Layouts are becoming an issue again. The (browser) landscape is changing, as are the fashion in layouts, but not really in unison. I can understand giving a greater weight towards design aspects, and maintaining the grid, however, I find the timing curious, as these changes seem likely to be obsolete soon.

For those who get a large volume of email, you probably know the pain of trying to balance reading, sorting, and acting on that email. After several years of battle, I’ve settled on a particular filtering method that will probably work for anyone that receives email from several internal teams, and many project lists. Do you need IA for email?

VoiceOver has undergone a major update, this article looks at the new functions, and what that means for people browsing websites. I am not looking at VoiceOver in general, just how different aspects of web pages affect the experience when using VoiceOver.

Predictive text is great, but a double edged sword. I’ve taught it a few too many acronyms, and now they are the default. Now, the default words for some things are really annoying. Are there any others who’ve been unstuck by this, or am I the only one?

This article on newspaper site accessibility dropped into my inbox, from the author hoping to get some coverage from accessibility related sites. Whilst the aim is good (testing sites to increase the awareness of accessibility), I wouldn’t be happy with the recommendations.

There were quite a few updates to the VoiceOver screen reader on OSX Leopard, not least of which was the new, very smooth voice “Alex”. What will be of interest to developers is the new commands to help people navigate HTML.

A few respected bloggers have come out against including comments on blogs. Partly due to their popularity, they have suffered from a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish. So far I’ve been pretty happy with the quality of comments here, but I’d like to maintain that.

A recent post by a local authority web officer was fairly frustrating for me, as it perpetuates several myths in usability, as well as calling into question my motives. The last part is about usability advice (from me) published on the localdirect.gov.uk site.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I try not to ‘test’ the system if I can help it. But when a friend drops you in it (possibly), you don’t have much choice. If I’m not heard of again, this is why.

There has been a little buzz about some CSS libaries, such as Blueprint, although YUI’s grids & other parts have been around for a while. I’ve kept an eye on these, but they have never seemed suited to CSS for one reason.