I read with great curiosity Richard Bernstein’s article in today’s New York Times, called International > Europe > The New Europe: Poland Is Worried That Border Controls Create a New Divide” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/international/europe/25POLA.html”>”The New Europe: Poland Is Worried That Border Controls Create a New Divide”. Now that Poland will soon be on the good (read: Catholic, capitalist, and calm) side of the European border, the Western Europeans have armed the country to deal with the potential flood of immigrants.
I lived in Poland for a year, and back then (1995), I was fortunate to meet up with the very few minorities living in the country: a few Polish Jews, a few Africans, and a few Koreans. I remember that the official non-Catholic population was about 2%, which included Roma and immigrants from outside of Europa. It was a new time of ethnic anxiety, as described by those I met, and I can see that those worries will continue to be stoked by both Western Europeans and the new security apparatus that is Poland.
Moreover, I can’t get over the incredible irony of Poland, sandwiched between traditionally bellicose Germany and Russia, now the border guard for the wealthy to the West. Called the new “Iron Curtain,” the article above mentions “exacerbating tensions around who is on the inside and who is left out of the new Europe.”
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Vanity Plates
I did a lot of driving today. 2.25 hours to Philadelphia and then 2.75 hours back, much thanks to a seemingly tiny accident on the Staten Island Expressway Parking Lot. In any case, I think I realized today that vanity license plates are the true predecessors of the Internet’s domain names.
Both are registered through demi-oligarchic means (the State and the state); both involve using specified letters, numbers and dashes (but no semicolons, colons, or asterisks) to lay claim to a piece of common cultural infrastructure; both are necessarily publicly displayed; both are treasured, admired, and critiqued for their logic, humor, and simplicity; and finally, both belong to a visual history of insignias, coats of arms, and other personalized or customized means of signifying one’s presence in the world.
Reserved
It’s been a very hectic few days but I’m always eager to give credit where credit is due: the new issue of Reservocation is out and there are some excellent pieces on illustration, typography on the Web, and other good design stuff. Relatedly, I have not gotten to one item on the list from Sunday. Help me, people.
Accessibility in the U.K.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about website accessibility, but it’s never far from my interests and aspirations. The Disability Rights Commission, a U.K.-based Government-affilated organization just released its Formal Investigation Report on web accessibility. This is from their introduction:
Disabled people must frequently overcome additional obstacles before they can enjoy the full range of information, services, entertainment and social interaction offered by the Web: blind people need sites to provide, for example, text as an alternative to images for translation into audible or legible words by specially designed screenreading devices; partially sighted people may be especially reliant upon large-format text and effective colour contrast; people who are dyslexic or have cognitive impairments may benefit in particular from the use of simpler English or alternative text formats, such as Easy Read, and from the clear and logical layout of an uncluttered website; people whose first language is British Sign Language may also find Plain English indispensable; and people with manual dexterity impairments may need to navigate with a keyboard rather than with a mouse.
Nevertheless, the Web has enormous potential for disabled people. In contrast to other information media, it is, with the benefit of assistive technology1, potentially tolerant of impairment. Inclusive website design makes it easier to use these alternative means of access, without making a site less attractive to unimpaired users. Irresponsible and inconsiderate design, on the other hand, not only puts disabled users at a significant disadvantage but can make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone, whether disabled or not.
And a few of the reports findings are interesting:
1.1 Few (19%) websites comply even with the lowest priority Checkpoints for accessibility.
1.2 All categories of disabled user consider that site designs take insufficient account of their specific needs.
1.3 Blind users, who employ screen readers to access the web, although not alone in being disadvantaged, are particularly disadvantaged by websites whose design does not take full account of their needs.
1.4 Although many of those commissioning websites state that they are alert to the needs of disabled people, there is very little evidence of such awareness being translated into effective usability for disabled people.
And perhaps most interestingly, the organization tested 1000 home pages from across numerous sectors. Only 16 were Level A compliant (this is the 19% noted above), meaning minimally accessible to those with disabilities. 6 home pages were Level AA compliant, which means that sites deliberately worked to assure accessibility. And NO home pages achieved Level AAA (or total) compliance.
