Crown Hall By Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Let me preface this by saying I want the next touchscreen phone, camera, video player, Swiss-army knife as much as the next guy (maybe more, I don’t like the one I have). But for the past I don’t know how long, simplicity has been a rallying cry expertly advocated by John Maeda in his book  The Laws of Simplicity. These rules are embodied in numerous web apps 37 Signals wonderful Basecamp, Twitter, Flickr, and thousands of others. They intentionally limit the offerings of the program, instead continually evolving and improving their chosen set of features. So far this ethos clearly hasn’t moved into the featuritis driven desktop software market, I’m looking at you Adobe.

I think it’s safe to say that the old Mies Van Der Rohe truism “less is more” has never really applied to technology products. Much like in software the common competitive strategy has been adding more features to an existing product to one-up your competitors. But if you look around there seems to be some hints at change in places like the netbook world. For the unacquainted netbooks are less powerful smaller laptops, not because they are the low-end cheap versions of their more powerful cousins, but because they have a different utility. The mode of thought that produced the netbook said that the majority of laptop users only need a word processor/spreadsheet application, a browser for the internet and sometimes an email client. So what is important is internet access, portability and battery life, not processor power. The major front runners compete on these basic attributes. Simple. Along the same lines is the the Kindle (although is a back light too much to ask) and other book readers which focus on doing a better job of allowing you to read. Most recently is the Canon PowerShot G11 which unlike competitors, forgoes megapixel count for improving image quality.

Of course it makes sense for some products to do everything ion the world I like my phone being an Mp3 player and a camera it’s less to carry around with me. Then again perhaps a phone is no longer a phone, but a completely new device with a new feature set? I think the take away is, do what you do well and don’t offer additional features unless they are in themselves a full solution. I know that at the end of the day I prefer my eReader to be a better book, and I prefer my software to do a good job of what I purchased it for. I wouldn’t use a hammer instead of a saw to cut a piece of wood even though it’s capable.

Interesting study on websites for charities/non-profits. While I usually rail against anything Jakob Nielson says (mostly because he presents his findings as hard and fast rules rather than guidelines, and rarely accounts for surrounding circumstances, but back to the subject of this post) I think there is a lot of good info here. The study indicates that the internet will be the primary vehicle for donations by 2020. With that in mind the study shows that many of the sites fail to provide key information needed when making a decision to donate. Devloping long term relationships throught the use of newsletters is also discussed. The full version of the report is here for $98.00, otherwise the overview is here. In a related post Webdesigner Depot has a post on 8 Tips to Design a  Charity Website.

The recent decision to allow a lawsuit against Target Corporation on the grounds that their website isn’t accessible enough to the blind, has caused me to mull over the current solutions for the visually impaired. While I don’t want to comment on my thoughts about the lawsuit, I do believe that current solutions are out of sync with the present state of the web.

I’m sure this isn’t a completely original idea, but what if we served a separate style sheet to screen readers just like we would any other alternate means of browsing. This way we could optimize the content for screen readers.

But I also think there is a bigger opportunity here. I think there is a opportunity to create an opensource screen reader. There are numerous benefits to an open source screen reader. First being technology, as an open project the program can keep up with the most current web technologies. Secondly worldwide input can help to create the most usable screen reader (hopefully with a lot of input by people who actually rely on them) current solutions are generally thought of as pretty inadequate. Lastly the major benefit is cost, current screen reading software is prohibitively expensive. An open solution would make the Internet accessible to people who cant afford basic access to the net.

With the combination of an open screen reader and an new style sheet class a community of could open the Internet up to millions of people. The development could spur competition between software, and truly help to push the web towards true accessibility.