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As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here without its stylesheet. The tweets appear in reverse chronological order.

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For my test page I wanted: paragraphs with transparent coloured backgrounds layered over images; each image to be different; the boxes to have rounded corners; the position of the paragraphs to alternate; the last paragraph to have no background image; the text of the heading at the top of the page to have a glow effect.

But I also wanted the html to be as clean and raw as possible, leaving the styling completely up to the css. I wanted to do without divs, classes and id tags, to see if I could get it to work without adding hooks into the markup. The html is simply an unordered list with a paragraph tag in each list item (I tried reproducing it here, but even using the ‘code’ feature WordPress tries to render it: so I gave up).

My test page worked perfectly in Safari, gracefully in Firefox and Opera, and at the bare minimum in Internet Explorer 7.

Transparent backgrounds

For this I used the alpha transparency of RGBa; not opacity because, as I discovered before, that would apply to the text as well as the background. RGBa is supported in the latest versions of Safari and Firefox (and in Opera 10, which is currently in beta). I had to include a hack to tell IE7 to add a background colour, otherwise the text was unreadable.

Different images

I wanted to keep these out of the html and include them as background images in the css. Of course I could have added a class to each list item, but that would have cluttered the html. I chose to use the ‘+‘ selector to define the image for each subsequent list item. This works in each of Safari, Opera and Firefox. It doesn’t work in IE7, so the same image appears in each list item.

Rounded corners

I used the proprietary -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius styles (for Firefox and Safari respectively), because it’s a nice enhancement but doesn’t matter if they’re not there.

Alternate positions

I wanted the paragraphs of text to alternate between appearing on the left of the image and on the right. For this I used nth-child to style every other paragraph. This works in Safari and Opera.

Styling the last paragraph

I simply used last-child to style the last list item differently. This worked in Safari, Opera and Firefox; not in IE7.

Text shadow

I used text-shadow for this, setting the x and y positions to zero (ie directly behind the text) so that it appears to glow around the edges. Text shadow is supprted in Safari and Opera.

Note

I built this page as an em-based layout, so it’s scalable. However I was lazy with the images, so these are large and pulled directly from my Flickr account. Therefore they don’t scale; and they’re not optimised to load quickly, so they don’t.

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The dates are yet to be confirmed, but I hope to try and work for a full five days (in my case, Mon-Fri 9-5.30).

I suspect that it’s more or less possible here in Birmingham, but what about other cities? I certainly had a hard time trying to find free wifi around Pariliament.

So if you’re in a job that allows it, why not take up my challenge of trying to do a full week’s work in your local town centre?

The basic rules are:

• Wifi must be free at point of use (I haven’t decided if requiring a purchase first is acceptable or not for this exercise; probably not)
• Wifi must be advertised as for public use (so no persuading an establishment to let you use their private network)

If you do this it would be great to hear of your experience: how much did you have to spend on coffee, how conducive to working was the atmosphere, were there power sockets, did the funiture lend itself to laptop use, etc.

I may get around to setting up a dedicated blog, but in the meantime do contact me if you’re interested in collaborating on this.

(Thanks a million to Nicky Getgood for suggesting I do this! )

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For example, the UK government wants to set up a scheme of ‘digital mentors‘. These people would help other people learn how to use ’social media’ to get their voice heard. For instance, a group of people who haven’t used computers before might want to tell the world about problems on their estate.

This is all very well. But at the moment we can only do these things where there is internet access: that might be at home, if we can afford it and understand how to manage it; it might be in a shop or a cafe, which charges us for it or doesn’t have it switched on.

A couple of weeks ago Paul Henderson and I tried to find wifi near the Houses of Parliament: surely not hard to do?

Our first stop was Starbucks. Being used to Birmingham – where there are at least a few places offering free wifi – we bought our coffees and tried to log in. That’s when we found we had to pay. So we drank our coffees and left.

Next stop was McDonalds, which is known for its free wifi. A sign on the door said ‘free wifi’, but there was nothing inside saying how to use it. The staff didn’t know how to use it either, and spent two minutes at the back of the shop hunting for a leaflet (I still have it; probably the last one in Westminster). The leaflet tried to be helpful, but made things incredibly complicated (click this, change these settings, etc etc).

After a while we realised that the wifi network actually wasn’t available. Perhaps they’d forgotten to switch it on; at any rate the staff were clueless about it.

Even if it had been on, trying to use a laptop in there was awful: the table was an awkward distance from the chair, and this couldn’t be changed because both were fixed to the floor.

If the government really wants to encourage ‘digital inclusion‘ it needs to make it easy for people to access the internet at any time and at any place. We should not have to go searching for it, and it should not be left to shops to provide us with their version of it.

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If (as I have written before) we should be willing to accept that some people will always be more comfortable with offline social interactions than with online ones, then we must also be willing to accept that the opposite will be true too. Some of those who have traditionally found conversation and debate difficult will find a new voice online. And now that there are teenagers whose entire lives have included the internet, I suspect the proportion of society that is less comfortable living offline will have risen dramatically. (I’ve no evidence to back any of this up, mind!)

What then does this mean for bridging the gap between the two? We don’t want to push anyone too far out of their comfort zone, but if we’re not very careful the ‘digital divide’ will only widen. ‘Digital mentoring‘ is an idea currently under discussion, but it tends to be discussed in a way that presumes the grass is greener on the digital side of the digital divide.

