Today is World Usability Day, and I am at Michigan State University which is hosting conferences. I’m here with Davin Granroth, and he’s showing me some of the ropes on usability. So far today I’ve seen exactly how hard it is for visually impaired people to use the web. So many websites are made so poorly(even 508 aside) that screen readers really have a hard time making any sense of the data that’s on there. Think of some sites that you thought were really terrible to look at(*cough*myspace*cough*) and then think about writing software that can read those out loud for people that cannot see…good luck!
So you might be wondering, “Is there ANY good news??”
On the Popularity of Web Apps
For the last few years I’ve been looking for ways to reinvent the graphical user interface. My original idea was something web-based, but I did not know much about web development at the time. I toyed with Visual Basic, but it was slow and awkward. I tried with OpenGL, but it was not only too powerful for what I wanted to do, but too complex to maintain robustness. I adopted Python when it seemed capable of making custom GUIs, but alas, Tkinter is somewhat limited. Now I am back to trying a web-based using AJAX.
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