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Photo Forum / General Photo Topics / General Topics / April 2008Can you hear me?
I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might take the time to drop by and test it for me. http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html Thanks, Dudley > I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might take > the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > Thanks, > Dudley On the opening page, Dima's picture lies over the title and hides it. The black narrative text lies on top of the image and is nearly impossible to read conveniently, the same with the links. The sound is good, though. Frames might be a good idea for layout, but I know a lot of people don't like them. Vance On Apr 23, 8:46 pm, "Dudley Hanks" <hanks.dud...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might > take [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > Thanks, > Dudley On the opening page, Dima's picture lies over the title and hides it. The black narrative text lies on top of the image and is nearly impossible to read conveniently, the same with the links. The sound is good, though. Frames might be a good idea for layout, but I know a lot of people don't like them. Vance Thanks, Vance, your comments give me a good idea of how things ended up. With speech, the colours don't matter much, everything gets read sequencially. I'll have to pay more attention to the colour scheme in future versions. Regarding frames, I'm working my way in that direction. At present, I'm just using a text editor I compiled, superpad, to put the pages together, and I'm learning all the tags as I go. I should have some basic frames worked out in a few days -- maybe a week or so. Also, I'm guessing all the Geocities / Yahoo advertising squeezes things together a fair bit. As mentioned in another message, I'm working on getting a better site. Hopefully it will be ad-free. Take Care, Dudley > I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might take > the time to drop by and test it for me. > > http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html No sound with Firefox 2, but the layout is fine. Everything works with Internet Exploder 6. >> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >> take [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > No sound with Firefox 2, but the layout is fine. Everything works with > Internet Exploder 6. Thanks, Rob, for the feedback. The sound is mp3 encrypted. I'll try changing to a different audio file format, but my site disk-space and bandwidth are a bit limited with geocities. I'm working on getting a site with more useable limits, but that's going to take at least a week or so. Take Care, Dudley >I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might take >the time to drop by and test it for me. > >http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html The layout of that page is quite poor. Because a picture says more than a thousand words I added my comments into a screenshot: http://mysite.verizon.net/jurgenex/images/comment.GIF Sorry, but you asked for it :-( jue >>I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>take [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > > jue Yes, I did, and I'd love to know what you posted. But, reading text from a screen shot with a screen-reader is just about impossible. So, I guess I won't be able to learn from your expertise. But, hey, thanks for taking the time to visit my site. Take Care, Dudley >>>I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>take [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] >screen shot with a screen-reader is just about impossible. So, I guess I >won't be able to learn from your expertise. Ooops, sorry, I didn't know that. Trying a verbal description: - The main text is cramped into a very narrow column on the left side, while there is plenty of empty space farther to the right, even between the text and the picture. - The right half of the text for the links is running into the picture and is therefore unreadable - there is a huge space underneath the picture. Why? In particular as you squeeze all the text into a narrow column, making it hard to read because of the very short lines - the text boxes for email and comment are halfway under the text and halfway under the empty space under the picture. That is confusing. In the meantime I also experimented a little bit more and found out that probably you didn't take into account that people are using browser windows in many different widths. In some widths the page looks pretty nice. In many it looks just awful. Experiment for yourself by changing the width of your browser window and you will notice how elements are jumping around and sometime are ending up in in really bad layouts. I had one size, where the first part of the title "Light, Sight, and" was on top of the page to the left of the picture and the last word "Photography" was moved underneath of the photo as if it were a caption. Not good. jue >>>>I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>>take [quoted text clipped - 37 lines] > > jue Thanks, Jurgen, that really helps. For me, it doesn't matter how I size my browser window, my screen reader just puts everything into a sequence and starts reading from the top. I can use keyboard commands to jump from heading to heading, link to link, table to table, etc. But, I never get a sense of what the graphical layout is like. If things are physically on top of each other, it doesn't matter to the reader, it just pulls out the text and reads it. However, the reader can only do that with text displayed in an application workspace. Once it has to extract text from an image, it gets a lot clumsier. At present, I'm coding my page with a very simple text editor, so I'm not sure how the various browsers slap my text onto a monitor. I've analyzed the coding of a few other pages, but, as of yet, I haven't come up with any "rule of thumb" to use as a template. As I work my way through the books I'm scanning (using omnipage), I'm sure my pages will start to look better. Once again, thanks for taking the time both to stop by my site, and to clarify your comments. I've learned quite a bit from what you've said. Take Care, Dudley >>>I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>take [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > Take Care, > Dudley Dudley, can you read if the text is large? >>>>I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>>take [quoted text clipped - 20 lines] > > Dudley, can you read if the text is large? If I blow the image up to where only two or three characters fit on the screen (I have a 17" wide screen monitor), and, if I can get light characters on a black background, I can "see" the text. However, at that magnification, it's not practical to crawl around the screen looking for words. It