly, for whatever reason, I’m afraid we can’t include you in the draw. Owing to the large numbers involved, we cannot engage in individual correspondence over any particular entry.

Oh dear, oh dear. This will never do.

Almost immediately irate Worthingites started tweeting their frustration at Nokia, swapping details of conversations with officials from the council (who denied any knowledge of any restriction on numbers) and planning to demonstrate outside the event on Saturday if they didn’t get the tickets they’d been promised.

The local paper published an article about the fiasco & I blogged about it over on WorthingThing.  An hour or so later Nokia did a massive u-turn when a spokesman said to the Worthing Herald “Nokia’s spokesman added: “What we are hoping to do is somehow accommodate everyone and we’re just working out what we can do as we have made a commitment to more people than we planned for.”

“Nokia will do all we can to make sure everyone has some sort of experience.”

So, Nokia underestimated how many people would want to come to the event, having voted for it. and they underestimated how angry people would be when they were told they couldn’t go after all. Faced with the prospect of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory Nokia have done the only thing they can to mitigate a barrage of bad publicity.

I hope that Nokia’s underestimation of people’s expectations doesn’t lead to an anti-climatic event on Saturday.

What can companies learn from this?

It’s not a new lesson really. If you promise the public something make damn sure you can deliver it.

The difference now is that if you don’t deliver on your promises social networks mean that people can very quickly rally together and cause negative publicity and that will bite you on the arse.

What is remarkable is the number of comments moaning and bitching about the coverage that the Guardian gives to twitter. It’s true that they have given it quite a lot of coverage lately in the paper, on the website & on the excellent Tech Weekly Podcast, with good reason, and this is the reason: some people, maybe even a lot of people think it’s interesting.

The fact is I find twitter extremely useful. As a web developer I use it for keeping up to date with the latest industry news, it’s an excellent way to pick your peer’s brains & share your own knowledge.

Every day papers & news websites dedicate pages & pages to sport. I hate sport; I particularly hate football. So do I take time out of my busy day to write to the paper or post a comment on the website every time there’s a sport related story? No, I ignore it and remain blissfully ignorant. I guess some people just have too much time on their hands.

• Choose your software
• Add to cart
• Pay
• Download Software

nice and simple & stress free. Unfortunately some companies don’t get it – Tomtom I’m looking at you.

Yesterday I decided to purchase the Tomtom maps of Western Europe in preparation for our holiday next month, so I spent £60 (approx $120 US) on the map and nearly a day later I’m still waiting for it to be “delivered”.

The Tomtom  map purchase experience goes like this:

• Choose map
• Add to Cart
• Confirm your Tomtom account details
• Pay
• Get a screen that thanks you for your purchase and tells you that you will receive download instructions “shortly”
• Receive thank you email
• Receive invoice email
• Wait!

Now the thank you screen did say that if I waited more than 24hrs for the download details to get in touch, but frankly I think having to wait more than a few minutes is too long – if I’m buying a software download I want it now, not tomorrow. Come on Tomtom, sort it out.

One thing that was missing until now though was a way of getting jQuery intellisense in VS2008. Yesterday I spotted this article by James Hart which describes how this missing functionality can be be added. You need to make sure that you have this Visual Studio 2008 Hotfix installed then follow the instructions in James’ article and as if by magic you’ll have intellisense for your jQuery code! This has gone down a treat here and looks set to make life an awful lot easier.

On Monday My wife phoned me at work to tell me that she couldn’t get on line. When I got home I rebooted the router a couple of times but still couldn’t connect.

Yesterday we got an SMS on our home phone saying “your Sky broadband is now connected, enjoy!” I thought this was a bit odd considering we’ve been connected for the last 15 months or so. I decided to give Sky a call.

It turns out that as soon as you tell them you’re moving house they put in a request to have your broadband disconnected. Apparently this is because it can take 10 -12 days for the request to be actioned. In my case it took about four days.

We were disconnected without warning, it was never mentioned to me that we’d be disconnected before our moving date. I am absolutely furious with sky as we now have no way of accessing the internet at home for the ten days prior to moving home.

Fortunately Dustin Brewer has come to the rescue by developing twittersync which, as the name sort of suggest syncs your facebook status with Twitter without pre pending anything (unless you want it to). Thanks Dustin! That’s much better.

With the recent redesign I completely scrapped the existing templates and started again doing away with the absolute positioning. However, none of the techniques I’d used in the past for footer positioning worked and for the life of me I couldn’t work out why.

Eventually the answer dawned on me; the form element that .net annoyingly insists on wrapping everything in was not being targeted by the CSS. Once I’d realised that it was fairly straightforward to get the footer working. Here’s how I did it:

The basic xhtml structure for your page should look like this

<body>
<!-- Stupid form required by .net -->
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div id="container">
<div id="contents">
<!-- Everything apart from the footer goes in here-->
</div>
</div>
<div id="site-info">
<!-- footer stuff-->
</div>
</form>
</body>

And here’s the CSS to work the magic

html, body, #aspnetForm
{
	height:100%;
	/* without this the footer stays at the end of the content
           - not the botom of the viewport */
}
#container
{
	margin:auto;
	min-height:100%;
	width:980px;
	/* #container is at least the height of the veiwport and contains
            everything except the footer*/
}
#contents
{
	padding-bottom:3em;
	/* #contents contains everything excepte the footer and adds padding at least equivalent to the height of the footer beneath the content*/

}
#site-info
{	height:3em;
	margin :-3em auto 0 auto;
	width:980px;
	/* #site-info (the footer) contains the supplimenatry navigation and copyright info.
	   It's height and negative top margin should be the same as the bottom padding in #contents   */
}

This technique was based on Cameron Adams’ “footerStickAlt”.

Blogged with Flock

About a month ago I found a nice easy cure for this, so I thought I’d share it. All you need to do to stop .net adding the name attribute to the form is add an xhtmlConformance tag to your web.config like so:

<configuration>
<system.web>
<xhtmlConformance mode="Strict" />
</system.web>
</configuration>

Hopefully that’ll be of some use to someone.

*What annoys me more is the fact you have to have a form tag on every page for .net to work, but that’s a rant for another day.