Understanding Screen Colors and Accessibility

There are lots of accessibility myths out there, involving which color combinations are and aren't accessible: It's all about the level of contrast between the colors and the size of the text. WebAIM, a site which provides web accessibility solutions, has a Color Contrast checker available for anyone to use to check your text's accessibility.

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

To use this tool, you need to understand a little about how colors can be named on a computer. Because of the way monitors show colors, colors are identified by the amount of Red, Blue, and Green in the color (RGB color). The value of each color varies from 0 (none) to 255 (as much as possible). Instead of writing out R: 255, B: 255 G: 255 (255,255,255) for white, some programs show this in something called hex code. Every color is coded in a 6 character combination with values from 0-9 and A-F - the first two characters are the Red, the next two are the Green, and the final two are the Blue. White is #FFFFFF and Black is #000000. Red would be #FF0000.

This would be simple enough (grab the RGB hex codes, you need and type them in the tool to compare) except that not all programs will give you the hex code - some will only give you the RGB values from 0 to 255, which is sometimes referred to as decimal code. If that happens to you (PowerPoint, for example, will give you decimal code under advanced color options but not the hex code) then you can use another tool to convert the colors to the code you need.

Here's an online tool that lets you put in RGB decimal values, or RGB hex values, or select a color by sight and gives you all the information about the color. Then you can take the hex codes to the WebAIM site to check color contrast for accessibility.

http://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.htm

Fast Internet or Slow Internet?

With online education becoming more and more prominent, it's important to remember the technological infrastructure that needs to be in place to make it a success. Today's Washington Post highlights this on one of their blogs, GovBeat, by showing an infographic of the fastest and slowest Internet speeds in the United States.

The really fascinating dissection of this map comes, however, from the site which posted it first (which may even have created the map): Gizmodo. That article talks more about the source of the data, and even gives the data a quick comparison against things like population density and income levels of the various areas.

The data used to create this map comes from OOkla's Net Index, which uses self-check speed sites like Speedtest.net to collect the speed information. You can download and play with the data yourself on the Net Index site: http://www.netindex.com/source-data/

Getty's Open Content Program: More Open Image Repositories!

Getty images has made the decision to open some of its works, both public domain and some to which Getty holds the rights, to be released "freely, for any use" - starting with works from the Getty Museum's collection.

So far they've released just shy of 5000 high quality public domain images, with an intent for this to grow. You can read more about this on the The Getty Iris, or you can jump right to the Getty search portal (I've taken the liberty of specifying the Open Content Images for your perusal). Links below.

Getty Iris posting: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/open-content-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/

Getty Image Search (Open Content): http://search.getty.edu/gateway/search?q=&cat=highlight&f=%22Open+Content+Images%22&rows=10&srt=a&dir=s&pg=1

Safer Internet Day

Today is Safer Internet Day, a day promoted by Insafe (funded in part by the European Union) to encourage responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices, particularly for young people. The day has been recognized in Europe since 2004, with CNET noting that the U.S. has just decided to get "on board" this year.

This year's theme is "Online rights and responsibilities" with the intention to get young people to "connect with respect." The official video below looks to be geared for younger audiences and highlights the bullying aspects of online connections. The last year has shown us some of the dire consequences of that.



Even adults should have a take away from this, however. Always connected may not always be a good thing. Remember that there is a person at the other end of every message you send (or fail to send). Text is harder to parse emotion out of than conversation, so make sure your message reads as you intend.

Connect with respect.

Simple Games

I'd like to introduce you to a product called Twine.

Twine is a product that lets you build an interactive story. As you're making the story, you can put in choices for the reader. As you get more advanced, you can even hide text from readers unless they made particular previous choices.

Twine is a free download, super simple to start using, but robust enough to grow into something more.

You can download Twine here.

You can watch a video on how to build a simple story with Twine below:

Creating A Simple Story from Chris Klimas on Vimeo.

And if you'd like to learn about some more advanced options (like tracking "whether the player's visited a certain place or how many stones of power she's collected") then you'll want to read "How to Make Games with Twine" at auntiepixelante.com

Can you think of ways to use Twine for your course?

Digital Handwriting

In the office, where I work, we have had several international graduate students. One of them had a story about when she first arrived; she had met with a group of other international students, a community meant to support each other in transitioning to a new culture. She wrote each of them a handwritten note after the meeting, thanking them and inviting them to keep touch and do more, but didn't get a reply.

At a later meeting, filled with the sort of positive camaraderie that made her curious at the lack of response to her note, she asked one of her more friendly acquaintances why he had never replied. The response? He couldn't read cursive handwriting. It turned out that almost no one in the group, international or local, could reliably read cursive.

To my knowledge, we haven't stopped teaching cursive - yet. But there's a certain atrophy that has developed from being accustomed to type-written words.

So I was intrigued by a question posed on The Fox Is Black design blog: "Would it be different to get an email from someone if it was in their own handwriting?"

One of the chief recurring complaints about the "digital world" is how cold and impersonal it can seem. Would it be any different if you used a font of your own handwriting? While there are numerous font creation services out there, one design group has taken this a step further. The group, Underware, developed a custom font for a client that has extensive glyph options depending on where a letter appears - just as someone actually writing would use a different "y" in the middle of a word than would be used at the end of a word.

This whole area is ripe for discussion, but let's focus first on questions suggested by The Fox Is Black website: Would email be different if written in the sender's own handwriting? Extending this question: How would it be different? Would it feel more personal? Would the age-range of the recipient make a difference?

Another angle: Are there any educational benefits to using cursive if it's accomplished by the computer? I can see an argument for a kinesthetic connection if one were actually writing (and we could assume that one must still learn to do this in order to construct one's individual font...), but when we're constructing a font to fit our writing it loses the rigor of an exercise where one writes material down to recall it better. Do the loops and whorls of someone else's (say, a professor's) handwriting serve as any sort of memory aid for you?

Technology will only become more sophisticated, and we already have at least one "intelligent" cursive type-face. This was done primarily as a design artifact, but it certainly could be more. Is this the sort of humanizing touch our digital lives need, or are we needlessly holding on to an obsolete artifact of the past?