Text Readability Research
A survey of user preferences on foreground and background colors and some additional work on text readability has confirmed some fairly well established conventions (e.g. black text on white background is preferred). Still worth a look.

A Heuristic Review Tool
Surfmind gives us a very brief look at a utility for conducting heuristic evaluations...interesting.

The WASP is creating a Buzz
The WASP (Web Standards Project) clears up some recent misinformation about how developers code. The explain that developers don't develop web pages for IE -- they only just TEST with IE -- big difference.

"Many books on web development still teach outdated methods, and many practitioners take pride in delivering sites that look and work exactly the same in compliant and non–compliant browsers alike, at the cost of accessibility, long–term viability, or forward compatibility. Others develop proprietary code that works only in a handful of popular browsers."
- from The Web Standards Project's New Mission Statement

It's good to have the WASP back.

Previous posts:- The Web Standards Project: Phase II Coming
- Whither (or wither) the WaSP?

Back and down to UPA

After a long absence from blogging, I'm back in the saddle. The absence was due to moving into a new home -- all that packing, moving and getting settled takes a lot of time. The new house is great, although my current connectivity is horrible. Hope to get that remedied soon.

I'm heading to the UPA conference this week, and hope to meet lots of neat folks there and learn a few things.

Most People Never Question Statistics

Shirky has a great article outlining why the "Digital Divide" may not be as bad as some think. Trying to prove or disprove the phrase "half the people on the planet have never made a phone call", he uses telecom market penetration to outline some factors impacting the digital divide. His conclusions are very interesting - pointing out that government can be a huge barrier to closing the "divide."