Author: vdebolt

Things I Learn from My Students

I’m teaching a beginning Dreamweaver class at UNM Continuing Ed this week. In Continuing Ed classes, it’s common to have adults who want to learn something new in hopes of improving their job chances. In web education classes of any kind, it’s common to have someone who’s been working in print and wants to transition over to the web. This class is no exception.

I’ve had students like that for all of the 15+ years that I’ve been teaching classes of this kind.

In class, we put a couple of rules in a style sheet to set up some font choices. We set a sans-serif font rule up for the body selector. Then we went through the heading selectors and picked a serif font. I explained a little about how everything in the body would display the sans-serif font. Then I gave a couple of minutes explanation of how the stylesheet placement of the rule for h1, h2, h3 etc. in the cascade would over rule the font set in the rule for body.

Then we moved on to something else. While the students were doing an exercise and I was walking around the room answering questions, one student told me she didn’t understand what was body text and how to style it. I reviewed what was in an HTML document body and told her we’d styled all the text with our rule for body. Then she said something that no one transitioning from print had ever said to me before. She said, “Oh, in print we always have a style for body text.”

Years of working with students who created a class called .bodytext in their style sheets and applied it to every single paragraph on a page suddenly made sense. Years of frustration telling students they didn’t need to do that because a single rule in a stylesheet took care of it flashed before my eyes. And I remembered other class names that students applied to headings and other elements that clearly were a print habit that didn’t translate cleanly to the web.

If only I had know that simple thing 15 years ago. It would make helping people transition from print to web so much easier. It gives me a more effective way to approach explaining how selectors work for those students used to print.

So I want to thank that student for removing the blinders from my eyes and helping me understand something that’s troubled me for years.

Useful Links: Before/After WCAG 2.0, CSS acc, screen reader video, abbr

Before and After Demonstration at the W3C site shows a site before and after WCAG 2.0 principles were applied to it. It’s all annotated so you can see what was done to make the site accessible. Great tool for educators.

Speaking of the W3C, there is now a new community group forming – open to the public – that deals with CSS accessibility issues.

Videos of screen readers using ARIA, updated. Another great resource for educators from zomigi.

Nice time saver from Chris at CSS Tricks. Abbr elements all typed out to copy and paste. Abbr’s for Web Nerd Acronyms. <abbr title=”thanks to chris”>TTC</abbr>

How Friday Night Lights can Teach us Something about Women in Tech

Are you a fan of “Friday Night Lights?” Great show, in my opinion. Remember the episode called “Blinders?” That was the episode in which Coach Mac McGill, played by Blue Deckert, made some racist remarks to a reporter. His apology is lame and all the African American players march off the field and refuse to play.

None of the white people on the team, in the town, in the media, and nearly none of the white people on the coaching staff even understand what the black team members are upset about. They just don’t get it – can’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t recognize why it was offensive.

That’s the same situation we have right now with women in tech who are complaining about harassment and sexist behavior from men (both online and in person at conferences). Men in tech aren’t doing much of anything to change the situation. Because they just don’t get it – can’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t recognize why it’s offensive.

What if the men who are online or speaking in public at conferences had to endure vile comments about their appearance, their penis size, their sex partners, their body, who they slept with to get their job, and their gender? Would they get it then?

I think they would. I think if men would stop and think about that for a few minutes – how they would feel if the situation was reversed and aimed at them – they would get it. And they would help change it. If you don’t see it, can’t hear it, and can’t recognize it, you can’t change it.

It’s time to change it.

See also: It’s Time to Speak Up about Online Harassment.

Cross-posted in a somewhat expanded and altered form at BlogHer.

Useful links: Interoperability, Organizing mobile, Moms with apps

CSS, HTML, ARIA, browsers, assistive technology and interoperability

Organizing Mobile. I don’t often link to A List Apart, because I assume everyone is already reading it without my encouragement. But just in case you aren’t, check out this post by Luke Wroblewski.

A group of women app developers are online at momswithapps.com. They share all kinds of helpful info about creating and marketing apps. Not just for women.

Themeefy looks great for instructors

Themeefy looks great for instructors (and students who have to do a presentation). Read more about it at Digital Inspiration, where you can look at Amit’s sample about Steve Jobs.

Here’s an example from the Themeefy site. It’s free. Sign up with a Twitter or Facebook login.

It’s time to speak up about online harassment

BlogHer and many other organizations are lining up behind a campaign to stop bullying. It’s called Stop Bullying: Speak Up. You can join in at Facebook and take a pledge to help. You can also get a widget like this one that allows others to participate.

There are a constant stream of blog posts by women in the tech world who have been harassed, bullied, and intimidated by online haters and trolls. I hear about it from women in private conversation again and again.

The tech world loses women because of this – women who are smart and who make valuable contributions. Kathy Sierra is a famous example of the loss of a valuable contributor to the conversation about how to make technology work better for people. (See the recent post: Kathy Sierra speaks out on the nymwars and hater comments.) Women are reluctant to speak at conferences, even when they have something valuable to contribute, because of the online harassment that often follows a woman after a public appearance. Now the tech community is losing Skud, who explains about her harassment and her struggles in this post.

The prevailing wisdom has been “don’t feed the trolls.” But that is changing to a philosophy of calling out names and exposing trolls. Skud is doing just that: giving names, IP addresses, and trying to uncover the hidden identities of offensive online bullies.

Another blogger who is urging women to speak up is s. e. smith from Tiger Beatdown. In On Blogging, Threats, and Silence, she said,

All of the bloggers at Tiger Beatdown have received threats, not just in email but in comments, on Twitter, and in other media, and the site itself has been subject to hacking attempts as well. It’s grinding and relentless and we’re told collectively, as a community, to stay silent about it, but I’m not sure that’s the right answer, to remain silent in the face of silencing campaigns designed and calculated to drive us from not just the Internet, but public spaces in general.

We’ve lived in an online culture where the advice is “ignore the trolls and they will go away.” But that advice isn’t working. Sweeping it under the rug isn’t working. Pretending that it’s okay because it’s directed at women isn’t acceptable. Laughing about it isn’t an option.

Women can’t change the culture of abuse toward women by themselves. Women need men to speak up. Men who will let other men know that online harassment and bullying of women is not acceptable to men.