Net Work. Palgrave. macmillan. Ethics and Values in Web Design. Helen Kennedy Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds

Transcription

1 Net Work

2 Net Work Ethics and Values in Web Design Helen Kennedy Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds Palgrave macmillan

3 Helen Kennedy 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

4 Contents List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements vi vii ix Part I Framing Web Design 1 A Book about Web Design 3 2 A Framework for Thinking about Web Design 23 3 A Brief History of Web Design 52 Part II Ethics and Values in Web Design 4 Web Standards and the Self-Regulation of Web Designers 85 5 The Fragile Ethics of Web Accessibility Going the Extra Mile: Web Accessibility for People with Intellectual Disabilities Free Labour: Web Designers Ethical Responses to User Activity Narrow Fame: Micro-Celebrities Making Good in Conditions Not of Their Own Making Hope and the Ethical Future of Web Design 208 Notes 217 Bibliography 221 Index 239 v

5 Tables 6.1 Job titles of INMD web professional participants Web design gurus I follow regularly on Twitter and on their blogs. I followed the twenty gurus whose names are highlighted in bold intensively for one week, March 2010, for the purposes of this study Twitter data for twenty selected web design gurus relating to total number of tweets, followers and followees, extracted between 11 am and 12 pm on Monday 22 March Their Twitter activity was followed intensively for the week of 22 to 29 March 202 vi

6 Figures 3.1 Screenshot of the first website published by Tim Berners-Lee in August 1991 (Berners-Lee, 1991) A webpage from the Inclusive New Media Design website, with no style sheet (Inclusive New Media Design, 2009b) The same webpage from the Inclusive New Media Design website, with a dark style sheet (Inclusive New Media Design, 2009b) The same webpage from the Inclusive New Media Design website, with a light style sheet (Inclusive New Media Design, 2009b) Image declaring that a site is made with valid HTML (W3C, 1999b) Image declaring that a site is made with valid CSS (W3C, 1999b) One of several WCAG accessibility conformance logos (W3C, 1999a) A webpage form laid out in a table (training materials produced by Web Credible, 2008) The sequence in which the form in Figure 3.8 would be read out, unless adapted to linearize correctly (training materials produced by Web Credible, 2008) First screenshot of Cederholm s site, with limited visual features (Cederholm, 2009) Second screenshot of Cederholm s site, with added visual features (Cederholm, 2009) Third screenshot of Cederholm s site. More visual features are added, and in Safari version 5.0 this includes animation (Cederholm, 2009) Fourth screenshot. When the mouse is held down, the salutation to modern browser people appears (Cederholm, 2009) Web standards badges, including one design based on Zeldman s pixelated half-head image (Rainsford, 2010) css Zen Garden unstyled HTML page (Shea, 2003) Under the sea, css Zen Garden design (Stoltz, 2007) 97 vii

7 viii List of Figures 4.4 Make Em Proud, css Zen Garden design (McAghon and Reifsnyder, 2007) A participant s drawing of her experiences on INMD, where fences represent obstacles to achieving accessibility Another participant s drawings of his INMD experiences. Here, brick walls are obstacles A simple slide from Zeldman s talk at AnEventApart in Chicago in 2009, summing up the attitude of many web designers to UGC (Zeldman, 2009) AnEventApart homepage, incorporating attendee photos on the bottom left and right (AnEventApart, 2008) A slide from an AEA 2009 presentation of the speaker s favourite comic shop and its owner (Brown, 2009) The font Comic Sans MS USB connection device, a free gift given out at AnEventApart, Chicago, Pyramid of Success from thisisindexed.com (used by Hess, 2009) The homepage of British web designer Simon Collison s blog (Collison, 2010) The homepage of Belgian web designer Veerle Pieters s blog (Pieters, 2010) 198

8 Acknowledgements Thank you to every past, present and future web designer who has spared the time to talk to me about work, ethics and values, and so provided me with material for this book. Thanks to web designers around the globe for making their thoughts and knowledge public, by talking, blogging, tweeting, vlogging, podcasting and writing good code. I m especially grateful to these web folk for commenting on early drafts of parts of this book: Dan Brown, Richard Garside, Whitney Hess and Prisca Schmarsow. Some of the chapters in this book result from projects funded by the UK Research Councils. Access and Participation for People with Cognitive Disabilities in Virtual Learning Environments was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) s People at the Centre of Communication and Information Technologies (PACCIT) programme. Inclusive New Media Design (INMD) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and EPSRC s Designing for the 21st Century programme. The University of Leeds s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) also contributed towards INMD. I am grateful to the councils and to the university for their support, to colleagues on these projects, and to the people with intellectual disabilities and their supporters for making the research undertaken on the projects possible. I especially thank Siobhan Thomas, research fellow on INMD, who must take credit for some of the thinking in these pages, and Simon Evans, consultant researcher and font of much knowledge about intellectual disability and web accessibility. Material from Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of this book appeared in the following journals, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reproduce and further develop this material here: Kennedy, H. (2011) The successful self-regulation of web designers, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 10(3/4) (chapters 4 and 5). Kennedy, H., Evans, S. and Thomas, S. (2011) Can the web be made accessible for people with intellectual disabilities?, The Information Society, 27(1): (chapter 6). I thank these people at the University of East London (where I used to work), the Institute of Communications Studies (ICS) at the University ix

9 x Acknowledgements of Leeds (where I now work) and in the global academic community for all kinds of support and feedback: Stephen Coleman, Rosalind Gill, Maciej Hrybowicz, Bethany Klein, Linda Leung, Vicki Mayer, Andy Minnion, Giles Moss, Gavin Poynter and Gary Rawnsley. I am especially grateful to David Hesmondhalgh for his very generous input and support. Thanks also to Fabro Steibel, Vanessa Malila, Jie Zuo and Anna Zoellner for research assistance. I moved to the outskirts of Sheffield in order to take up the post in ICS. I thank the mothers at my children s school there, who have helped me to write this book by picking up, dropping off and looking after my children without knowing very much about me at all. This book is dedicated to the memory of one of these mums, Rachel Smith, who died a few days before I finished it. I didn t know her for long, but long enough to appreciate the values by which she lived her life. Friends and family have helped me to write this book by being brilliant in all the usual ways. Thanks Mum, Dad, Karen, Fiona and Eileen. My partner Dave has taken our fantastic children, Lonnie and Pearl, to many park and hillside so that I could get on with writing. For that and for very much more, thanks Dave. Thanks especially for living with the fact that, whilst for Lonnie and Pearl work on the Net gets put to one side, for you it rarely does. Such are the contradictions of work s intimacy (Gregg, 2011).