just takes too long. Using Omnipage, I can process an image and extract the text, but screen shots have too many elements interfereing with the text. Also, the program trys to make sense of fragments and peice them together into semi-intelligent statements. It isn't always successful. I've learned from experience not to bother with screen shots. Take Care, Dudley >> Dudley, can you read if the text is large? > [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > Take Care, > Dudley Windows Mouse Driver 6.2 and possibly earlier, I don't know, allows a mouse button to be set as a magnifier. This creates an enlarged rectangle on the screen. You can modify the size and shape and magnification of the rectangle. The centre of the rectangle follows the mouse pointer around the screen. >>> Dudley, can you read if the text is large? >> [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > and shape and magnification of the rectangle. > The centre of the rectangle follows the mouse pointer around the screen. Yes, I'm aware of that. Also, Windows Magnify does a fairly good job of bumping up the size of the characters displayed in the rectangular area. The catch is that the more I bump up the text, the smaller the highlighted rectangle becomes. So, While the characters are half or three-quarters the height of the screen, the highlighted mouse pointer / rectangle is only a small blip on the screen and I can't make it out. Also, the text that I want to hover the mouse over is invisible to me, because of its small size, so I couldn't find it even if I could make out the highlighted mouse pointer. It's all a viscious circle. Believe me, I tried to read my monitor as long as I possibly could, and I only reluctantly gave in and started using a screen-reader. This aversion to speech was made even more difficult given my love of photography and my desire to appreciate good graphical images. So, when I say I can't read the screen even with the aid of magnification, I actually can't. The only caveat to this is that I sometimes tie in magnification with my screen reader when I encounter characters the screen reader can't (or won't) read. When this happens, I navigate to the offending text using speech and then examine it as best I can in the magnified area. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't. Take Care, Dudley >>I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>take [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > > jue I hope when I finally overcome my lack of inertia you give my site such constructive criticism. BTW my thinking is that a sampler site should contain no more that 20 - 30 images, any thoughts on this?  SignaturePeter On 4/24/08 12:04 AM, in article nv40141341tdan0va2du159aempg848i4j@4ax.com, >> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might take >> the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > > jue If you got rid of the useless Yahoo ad bar on the right side, the layout would be just fine. No problem in Firefox or Safari on the Mac. But, Dudley, there seems to be a lack of any audio. I assume that there is supposed to be a soundtrack. > On 4/24/08 12:04 AM, in article > nv40141341tdan0va2du159aempg848i4j@4ax.com, [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > But, Dudley, there seems to be a lack of any audio. I assume that there is > supposed to be a soundtrack. Thanks, George, I'm starting to get a sense of what the lowest common denominator is for the various browsers out there. Regarding the sound, it's not a musical sound-track; rather, I just recorded a few introductory words that play when the page is loaded. A musical sound-track may come later. Take Care, Dudley >>>> http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html > > Regarding the sound, it's not a musical sound-track; rather, I just > recorded a few introductory words that play when the page is loaded. Better to have a link or button that says: <a href...>listen to introductory narrative</a> because automatic sound on a web page is disturbing to many people. Although this may be an exception as it's pointed at people who might rather have sound. > A musical sound-track may come later. > > Take Care, > Dudley > >>>> http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html > > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > Take Care, > > Dudley As the best part of a big Flash animation is usually the "Skip Intro" button, the best part of an <onload> mp3 or wav is the "Mute" button. A suggestion for your coding: using tables is a good way to divide up the page; however, the table definition should contain specific cell widths based on percentage of total width, or absolute pixel size. With no specific instruction from the page, your tables rely on the browser to assign widths. This can run into problems because the picture of Dima is so big. You will probably have more luck with the title in one cell spanning the whole table, the photo of Dima in one cell directly below also full span, then start your text below divided into however many columns you want. Also acquaint yourself with the table-compositor's best friend, the non-breaking space, HTML entity: or Hex:   . Put one in each empty cell to maintain the widths. Or you can explore the possibility of using Flash. That gives you much more control but some people will find it painful, and possibly your screen reader may not be able to read it. Also, mobile web devices like BlackBerry can't render Flash, but you can't please everyone. Also, the Macintosh rendering engine assigns font sizes based on 72dpi while Windows assigns based on 96dpi. Current practice advocated by the W3 Consortium is to use cascading style sheets, which overcome these built-in differences. An excellent Windows HTML editor is UltraEdit <http://www.ultraedit.com/> actually a general purpose programmer's editor with libraries built in for web design and programming. They have a free trial you can download. If you use a Mac then BBEdit <http://www.barebones.com> is my personal favorite editor. Hope this helps, --k >> >>>> http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html >> > [quoted text clipped - 48 lines] > > --k Thanks for all the suggestions. As a newbie to the field of html tables (pun intended), I'm trying to figure out all of the uses they are good for. Having only used tables for data tables in word-processors, the concept of laying out a whole page with a table is a bit foreign to me, but I'm starting to see the logic behind the concept. My next version will incorporate many of your suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to clue me in, Dudley > I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might > take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > Thanks, > Dudley If you click on the CLOSE tab for the advertising, the layout becomes much