Good night, good luck, win awards
While I was off galavanting around Dublin, the 2004 Virtual Festival was hosting its Web Awards ceremony here in Brighton.
As I mentioned before, I was nominated in the Best Personal Site category, a somewhat uncomfortable category for which to be shortlisted given its subjective nature. The award rightly went to Jonathon from the band Assistant who clearly puts a lot of time and thought into his blog (as opposed to the hastily scribbled ramblings that I throw up here).
Most of the categories were shortlisted by a panel of judges before entering a round of public voting. Thank you, by the way, to anyone who voted for me… you shouldn’t have, really.
Anyway, there were one or two special awards which were judged separately by experts in the relevant field. I am proud to say that this website won the somewhat grandiously titled Humanity Accessibility Award.
The judging was carried out by someone from a group called HumanITy (which, I guess, explains the title of the award):
"Rosario Garcia-Luque has conducted the judging for HumanITy every year. She has seen a marked change in each year, as accessibility becomes a more mainstream part of web deisgn and this year was notable in that the winner achieved the first ever 100% score!"
"Whilst ostensibly fairly simple the winning site - adactio.com - includes a blog, gallery and various details about the work of its author, Jeremy Keith. It is easy to navigate and well designed, with adjustable type sizes and clean clear use of colours."
That tooting you hear is the sound of my own trumpet being blown.
Speaking of proud accessibility achievements…
I recently put together a little holding page for local band Mudlow. It’s very bare-bones but it does include a little Flash movie that streams MP3 clips of some songs.
By styling the size of the Flash movie using a relative measurement, the movie grows and shrinks along with all the textual content when you change the browser’s magnification level. Try it and see.
Of course this nice little accessibility perk is somewhat offset by the fact that the page is trapped inside a horrible frameset thanks to a very primitive "domain forwarding" service.
You can’t win ‘em all.