I would prefer to drop the ‘digital’ from ‘digital mentoring’ (though god knows what I’d replace it with) and concentrate instead on skills of debate and social interaction, bringing expertise from all fields into a two-way learning process.

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See all of my web accessibility links on del.icio.us

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I want to endorse the idea of ‘digital mentors‘ [link updated], really I do; but the more I think about it the less able I am to do so.

For a start the funding would run out eventually. Any mentoring programme would therefore reach a finite number of people within a very specific time window. Developments in technology will move on regardless.

More importantly though, what point of understanding would mentors be trying to reach with their charges? What aspects of social media would be seen as important? Would their efforts be welcomed, or would some people rather stay digitally divided?

Definitely I agree that education is as least as important as access to technology, but there’s no point in one without the other. And I think that maybe the education is best embedded in the (ever-evolving) formal structures, so that we can develop a culture of understanding and appreciation of the changing nature of technology and the different speeds and levels at which people adapt to it.

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When this happens – and it happens a lot these days – I feel that I’m on an irreversible and rapid ascent to the peak of my sanity, at which point I shall burn-out: not from work but from trying to keep abreast with technology (and currently with today’s hot potato of ‘social media’). I feel like I’m constantly trying to catch-up, desparate not to fall behind. The world is changing incredibly fast; I already feel as though it’s running away and I no longer have the energy to keep up.

It’s inevitable that I (and all of my contemporaries) will eventually become part of the technologically disenfranchised section of society, that we will slip over to the wrong side of the digital divide. Doubtless some of us will fight it off longer than others; but it will happen, as technology develops in ways that we are unable to comprehend within the confines of our experience.

My understanding of the world is already inconcievably different to that of my nieces, whose world has always been inhabited by the internet and mobile phones. My understanding of those technologies was shaped by experience of more than 20 years without them, whereas Vicky and Rebecca are starting from a very different place; consequently they will have a much more profound awareness of technology than I. As with every generation gap, they will have no way of appreciating my understanding of the world and I will have no way of appreciating theirs.

And things are changing more quickly than ever. Life online is much faster than life offline, and that pace is increasing. Yesterday I replied to a tweet (a message via Twitter) ten hours after it was posted because I hadn’t been in front of the internet in that time. I felt I should apologise for the delay, because ten hours is a long time on Twitter.

Although that can happen offline too, it is much easier online to flick back through your messages and catch up with conversations, giving a perspective on the rapid progress of what you’ve missed; while this at least keeps you in the loop, it can also leave you feeling as though you’ll eventually run out of the energy to keep up.

So how do we tackle this problem of a growing digital divide? (And I believe it is growing, and always will: not just access to and understanding of technology, but pace of life, social development and personal education.) Should we be providing people with access to technology? Should we be educating people on how to use it meaningfully? Do we really want offline and online interactions to fuse?

In short, should we be educating to tackle the digital divide or accepting that it’s always going to be there?

The Prime Minister recently pledged £300m to provide internet access to the technologically disadvantaged. There is a ripple of debate around the futility of that, and a suggestion that the money would be better spent on ‘digital mentors‘. Stuart Parker argues: ‘It’s not about the access. The ongoing evolution of the Internet … means that people who are still to use the technology or have limited experience, are being left behind at an unacceptable rate’.

But plenty of people I know want to be left behind. They don’t want to embrace technology completely. They may feel frightened of it, and a little more understanding may even exacerbate that. I may well be one of them. And I suspect the limits of experience and understanding will prevent them (and eventually us, including those charged with the educating) from progressing past a given point.

This isn’t to say that I don’t agree about education being more important than mere access to technology. But I do think we need to think carefully about what that education is. For me it should be as much about understanding how we all live together in a ‘multi-technical’ society as about anything else.

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The poster seemed to want two things. Firstly, to “leverage the strongest, most engaging elements of online campaigning and communications and transport them to the offline world”.

This is interesting but flawed. ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ are two different realms; replicating the benefits of one within the other would at best be a waste of effort, and would in fact probably be impossible. It would certainly seem to defeat the object of operating in two different realms in the first place.

To me, his second point is the key one: to “make finding relevant content easier, not harder”. However, the answer is not to make content available in as many formats as possible so as to give every potential user exactly the same experience.

Rather, we should be understanding our audiences (who are we targeting and why) and ensuring we are as accessible to them as we possibly can be; audience first, content and delivery second.

This is not simply about the presentation of our content, but about the whole design of our organisations.

For example, when someone phones our switchboard can we guarantee the call will be answered immediately? Will that person be able to provide a satisfactory answer? Will they have the initiative, for example, to offer to post a DVD or a web page transcript? Are they able to do that at no cost to the recipient? If not, are there systems in place to manage the transaction?

So how we organise and present ourselves is at least as important as how we present our information. Moreover, it’s about how we understand and manage our internal processes. (It’s a no-brainer really, but surprisingly ill-understood.)

In order to give the best service to our users – not just those in the extremely broad categories of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ – we must understand our target audiences; and we must strive to appreciate fully their experience of the points at which they interact with us.

*The forum cited is members-only, so I haven’t included links to it. If you’d like to know more about the post referred to please do contact me.

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