(Now UPDATED elsewhere)   Well, there are sometimes periods in which I never fail to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and Blind Justice is one of them. I missed the first three episodes of this new Steven Bochco police drama, which is like every other Bochco police drama save for the fact that the hero of our story is blind. Yes, a blind cop. Now you’ve heard everything, right? [continue with: ‘Blind Justice’ Watch →]

I posted a comment on Tom Coates’s site warning that his charming and delightful proposals for social software for TV viewing would end up being inaccessible unless people tried very, very hard. Tom replied via snatchmail that I should write something that could then be linked and shown around.

So here it is. [continue with: Accessible social software for set-top boxes →]

The TVGuardian is a closed-caption decoder that pre-reads upcoming pop-on captions and, if selected, attends to swearwords and other “offensive” speech. The decoder then mutes the audio and rewrites the captions with inoffensive words. (In some cases, it simply doesn’t show a caption.)

I have no problem with this in principle. You aren’t altering the original work you’re watching; you’re merely altering its rendition on your television set at that particular moment. You, or anyone else in the room, can revert to the original easily by pressing the button that doesn’t look like a button on the TVGuardian unit – the one marked “TVG” – until CC1/Off pops up.

I have no problem with this even though the kind of people who would spend all that money on a device like this are invariably the same kind of people who consider me a sinner and want me made illegal. (Or they’ll just bide their time till the Rapture, at which point I will simply not join them in heaven, and they will pretend to be saddened.)

En tout cas, the makers of the TVGuardian – not coincidentally, they’re in Arkansas – sent me a snatchmail asking about certain issues, and, as ever, I was all too happy to help them out. They offered me an eval unit, and I accepted.

Now, when you get a machine that claims to filter out swearwords and turn movies for grownups into movies for uptight Christian-fundamentalist schoolchildren, what’s the first thing you do?

You run South Park through it, of course. [continue with: ‘Bottoms of Fire’ →]

Would everyone please stop linking to that Poynter article by Anne Van Wagener about the upcoming Microsoft ClearType fonts?

First of all, while I cannot claim to have broken the story, I was there weeks in advance, as dedicated readers will be aware.

Van Wagener’s article is so full of mistakes that even her correction has a mistake. Let’s get fisking!

the structure and the clarity of the letter forms. Basically, that means a story will be easier to read because the letters and words won’t be as soft and mushy looking.

That’s not what it means at all. You don understand that antialiasing is blur, which is “soft and mushy[-]looking”?

The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sansserif, and a monospaced face

two serif and three sansserif faces, and a monospaced face

If you’re using a Mac, like me, you may have already figured out that these new fonts usually won’t work on your machine.

Of course they will.

The fonts can be viewed on Macs only if the operator of a Web site has licensed them for embedding or if an individual user has licensed them for personal use.

What, if anything, are you talking about here?

Microsoft has announced no plans whatsoever to distribute the ClearType fonts to “the operator of a Web site” or to individuals.

Although it’s not likely that many sites – or individuals – will take such costly steps,

because Microsoft shows no indications of making it possible.

I hope you’ll keep reading. These fonts are worth looking at regardless of platform – and you never know when someone will take your baby away and replace it with a PC.

Only out of my cold, dead fingers.

Helvetica. It is also the one typeface in the collection that is appropriate for use both in text sizes and larger headline sizes.

That’s rather broad.

Calibri is a sans serif with soft rounded corners. It has a warm, friendly personality that isn’t found in fonts like Arial and Helvetica. It is also the one typeface in the collection that is appropriate for use both in text sizes and larger headline sizes.

In Microsoft’s promotional booklet, Now Read This, Calibri’s designer Lucas de Groot says, “Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small type alike.”

It’s Luc(as) de Groot.

Candara is my least favorite of the six typefaces. One feature of this “informal sans serif” is a “slight flare” of the stems, or vertical strokes. The stroke is reminiscient of calligraphic forms, which I find to be less reader friendly.