Tomorrow Now Sans Art
After putting the book down a while ago, I just completed reading sci-fi author Bruce Sterling’s quite excellent Tomorrow Now : Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. It’s a very smart read about how the future could look for all of us. Alternating between a dystopia where governments are consistently challenged by terror and crime and the planet wastes away under its noxious gasses and a utopia in which medicine provides strange life-changing elixirs to the common man, Sterling hits many great futurist notes.
Interestingly as well, within its pages, Sterling praises doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers, industrial designers, corporate technocrats, government policy wonks, and political activists. But the book gives pretty short shrift to art, makers of culture, and the visionary potential of aesthetics. I don’t want to agree with him but I can’t help but wonder if his ellision is all too true. Perhaps art (e.g. film, painting, music, etc.), in the most traditional Western and Eastern senses of the word, can only envision a future of one (viewer, participant, extremist) at this point — it can no longer participate in true social patterns or partake in the biggest issues of our days. I don’t think Sterling is explicitly saying this. But I do wonder if this is what the book, by its omissions, implies.
To Do or Not To Do
A series of lovely colds swept through the place last week, leaving my written logs incomplete. But I have a number of in-house redesigns I’d like to accomplish this week and only with you, my willful reader, will I perhaps have a chance at fulfillment thanks to the inevitable public humiliation that will follow if I dare not act:
- Redesign the MANOVERBOARD.com home page to allow for more text and updates
- Slightly revise the Deckchairs home page to allow for more color and variety
- Push Ruth Root’s incredible paintings to MANOVERBOARD.net once and for all
- Send out The Telegraph, which went sadly unsent the month of March
More on the R.E. Bubble
I promise not to drag this dead horse around another time, but I was glad to see that someone on Metafilter posted a heavily commented piece on the possibility of a real real estate bubble.
(I had forgotten how great Metafilter is; I hadn’t posted to it in a long, long time.)
Sad But Jew
It’s making the rounds. When you type the word “Jew” into Google’s main search window, you get this page, which shows at the top of the rankings a site called “Jew Watch,” an anti-Semitic site.
Google took out its own little ad to comment on it and it has further links to more information. Does this mean that the JewWatch.com website is more popular than any other Judaism-related website? If Google’s objective and automatic rankings are correct, and they probably are, the answer is yes.
But what’s maybe equally sad is that beneath Google’s ad is another ad titled “Jew prints.” What could the sponsor, AllPosters.com, possibly seek to gain from this?
The Inadequacy of Diversity
I appreciated an article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine by Walter Benn Michaels, called Magazine > Essay: Diversity’s False Solace” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11ESSAY.html”>Diversity’s False Solace. Mr. Michaels (perhaps a little too gleefully albeit boldly) points out the hypocrisy of U.S. universities that show how diverse their student populations are. Mr. Michaels’ point is that their marketing is authentic but that it masks the fundamental class differences in America and American education today. Yes, he says, the racial and ethnic demographics are identified but where’s the beef if everyone attending a university is rich?
I found this to be mostly true at Brown, where I went to undergrad, and at most schools like it. I’m a fan of affirmative action; however, I do wonder what will happen to this country as it slides down a superbly polarized slope where the rich eat the poor for lunch. Who really speaks to and about class these days? There are already two very structured class tiers around health insurance, home ownership, car insurance, daycare, and political representation. Once higher education, jobs, and access to clean water are divided up, it will get really scary.
Here’s an excerpt from the last paragraph of the article:
This, if you’re on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution. For as long as we’re committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don’t have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don’t have to worry that most people can’t go to them, while others get to do so because they’ve had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won’t have to worry about inequality.
Chicken Dance Elmo
I can’t say I’m proud of it but I also can’t, at the same time, say I’m not elated that my daughter was able to co-ordinate her hand and eyes to click on the various eggs in the Chicken Dance Elmo online game. I watched her subtly and artfully move her hand from egg to egg and clicking squarely on each one (pardon the bad metaphor).
What’s the meaning? Well: a. she’s spending too much time on the computer with me (like me); b. she’s got highly advanced hand-eye coordination and a deep understanding of the relationship between three-dimensional movement, human agency and two-dimensional interfaces; c. she somehow connects with the logic of this sweet and goofy game; d. all of the above plus a mixture of plain old growing and learning.