Re: Some comments about the forum design

[Anonymous]

I was not, at any point in my comment, advocating flashing images, moving text, or anything else of the sort. Where you might find cyan on white relaxing, I find it almost impossible to read, I do a lot of work online, historical research, contracted information research and development, even a bit of information design, so I have seen a lot of web design, good, bad, and indifferent.

So for a website’s design to seem to actively discourage people from using it as effectively as possible seems to me to be worthy of comment.

The point of web usability is to make the site as useful to the greatest number of people immediately. Of course I could impose my own set of standards, I could zoom to make the letters larger I could force the website to display the colors that I choose, I can use another search engine, but I shouldn’t have to.

I will readily admit that my eyes are old. I medicate them for glaucoma. I use a special set of reading glasses for my computer. Even so, the use of color and the size of text in these forums is harder to read than the many hundreds of other websites that I visit daily.

Probably one of the reasons that I find it so frustrating is that I used to do a lot of work in concepts of universal usability of information, trying to make sure that the information that my group produced would be available with minimum effort for people who had any type of perception or mobility impairment.

A simple change of the heading color from cyan to something that has a bit more contrast would not be dreadful for someone with normal vision, but makes a great deal of difference to someone whose eyesight is less than perfect. Ditto for increasing the type size a couple of points.

REPORT ABUSE