better. >> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >> take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > If you click on the CLOSE tab for the advertising, the layout becomes much > better. Thanks, Rudy, I never tabbed far enough into the advertising to find that close button. After I get onto an ad-free site, that won't be a problem, but, for now, I'll try to add a hint about clearing the ads. Take Care, Dudley On 4/24/08 6:04 AM, in article fuppl1$j23$1@aioe.org, "Rudy Benner" <rudolfbenner@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >> take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > If you click on the CLOSE tab for the advertising, the layout becomes much > better. Thank you! > I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might > take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > Thanks, > Dudley works fine tie I.E. 7. I will not repeat the comments below. SignaturePeter >> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >> take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > > I will not repeat the comments below. Thanks, Peter, I appreciate the feedback. I'm trying to figure out what browsers have problems with the sound, and whether or not the layout gets screwed up for users who run smaller window sizes. The newer versions of IE seem to do fairly well. Take Care, Dudley >>> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>> take the time to drop by and test it for me. >>> >>> http://www.geocities.com/hanks.dudley/index.html >I'm trying to figure out what browsers have problems with the sound, and As for that: personal tastes vary but I for my part am very happy with the blessed silence I am getting from Firefox. Whenever a web page is blaring at me I hit the mute button on my keyboard or most often just close the page to never come back. Same with fancy flash animations (luckily Firefox can block). This is one of those cases, where less is often more. jue >>>> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>> take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > jue Some people just LOVE to have loud music blast them out of their seats, or strange noises assault their senses. I am NOT one of them, and ANY site that produces sound without specifically being ASKED to do so will find me scarce after the first couple of seconds. I suggest that if your site plays sound, you ASK the user if he/she wants sound, but default to SILENCE. >>>>> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone >>>>> might take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > I suggest that if your site plays sound, you ASK the user if he/she wants > sound, but default to SILENCE. Yes, this is the general drift of the feedback I'm getting. As a test of the sound coding, I wanted to make sure that it played, so I put it in as a background sound. But, suspecting that it might be considered a bit intrusive, I tried to keep the time period to a few seconds. Also, I tried to give potential users a bit of a warning by using the "Can you hear me?" title on my post. Upcoming versions will tie sound to a button and give users the option of "the sound of silence." Thanks for the feedback, Dudley >>>> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>> take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > jue For my purposes, I doubt I'll go the flash route; I'm having enough trouble mastering html -- although, I might try a bit of javascript if I can find a book that scans properly. Regarding background sounds, I've heard the message "loud and clear" from you and others that I should tie it to a button. I will do that in upcoming versions of the site. I find it interesting, though, that firefox doesn't play mp3s. Is it because of a setting that the user selects? Ie, does it block all sounds, or does it just not play mp3s? Take Care, Dudley >>>>> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone might >>>>> take the time to drop by and test it for me. [quoted text clipped - 21 lines] > because of a setting that the user selects? Ie, does it block all sounds, > or does it just not play mp3s? IE uses Microsoft html code which does not exist in the standard specifications. Other browsers have no reason to haphazardly adopt stuff that Microsoft invents. There are also some cases where IE is incapable of reading standard html but normally there are ways to do what you want by following the standards. Apparently <bgsound src="IntroMessage.mp3"> is not the right way to add sound to a web site, I'm not sure what is. Some standard references: http://edgehill.net/Misc/html-coding/reference http://edgehill.net/Misc/html-coding PS Would indenting the html help or hinder you in reading the coding for the tables? The code is a LOT easier for me to read when indented but maybe no help to you or not even practical. > Take Care, > Dudley >>>>>> I'm trying a new feature on my site, and I'm wondering if someone >>>>>> might [quoted text clipped - 41 lines] >> Take Care, >> Dudley Thanks for the info, Paul. I'll check these docs out. Regarding indenting, that's a visual thing; it doesn't help at all when using speech. At best, some screen-readers will beep on the tabs, but that just gets confusing when multiple indents are used. For us blind guys, the blank line is a sort of equivalent, or strategically placed comments. I will probably go to Microsoft Word once I upgrade to a better site. But, html docs produced with Word seem to be a lot bigger than minimal requirements. When you've only got 15 megs of disk space and a 4 meg bandwidth per hour, the Word html docs can pose a problem. Besides, that still puts the coding in Microsoft's ball park, and it probably won't make my pages more universally acceptable. I'll keep working my way through the books I'm scanning, as well as the docs you pointed to, and I'll get a more workable solution, shortly. Take Care, Dudley > Apparently <bgsound > src="IntroMessage.mp3"> is not the right way to add sound to a web site, > I'm not sure what is. There is no such thing as a right way to do a bad thing :-). However, if you must know, the correct tag to use is: Attribute for <BODY ...> onLoad = "script command(s)" So, in your example: <BODY onLoad="play(annoying.mp3)"> But don't, please don't, use this example because the user cannot stop it except by closing the window. --k >> Apparently <bgsound >> src="IntroMessage.mp3"> is not the right way to add sound to a web site, [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > > --k Don't worry, K, I won't use it. I think I've got frames figured out, now, so, if I want sound in the future, I'll set up a page that invites people to watch and listen to a presentation that will appear in a frame after a link has been clicked. I think that should satisfy my urge to go multimedia without offending people's personal preferences too much. Take Care, Dudley |
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