Broadband Data Act
This article talks about and act that is being pushed through congress for schools receiving e-Rate funds to teach students about appropriate behavior on social networking and chat room websites and cyber bullying. The Broadband Data Improvement Act is included in this Act. It seeks to establish studies to track the penetration of US broadband internet access. (I'm not sure what that means. Maybe someone can elaborate?)
We covered internet safety earlier in the course. I definitely think this is a good idea. The internet is becoming a necessity, an extension of our everyday lives. Some people could not live without access to the internet. I know I couldn’t. I remember 1990, when the internet was just starting. I had Prodigy and paid $14.95 a month. I remember my parent being in total awe, I was in total awe, at how cool this idea was. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve advanced and how integrated the web has become in our lives. Unfortunately, people are realizing that they can act inappropriately and criminally. It is so difficult to catch online perpetrators. So we need to be preemptive and teach our kids to be cautious and careful when disclosing information or talking to other people.


School Libraries Renewed by Ann M. Martin

Did you know that since 1965 more than 60 studies have found a link between school library media specialists (school librarians) and student achievement. Studies show that kids increase 10-20 points on standardized tests. I'm not sure how they teased other factors that might be affecting student scores, like better teachers, better technologies, resources, etc. The library is becoming the place where children learn to think critically.

K12 Online Conference
I am currently attending a conference at work. The cost of conferences can be astounding. I've seen prices in the 800 dollar range. Thankfully mine was $150 and thankfully I didn't have to pay for it. But I can see how having an online conference for free can be a wonderful thing. I often wish there would be more of these available on the net. But I guess everyone has to make money. This conference focuses on innovative Web 2/0 technologies for the K-12 classroom. It runs for two weeks and has 40 presentations. Some of them can be quite interesting for the general public. They offer insight on webpages and tools we might find useful but weren't aware of their existence. One of my favorite tools I found was a mind mapping software. I wanted to purchase one of these for my project, but now I've found it for free! It looks like flow charts, but you can link files into them as well as web pages and other fun stuff. It's designed to look like Microsoft Office 2007, which I haven't learned yet. You are limited to storing only 7 maps on the free version. If you want all of the features you have to pay $6 a month.

There are other websites that offer mind mapping:

Bubbl.us
FreeMind
and
View Your Mind This program (you have to download it) seems cluttered and hard to navigate. From what I’ve seen on the webpage, I wouldn’t recommend it.

This past week, with the collaborative paper we had to do with our group was much tougher than the previous paper, even though there were only two of us rather than 3. Maybe it was because both of our schedules were so hectic and on different shifts that (even online) getting together to talk about the assignment was difficult. Either way, it somehow came together in the end.

Since the week had to do with designing functional and accessible library websites , I thought I would address a comment I saw earlier today from a new member of this site. I am not sure, but I think this might be someone from our class that might have decided to join the site. This person quickly told the owner of this site how bad his choices of font and background color were. The reason I think this might be a classmates, is because included in that comment were various sources about website design and what is acceptable and recommended and what isn't, followed by a book suggestion about the same subject.

This is what I've found librarians guilty of far too often; giving too much information and advice when it isn't needed or requested. I felt as if it was rather insulting. Had the person looked around, they would have found that what they had on their screen was just one of the many themes you can choose to view estrip with. You can either select one of the ready made themes or you can actually customize your estrip experience to have the font, background, borders, etc... exactly to your liking.

So this person tried to school someone, who's journals I've read and learned has a great amount of education, has been a proff at Canisus, is a system analyst at Roswell and has designed and run this website for over 4 years, simply because they did not take the time to figure out how the website properly works. This was followed by a quick 'kudos on your little project' statement, which too, made me cringe. I'm not sure, but to me this site looks like a tad bit more than someone's side project by some kid who lives in his mom's basement.

I must say I felt somewhat embarrassed.


But for those of you who were interested we read this article for class "Apple Threatens iTunes Shutdown over Royalty Dispute"
which will probably cause some of you to dislike Jobs even more.

Another interesting bit we were required to read through was Jessica Hupp's Website Usability Checklist; where she goes through 57 tips one should follow when designing a website for maximum usability.

This week focused on usability and the barriers we sometimes put up for those with disabilities when designing on the web without even knowing it. That is in fact what I concentrated on in my portion of the paper.

Did you know that there are devices out there that read the computer monitor and display Braille on a small device that a visually person can then read? And they not only use this to view the page but to also double check their spelling. Imagine if you could not see the words you actually typed; you'd miss tons of spelling errors.

The major things I've learned to keep in mind for people with visual disabilities is to make sure that all images have alternate text associated with them so that when they're using screen readers to "hear" what is on the website instead of seeing it, they can also have an idea as to what pictures and images they're missing.

It's also important to remember that great fonts are cool, make sure that all of your text is actually text and not an image. Placing text on your page as an image will also render it impossible for screen readers to read, and the person will miss out on whatever you are trying to display on your site. If you absolutely must do that make sure again that alt text is present in place for the missing image.