You’re saying, for example and by comparison, that Optima is “less[-]reader[-]friendly”?

Consolas is a monospaced typeface, like Courier, that is used mostly in programming environments. The main characteristic of a monospaced face is that all the letters are the same width, as they were on old typewriters.

The defining characteristic.

If Candara is my least favorite, then Constantina is my favorite. It’s really a beautiful typeface that is very clean and readable.

Ah, yes, the use of the word “clean” to describe a typeface. Always a sign of typographic acumen.

Also: Are you not talking about a different typeface? Watch your ns.

Designer John Hudson says, “I would be thrilled to see Constantia being used for both the print and electronic media versions of a publication. Until recently, it has not been possible to use the same typefaces in print and electronic media without compromising either the readability or the attractiveness of one or the other.”

Um… Georgia and Miller? John, you know better.

And didn’t Van Wagener just finish name-dropping Arial and Helvetica?

Designer Jeremy Tankard describes Corbel as “less cuddly, more assertive.” This sans serif would be a nice alternative to Arial, Trebuchet or Verdana.

Arial’s getting a lot of press here. I thought we were talking about fonts that are not abominations.

More and more content is being viewed on a screen. From computer monitors to PDAs and cell phones, reading comfort is a big issue. If type isn’t easy to read then people won’t visit sites or buy the devices.

Demonstrable only in extreme cases. People will put up with anything.

In late Novemember 2004, Poynter brought together type designers
to talk about the future of onscreen reading. To read about the conference click here.

“Click here”– a sure sign of acumen in Web development.

Also, what month is “Novemember”?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article reported incorrectly that these new fonts could not be displayed on Macs. In fact, they can be – but only if the operator of a Web site has licensed them for embedding or if an individual user has licensed them for personal use.

See above. The correction is still incorrect.

…then you have A Hate-On for Arial. Go forth and vent.

Plus a sort of folk-art version of Helvetica. Perfect!

Returning to Austin after a break of a year, I was reminded that I quite like the place, with its functional downtown and a citizenry whom many of us would recognize as people rather than as stereotypical Americans. (My mental image of any American city always starts out with a climate of fear, a total dependence on driving, nothing for me to eat, a potential for gaybashing, and a certain echt-mainstream cultural taste. Only some parts of Austin are like that. And I’ve never seen so many buses running late at night on a weekend.) As a bonus, Austin features hundreds of neon signs, and not a single such sign that I saw was tacky.

I attended South by Southwest Interactive Festival and appeared on two panels, Does Design Matter? and the Accessibility Shootout. I brilliantly scheduled the takeoff of my return flight during the Shootout, which I of course had to fix.

[continue with: Austinism →]

Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with John Halcyon Styn, John d’Addario, Amelia G (sic); 2005.03.15 16:08

I walked in late, having just presented at the Accessibility Shootout. Naturally I would walk immediately into the porn panel. I just had to meet Jonno, finally.

Jonno: It relates to the guiding principle I use to anything (the Golden Rule). If I had a personal sex video that was hacked from my Sidekick, I wouldn’t want blogs talking about it. Some of my friends use affiliate programs; Fleshbot doesn’t. Doesn’t that affect your editorial? Styn mentions that Jonno could be getting half the money from the signups caused by links from Fleshbot. “There’s a certain amount of objectivity to what I write about.” Some sites see traffic from Fleshbot and buy a banner, leaving him in “a sticky position” later: Is he writing about them because he wants to keep them as an advertiser?

Styn: Have advertisers pressured you? Jonno: Yes. All Gawker sites do the “advertiser salad toss” – a weekly post listing the advertisers that week. “ ‘We’re paying $400 a month for a tile ad. I see you did a spotlight on Blue Blood – why can’t we get the same treatment?’ I don’t like all my advertisers, quite frankly.” Question from audience: Does Gawker Media (that is, Denton) ever call you about advertiser pressure? No.

