ia play

My basic librarian-ness is always a bit shocked by finding writing in books. But this is a bit different:

At first I suspected a personally prudish but meticulous scribbler. But there’s a more obvious explanation, of course. This book was used to record a Talking Book, a structured audio book that blind and partially sighted readers use.

Talking Books are recorded in DAISY format, a XML based markup language.

“A DAISY book is a digital audio book, designed to allow you to move around the text as efficiently and flexibly as a print user. You can:

• make bookmarks
• pause books
• speed up or slow down
• read or ignore footnotes
• jump easily from chapter to chapter, heading to heading and page to page.”

Daisy 3 Structure Guidelines, for those that like this sort of thing.

I’ve started work on a project for RNIB Rushton School and Children’s Home.

Rushton provides education, residential care, and therapies  for young people with sight loss, multiple disabilities and complex health needs.

I’m capturing requirements for an information system for the school and home.

Some of the constraints (like complying with the Care Act 2000 and OFSTED inspections) are rather less negiotiable than is usual on my typical IT projects.

And for many of the staff, their daily lives do not revolve around a desk and computer.

It’s interesting stuff and I’m looking forward to getting to know more about how Rushton works (even if that does mean a lot more travel to Coventry!)

Drop-down menus aren’t inherently evil but they do seem to encourage all sorts of terrible behaviour.

HMCS CourtFinder includes a menu that is certainly the worst I’ve had to interact with this year, and probably for a quite a long time before that.

The list is incredibly long. But more damagingly it isn’t in *any* order that I can see. Nor is this a list where you or I is likely to be sure exactly what the term we’re looking for is. After all types of court work isn’t a classification that most of us know off-by-heart.

CHOW has a nice example of topical navigation.

It’s cold, people are trying to eat healthily, and it is Superbowl time (for the Americans anyway). So the navigation includes nachos, snacks, braises and healthy recipes.

I’m very fond of this kind of navigation. For big sites it is rare than the navigation actually contains exactly what the user is looking for, instead it provides a starting point for a journey. But for any site where interest in content is influenced by outside events then you can use this knowledge to get the users where they are going much, much faster and with greater confidence.