Re: Joe Clark book review from pcpro

BTW, it would have been nice to have received an actual E-mail about
this thread. You know, I'm *on* this list, not merely present by
name in subject lines.

> I agree on the odd typography - the twirls on the image captions are a
> little distracting (on words like system and selection).

I assume you refer to the ct and st ligatures. You don't have to
like them, of course.

> The images could be
> a bit more clear - especially those containing close to unreadable text in
> pop-ups.

We did what we could with the somewhat ridiculous constraint that
*we couldn't print in colour*. TIFF screenshots are intrinsically
low-resolution (72 dpi, nominally) and actually look *better*
reduced in size. Believe me, we spent actual days doing nothing but
manipulating and optimizing screenshots. Days and days and days. We
removed individual pixels in more than one case.

In examples where reading the onscreen text was absolutely
necessary, we used callouts and bigger magnification sizes,
actually.

I agree to some extent with the criticism, but what you see in the
book is the best we could do under our constraints, one more of
which was we were unable to include the graphics on the CD-ROM,
which might have obviated certain problems.

> I don't find the US-centrism that much of a problem (as opposed to

Probably because there isn't any. U.S. coverage was included where
necessary, but a great deal of foreign information was included.
Anybody bother to check all the screenshots in Italian, Portuguese,
Finnish, and so on? In fact, the *lack* of emphasis on the U.S. was
remarked upon by my publisher, but I stayed the course.

> draw the right parallels. For a UK perspective, I find Australian practice
> setting a good precedent.

Check the CD-ROM for Martin Sloan's article on the subject. It was
too lengthy to include in the main text. But you see, I didn't
overlook the U.K.

> *aside* The quote "Standards compliance is a form of programming maturity"
> is a good one, but I hesitate to use it because of the word "programming"
> and its implication of website creation as programming -- but that's just my
> paranoia.

Possibly a fair point, though admittedly rather minor, but I've
found that critics of my book have quasi-Aspergerian capacities to
expand inconsequential issues into blanket condemnations. It's a
feature I recognize in myself, of course.

-- 

  Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org
  Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
  <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>

Received on Monday, 3 March 2003 14:03:36 UTC