But he probably wouldn’t do the weekly advertiser wrap-up if he didn’t have to; it seems too much like paying for editorial.

Styn asks audience if anybody has a goal to work in or on any adult site whatsoever; none do. “You can talk about porn in restaurants as long as you avoid salad-tossing talk, or activities.”

Amelia: “When people won’t pay for things that are really [needed] for them, they will pay for smut.”

Jonno: “You can lie, cheat, steal… but you can’t cheat about what turns you on, what gives you that little frisson [or whatever].” “I am sort of of the belief that you shouldn’t have to pay for porn, and I’m glad that a lot of people I care about” are making that possible, and Fleshbot links to them. “For the casual porn fan, I don’t think you have to pay, but when it comes to the realm of the sort of more-niche content,” you do.

Jonno will link to sites that steal other sites’ photos if the source is a large corporation, which he sees as not as bad as taking money out of the pockets of the “more personal” porn sites. Amelia says it’s more important to get credit for what she did rather than to get paid.

Jonno has 724 DVDs unopened at his house. If anyone with a Weblog here would like to guest-review a title on Fleshbot, mail him with “your approximate flavours.”

Question about content filters on one guy’s dreamed-of erotic-fiction site. Amelia says to place things inside folders that are not linked at the homepage, which does not make the tiniest bit of sense whatsoever. Also stay away from the classic swearwords. Or use a subdomain. Or make a password-protected site whose password is listed right on the page.

Jonno says Gawker “give[s] me a pretty long leash… apart from the occasional frantic IM from Nick Denton when a celebrity sex tape breaks with ‘Are you blogging this? Are you blogging this?’ ”

Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with Joshua “Rock Queen” Darden, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson; 2005.03.15 09:53

Josh: “Me first.” His background in typography is indeed with screens and Web sites. His first company was Scanjam; first projects were for Web sites and specific Web projects “addressing things that I didn’t think were being addressed fully by existing [faces].” Were mostly bitmaps at first, then outlines “that were specifically designed to render good bitmaps on screen, and that’s sort of how I got started.” One shortcoming of his image-based type was that they were “hardwired into GIFs,” meaning they were not searchable. (Hence Josh essentially makes an accessibility case for live text.)

Now is working at extended text at very small picture sizes or in bad printing conditions like newsprint. “How things will render in specific media… drives what I do.”

Will define screens narrowly. “As Mr. Clark will tell you, screens encompass many things we can read – captions and subtitles on the screen, video/DVD,” destination displays in rail stations. Square pixels and phosphors or LCDs are components specific to Web fonts “that interest me.”

Text is typically handled by core fonts like Georgia and Verdana, “and that’s terrific”; display is handled by a core font “that’s been tagged somehow” or an image. Display is where things begin to get a bit tough. “Fonts for extended text always have to be comprehensively useful; they in fact tend to be a little boring.” You can’t set extended texts in Zapfino; he shows an example in Zapfino caps (an unlikely scenario at best) and a semiserif screenfont.

Readability and differentiation of onscreen text are big issues for him. He shows 356890 in Arial, “based on a font that was designed around 1826 – your typical British or American grotesk…. The shapes are closed; they’re very circular.” Blurry or small type makes it impossible to differentiate; Arial isn’t useful for some applications, like bus schedules, “U.N. relief information.”

These problems have been addressed “by two of our best typefaces to date, Georgia and Verdana. Granted, they’re boring” but they are successful at being distinguishable and readable. The ClearType Font Project expands from Verdana to include a larger character set.

He shows a page from the bible in a previous century. Sticking to core fonts for that same text “loses a little something in the translation. It’s just not quite as cool – and coolness is important.”