There are also the disabilities that we don't often think about when talking about website usability or access. There are cognitive disabilities that we should take into account such as ADHD and memory issues, age related memory stuff and learning disabilities like dyslexia and Down's Syndrome. There are helpful things you can do to increase the usability of your website for people with cognitive barriers. Designing the page to be clean, simple and easy to navigate with a well organized structure are the most obvious. Keeping the page clutter free is a huge help for those with ADD and memory problems. Having fewer distractions on the page allows the user to focus and concentrate on what they are trying to accomplish. Using big simple graphics instead of links embedded in words is helpful.

We tend to forget about individuals with motor skill impairment. For people who have things such as carpal tunnel syndrome or cerebral palsy, creating sites that don't require constant repetitive movement or clicks is helpful.

I found a great report you might be interested in called " Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users with Disabilities" by Kara Pernice and Jakob Nielsen. It's quite lengthy (157 pages) so be prepared. It was put together by the Nielsen Norman Group, a usability consulting company (who knew that there were usability consulting groups out there, right?). They do their own research by conducting studies and have regular conferences around the world for those who might be interested. The paper discusses several of their studies.

Study of 44 users, 31 in US and 13 in Japan of whom 35 had visual impairments and 9 motor skill issues.
Study in the US to magnitude of usability problems for users with disabilities compared to non-disabled users. 60 participants:

It then has in depth discussions on numerous guidelines they suggest for web page design.

Here are a few of the suggestions that I thought were not so obvious.

Avoid using pop-up windows.

"For people using screen readers, it can be a big problem if they click something, expect a certain page, and then hear something completely foreign like the contents of an unexpected pop-up window. The information they want, expect, and need is often right behind the pop-up window, but since the window focuses on the pop-up and that's what the screen reader reads, the user has no idea that what they want is right there. One participant noted, "You press a link and you end up someplace way far from where you were and Back won't work. The only thing you can do is close the window."


Avoid using cascading menus.

"People using screen magnifiers and people with motor skill challenges had a difficult time using cascading menus. These implementations rely on users being able to drag and hold the mouse while clicking with precision."


Underline all links.

"Underlines are especially important for users with low
vision. When a page is zoomed in, it is difficult to discern some of the more subtle link indicators, like bold or blue text. Underlines are easier to see when the screen is magnified."


Do not rely on only an asterisk (*) to indicate required fields.

"Some screen reader users have
learned that the word star means required field, but several users in our study did not know this. A few even said that they didn't know why they sometimes heard the word star, and thought it might be a bug in their screen reader."


Inform users when they have entered nothing in the search query box.


"In a few sessions, users typed keys on the keyboard and were obviously trying to type in the search query box, but didn't have the text field selected. They selected Go, and the search started. It returned a page of results, starting with Search results found for you... 100 products found. People naturally assumed that the
results returned had something to do with what they were looking for, but in fact they hadn't searched for anything. This was especially confusing for people using screen readers and screen magnifiers, as they were unaware that they had not typed a search query."



Avoid using large tables for any reason.

"With so much information in a table, it is difficult for screen reader users, Braille users, and screen magnifier users to make sense of it all and remember it. It is especially difficult to recall which column each cell belongs under as the contents are read."

It seems like a weird coincidence that internet safety would be the subject covered last week since last week I discovered that my checking account was infiltrated and fraudulent charges were being posted.

I actually had the opportunity to use easywhois.com to try to track down the culprit. The interesting thing the charges in common was that they both had an web address listed along with the charge and so I tried to search for them both, but was only able to obtain information on one of them. The other website address brought up nothing in easywhois. The one that I did find was located abroad and had very little information provided. Although if you go the website itself, you can tell that it must be undertaking some kind of fraudulent operation, since the first thing listed on the website states, "If your credit card statement directed you to visit this web site, then your credit card was used to purchase a subscription to a membership based web site. The "descriptor" or "merchant name" on your credit card statement is not the same as the name of the web site that you joined. The best way to identify exactly what membership the charge on your statement was for is to call us and speak with a representative.

Being the parent of a teenager, I share internet safety concerns with most other parents, but I have found myself to be a bit more lenient than most parents with regards to objectionable material once my child became a teen. Other than making sure she wasn't giving out personal information, there was little I did to limit her access to the web. I guess maybe it was because I felt I was fighting a losing battle? She would see it sooner or later and by making it so "bad" and "forbidden" I was just making it more exciting and enticing. I used a filtering program when she was younger, but found myself always having to sign in my password for sites that were blocked that had nothing questionable. And I guess that is where the issue is.

However, all of the sources that I've seen our classmates gather as well as the material covered in class have been very informative and I actually might share those with my family.

Hi am a student at UB finishing up my library degree. One of my classes requires that I post about the class on a blog, so I decided to open one up here. My classmates and my instructor will be reading this, so you guys don't have to..hee hee.