Beyond the Button

Museums have done an enormous amount of work making their spaces and exhibit interfaces accessible to those with physical differences, limitations, and disabilities. However, we have lots more work before we can claim such progress with digital and media interfaces.

One easy thing we can do right is design websites and media interactives for for the colorblind. An estimated 8% of the male population (roughly 12 million folks in the US) have some form of color blindness that can make it hard to use interfaces that rely on color to convey information.

I use two simple tools that help me test my designs for color blind users. They let me see what my work looks like through the eyes of some one who can't see the various differences between the shades of green, blue, or red.

Color Oracle

Color Oracle is great because it turns your entire screen color blind for a moment. Any movement of the mouse or clicks turn the display back to "normal."

Sim Daltonism

Sim Daltonism gives you a color blindness portal or window that lets you see little parts of your screen color blind live. This can be real nice for flash and moving images. But this can also be more memory and processor intensive if you are on a slow computer.

Both of these apps are for the Mac and I don't have any first hand experience with any PC tools. But Daltonize lets you test your interfaces over the web. You can upload an image and filter it for various types of color blindness.

I'd love to hear your tips about how you work to make your visual interfaces more accessible to all viewers.

courtesey Ard Hesselink
This Friday I thought I would post on some of the tools that our web/media group has been using lately.

Assembla

Writing code is hard. Writing code in a group that might not even be on the same floor, building, or state is much harder. Assembla is a set of the key collaboration tools that programming teams need, all rolled into one off-site package. SVN, Trac, a wiki, and even Scrum reporting tools. We initially used it as a stop-gap measure while we got our own SVN server up. Now we're finding it hard to tear ourselves away.

IRC

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around for a long, long while, but we hadn't really thought of it as a work tool until real recently. After two of our finest web/media developers returned from the 2008 DrupalCon, they informed us about a whole 'nother world of Drupal support and discussion living on the IRC channels. I tried it out for a couple of hours one Sunday I was amazed at how much live help was out there for some complex stuff I was trying to figure out. I'm on a mac so I use Colloquy to get on Drupal's IRC channels. Obviously this isn't Drupal specific. There are many channels for the topic you are currently banging your head over right now.

ScreenKeys

What's cooler than a button? A button with a little display built in. Screenkeys are little programmable LCD screens in buttons and switches. These could be quite fun for customized and changing content. The options for control in a game could change every time a visitor plays. We aren't using these yet but I just threw them in for fun.

Any of all those crazy acronyms throw you for a loop? Post a question about how we are using these tools and I'll try and fill you in.

An interesting experiment in click-free user interfaces http://dontclick.it/

Keys on a keyboard?: Courtesy Bonnie ShulmanWhen I was in London recently a friend of mine showed me a rather interesting product that was developed in France with medical laboratories in mind but could find a comfortable home in the museum field as well. Sensitive Object's Virtual B Keyboard(VBK) turns any surface, flat or three dimensional, into a keyboard like input device.

VBK is a revolutionary ultra thin acoustic keyboard that can be used to create a fully functional 108 key computer keyboard on any surface. Two sensors mounted underneath the surface enable the entire keyboard face to be made tactile sensitive.

It works surprisingly well after some calibration and could allow designers in exhibits to get quite a bit more creative with their use of keyboards for visitor feedback.

After thinking it through my example of a banana might not be the best medium for this acoustic keyboard but you can surely see how it might work on a uniquely shaped desk, the wall next to a piece of art, or even on a large scale globe.