“Typography is not just about communication in a clinical sense; it really is about expressing emotion or grandeur… whether it’s lyric poetry or deathmetal lyrics or love notes, it really does need to express, really does need to capture the spirit of the moment.” Has manageress passes around an edition of Erasmus’s colloquial Latin phrases that is 337 years old. It fully predates computers, “but it manages to clearly capture what it’s all about…. Unfortunately, onscreen typography cannot now express what we had as a matter of course 300 years ago, and that kind of sucks. My personal mission as a typeface designer is to try to embody content. I do it through typefaces; designers do it through design of documents.”

Wants to pass something down to future generations that is “warmer than Georgia and Verdana…. We don’t have to lose our typographical culture just because we’re now reading things on screen.”

How do we get there? Type designer; operating-system developers; rendering-system developers; standards developers; interactive users and developers; and the users, “who are at the mercy of everybody else” and tend to be separated from everybody else. But users and type designers are the easiest to put together in the same room for a discussion.

Mike: My interest in typography grew the day that I realized I couldn’t draw. That was the day I first tried to draw, and that day was his first day of art school. Not that many people understand the labour involved in designing a typeface – 2,000 work-hours, according to Josh. That’s a year. “We’re silly not to view that for all that it is.”

Designed posters for sports leagues out of “college.” It was a great exposure to type, since the audience – kids – wasn’t all that picky about type. But the Web was a bit of a disappointment because everything was Times typeset in black and white.

Shows found type from Austin. The more words and letters you see, the more readable the font will be. He, like me, loves the neon in this town.

In his last ESPN redesign, he wanted to bring type to the forefront. You go to ESPN to find out not just what happened, but how important it was, and type is a great way to do that. Compares “war mode” ESPN homepage to Sportsline.com’s, “with black Arial text over a rectangular photo, which is the same thing they have every day.” Yahoo Sports has “an even smaller photo with even less interesting text.”

“ ‘Skirmish mode’ is not quite as serious as war mode, but we use it when something pretty important happens.” It’s more rectangular; war mode uses a large type/photo illustration with a curved side.

They designed a Flash 4 component that would let them inhale Akzidenz, their corporate font, and render it. It still used an alt text and an h1. Shaun “The Wolf” Inman did a much better job at using Flash for type without changing the HTML. (“Shaun has solved so many of my problems that he has begun to remind me of the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction, who was known to make problems go away.”)

Shaun polls the room to see who’s familiar with Flash replacement – nearly everybody.

Shaun: Mike’s the pusher, the advocate. Looked at it from an educational standpoint; wants to talk about what we need to do.

One easy way to maintain typographic control, which designers certainly like, is to use px, which IE/Win cannot resize (due to its own browser bug). According to the Noodle Incident, set your body element to 76% and other faces in em; that always resolves to 12 px.

Some image-replacement techniques were inaccessible due to bugs in screen readers; you can fix that by positioning an image -3000px or so offscreen.

Question from Brent: Which is really best, px, em, or %? Shaun recaps the Noodle Incident technique. Mike finds himself caring less and less about Internet Explorer every day; there are better browsers to use whether or not you have “special needs.” “I find that taking little things away from them can be fun, and this is not such a bad thing to take away from them. I still size my type in pixels. Yes, the 76% technique is better.” Two more questions, one from Andy Budd, clarify this.

Question from Jason Santa Maria: Are there any further movements to get more core fonts on computers? Josh: Unfortunately, there are invariably issues with licensing. Getting a font into the hands of millions of users is a problem. Just selling a license to several million users requires several million dollars (in theory). “There are quite a few of us, though, who are developing typefaces for heavy information as well as [display] typography.” We’re used to 72-/96-dpi screens, but at TypoTechnica somebody was using a 200-dpi screen “and it changed everything” about type on a screen. The onus is on OS developers interested in doing the work and getting them to actually design the faces.

Mike: Traditionally, this has been mostly a technological problem. 1984-era Macs used aliased type where even print fonts “looked like crap on screen.” Now we’re left with business barriers – getting the right people in the room together. sIFR came from an idea to do something “that’s not perfect” but works.

