are we sterilizing student minds?

mtadros

Do you know these terms: microaggressions, trigger warnings, emotional reasoning, fortune-telling, catastrophization, mental filtering? Read The Coddling of the American Mind.It is an essay in the Atlantic written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, September 2015 Issue. It is about the sterilization of the student mind before leaving college in favor of an absurd level of political correctness that even affects how and what you teach. I cannot imagine it in teaching literature for example – or the humanities in general [political science, anthropology, sociology, history.]

The essay tackles the following questions: What exactly are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help?

Of course in the Trump-winning world where political correctness is derided, the essay might seem like yet another attack on PC. However the authors are quick to note the difference between PC on the one hand and VP or vindictive protectiveness on the other: Read More …

all about ux design

mtadros

Here are some spectacular resources for UX and UI designers:

Tools:

Articles:

Freebies: I love freebies!

a thought on education

mtadros

Focusing on skills and skill sets rather than focusing on the humanities is in great part the reason for the downfall of education. Graduating students as cogs in a wheel means they will never get out of being cogs and will preserve the status quo. Innovation requires other tools – including critical thinking and thinking outside the – well – wheel. Skills ensured my place in the wheel in this brave new world. The humanities – especially literature and history – ensured my place as a human being in a world that sees people as cogs.

aria roles

mtadros

Web accessibility is often overlooked in web design and development. Even when I teach it it seems I just gloss over it, explain what it is but do not demand it in final projects. It is an error that I will make sure to correct in the future.

AIRA, which stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and is adopted by the w3c. Currently we are in version 1.0. Aria roles are attributes to ‘role’ that allows assistive technologies [such as screen readers] to make sense of the structure of a web page. It therefore helps people with disabilities to be able to ‘read’ the web. As the w3c notes “Role information is used by assistive technologies, through interaction with the user agent, to provide normal processing of the specified element type.” In particular, when using SVG for example or some extensive widget and javascript, assistive technologies find it difficult to read the content except through roles.

There are different types of roles, the most important and common of which are the html5 structure roles . Eg.

In addition, there are the landmark roles which are regions of the page intended as navigational landmarks:

The following is a list of roles, their definitions and uses.

In addition to all of the above, there is also a website dedicated to web accessibility matters which is the Web Accessibility Initiative which has valuable information about web accessibility and Arias.

 

 

 

optimizing svg images

mtadros

Inkscape – the free open source alternative to Illustrator – automatically saves files as svg [scalable vector graphics]. Once you save your file, go to this editor which is the SVG Editor and upload your svg file. Click on Optimize and it will optimize your svg file. At the bottom right of the editor you will see the original size and then the optimized file which you can then download.

 

optimized

If you want the editor on your desktop, you may download it also from github.

If you are using illustrator, then you need to “save as” svg and when the panel opens, and optimize at will. You may also get the SVG code from it.

Once you get the final code whether from Inkscape or in Illustrator you can copy xml code to your site and animate or customize it at will. Note that in Inkscape there is also an xml editor under Edit menu. In addition, svg could be opened in a regular text editor and you will view the code there.

You may learn more about optimizing and using svg for animation on this site.