[Nfb-web] introduction

[Peter Donahue]

Hello Chris and listers,

    I do lots of front-end Web design and enjoy it thoroughly. In addition 
to building and managing web sites for a number of NFB affiliates I now have 
several private clients all of which have approved of my work. Some of these 
folks are sighted. Most of the complaints I have received have been content 
rather than design-related so it is possible for a blind person to do both 
front-end and back-end work. I for one would not want to see the door to 
employment slammed on the blind Web designer who has mastered alternative 
techniques for creating and verifying page lay-outs independently.

    Many of the Web sites I created for the NFB were done using templates I, 
a totally blind person designed myself. Hence I have a good idea of where 
page content should appear. I use a combination of HTML, CSS and tables to 
achieve this. If I feel that a visual verification is necessary I get it 
done. It's just another alternative technique in the blind Web developer's 
black bag to use when necessary.

    I'm also a staunch supporter of including multi-media content on Web 
sites. I have independently aligned, sized, and inserted images and graphics 
on to Web pages and do lots of audio and some video production all without 
vision.   My best advice is to keep the expectations high and the 
imagination juices flowing.

Peter Donahue



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Westbrook" <westbchris at gmail.com>
To: "NFB Webmaster's List" <nfb-web at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 5:54 AM
Subject: Re: [Nfb-web] introduction


Welcome, Peter.  I don't post much to this list, I don't actually do any NFB
work at the moment, but I am a web developer at an ad agency.  I think
design work is a challenge all web developers face, blind or sighted, but I
think blindness creates even more challenges in this area.  It is extremely
hard for a blind person to understand where things are laid out on the
screen and what size certain things should be in relation to other things on
the page because, well, we can't see the screen.  Yes, we can go to a
sighted person and get feedback and attempt to adjust our pages to match
their feedback, but it is my experience that this takes a lot longer than
having a sighted person do the markup and look at it instantly.  It has been
decided at my department by new management to remove me from design work as
much as possible and have me focus on back end and JavaScript programming
and be given templates to use with the necessary fields and tables for the
project already included.  Frankly, I hate design work.  I think most of you
develop for a blindness only or primarily blind clientele, so you are not
aware of how hard it is to design for the sighted.  I'm not even talking
about flash, etc., I'm talking about pure html and css.  I believe this is
why the national office has made templates for all affiliates to use, and I
would be willing to bet they were made by sighted people.  As an aside, I
hope your learning of JavaScript includes jquery, which has taken the
JavaScript world by storm.  Microsoft is even including it in their latest
asp.net framework.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Wolfe" <sunspot005 at gmail.com>
To: <nfb-web at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 2:18 AM
Subject: [Nfb-web] introduction


To NFB webmasters,


    My name is Peter, who is a amateur web programming working on my
new site found below at my signature. Currently working on learning
java script just got to look back over hyper text markup language and
cascading style sheets as I’ve been busy in classes too. If you have
any advice about your first viewing of my site that would be
appreciated. What are some common challenges that all of you as blind
website programmers face? My biggest challenge is too convey visual
affects in the right size and shape in that specific area to be
visually appealing to users on all platforms using different specs
with different sproviders and hardware/software functionality. My
project is to one day to make a free persistant browser based game for
the blind and sighted to play for free! If you have any resources you
can give me in any helfpful way they will all be appreciated. Thanks
for all of the help to  this novice.

Sincerely,


-- 
Peter
Webmaster
http://www.darkstruggle.com
webmaster at darkstruggle.com
alternative e-mail
sunspot005 at gmail.com

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