The Ignition Project

When you write web pages, accessibility should be a key issue on your mind. Everyone should be on the alt bandwagon, and hopefully thinking about how someone with an aural or a visual disability might parse your web page. But there are some things you just don’t even think about and anyone pointing it out would just be helping you, right? :)

The issue I’m speaking of is writing content with phrases in it that require aural or visual ability. For example:

Please look around on our site.

Can you look around a site if you can’t see it? I wouldn’t think so. “Please browse our site” might make a little more sense but it has a separate issue of basically begging your visitor to browse your page without giving them any information as to what they’re browsing to. Give them a short list of awesome things you can do: “You can learn about X, Y, and Z on our site.”

Click here.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around, does it make a sound? If you press a mouse button and can’t hear it make a sound, does it click? Well, no. You should always link to a phrase or word that makes sense. “Click here to schedule a tour.” is inferior compared to “Schedule a tour today to learn about X, Y, and Z.”

Another thing I’ll bring up is the Oxford comma. Growing up, they taught us to always use an Oxford comma, so pardon me if I sound biased. Anyways, I always say to include it because screen readers are stupid and won’t put the right emphasis on a list consistently unless you explicitly delineate the list. Plus, the US government printing office requires it, so that seems like a good enough reason to include it in sentences.

I once assumed that everyone just “got it”, but after last night’s LAN party, I’m not too sure. So, I’m going to go over some of the semantics of LAN parties:

1. Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC). How could any club afford to get a computer for each member? That’s like, $800 a person. We can barely afford to keep the servers going, which brings me to #2:
2. If everyone else is on the game server, and you have problems getting on, there’s a 90% chance it’s your problem, and not the game server’s. The other 10% of the time is either the server needing an update that just came out or a configuration problem nobody else sees for some reason.
3. When you do have these problems, please ask the unpaid sysadmin nicely to help you. Do not insult his operating system choice, his dislike for Vista, and/or his choice of game mode if you intend on asking him to help you to get the game to run on your Vista machine.
4. OpenGL-based games like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Quake 3 Arena, and Unreal Tournament 2004 do not run well or at all in Vista due to the shoddy and/or nonexisting OpenGL support (at some point, NVIDIA and ATI added their own OpenGL layer, but hey, it still doesn’t always work, particularly when the game probes for 3dfx features).
5. If you don’t like the map or mode, tell us, don’t go play something else.
6. Give the unpaid sysadmin some respect. Use your brain. Read. Don’t be lazy. If the LAN organizers put up documentation, read it before asking how to do something.
7. Play the same game as everyone else! You can play on a public Internet server any other day of the week.

So anyway. Maybe people will understand this. And yes, I hate Vista. Not because it’s not Linux, not because it’s new, not because I can’t run it. Because every time I use it, something new and exciting pisses me off about it. It can be something simple and dumb, like the fact you can’t right click in (My) Computer and pick “Map Network Drive” (is “Add Network Location” the same thing?).

Also, and this is completely seperate from the rant, but widescreen in Q3/RTCW-based games is actually easy:

1. Bring up the console (~ key)
2. Type:

   seta r_customwidth "1680"
   seta r_customheight "1050"
   seta r_mode "-1"
   vid_restart
   

3. ENJOY!