Question from me: I’m in favour of any innovation that makes pages look better that also is proven not to harm accessibility. (Mike: “Is somebody recording this?”) But with sIFR, isn’t it true that all you get is a better choice of typeface and not a better usage of that typeface? You don’t have kerning and letterfit, for example.

Mike: “I would agree with that, but that’s half the battle…. The tests that you need to pass in order to use it is a technical test” – CSS, JS – “whereas I would much rather have it as a design test – for example, if I could lock the zip file and ask a question like ‘What year was Helvetica invented?’ before you could use it.” “If you use [sIFR] improperly, it can kill your site.”

Flash cannot programmatically kern text; you can do it manually inside of Flash. But that’s not a parameter you can pass through in a script. “I don’t care which one people use,” Mike says, referring to IFR and sIFR (or his and Shaun’s versions). “It’s all about using the best method possible.”

Question: What are the barriers to embedding fonts in Web pages? Josh: Mostly technical. Embedding a digital font lets the user distribute it. Type designers earn nearly all their income from licensing, and licensing could not be worked out. Most licenses forbid embedding of any kind, even in PDF. “Unfortunately, no one at the moment is speaking to the people who actually use fonts. We’re just software developers sitting in a room bitching.”

Mike: Wants an easy way for people who work on the Web to buy just a subset of a font, sort of like the iTunes Music Store where you can buy a song rather than an album. He wants a reasonable fee for a reasonable license.

Question from Brent: Has anyone done any testing on speed between client- and server-side font replacement? Shaun: No, but somebody is working on it. (Your scribe missed the name.)

Question: sIFR headlines tend to load last on a page, and that’s a usability issue. “It’s kind of a problem when headlines are the last things to load.” Shaun: There are technical ways to solve it (though not good ones). That will happen if you use images, too.

Mike: That’s also a bigger issue on Safari; he’s talked to Hyatt about it. They have to fire their replacement event onLoad because Safari begins to render the page before it’s fully loaded. It’s a tradeoff from the Safari developers. sIFR measures the boundaries of where the browser text should be and replaces it with a Flash block, so if those boundaries change, it takes longer to load sIFR. Person in audience suggests using CSS to style the headline in a font of similar measure so the difference in width is smaller.

Question: Any way to make sIFR text resizable? Mike: It is resizable on load and follows the zoom settings of your browser. (So I guess you resize your text and reload the page.) Mark Wubben is working on that.

Question from Jason: Could a central host of fonts be a good idea instead? (That could work for browsers you have to pay for and for embedded systems.) Josh likes the idea.

Question from woman in audience: Is teeny-tiny pixel text a trend or a long-term solution? They’re tuned for today’s large pixels compared to laser printers. Josh suspects it’s a trend, “a local hack, if you will. It’s certainly not a bad thing, and it’s resulted in some terrific typography, but pixels are eventually going to get so small that you can’t have a single-pixel stem.” You may have different tiers of information, like footnotes (at several millimetres) and headlines (much larger). Mike says you can design an outline font that looks like a pixel font, but pixel fonts “will always remind you of the ’90s… and is always going to remind us where we come from.”

Question from Andy Budd: What’s your favourite font? Shaun: FF DIN. Depends on the situation. Mike: For body copy, Lucida Grande (“I think it’s one of the most readable fonts in the world ever”); display, Mythos (“Do not use this for body copy”); print, Myriad (“One of the few sansserif fonts that I can find myself reading easily”). Josh: “My stock answer is ‘the next font,’ but I’d have to say Lexicon.” Comes in several hundred styles “but is strangely incomplete – they released an @ sign a couple of years ago…. Virtually unknown in North America, which means you can scoop the whole design world” if you start using it.

Question about subpixel anti-aliasing. Shaun: I haven’t explored it at all. Mike: It’s a bigger issue with small text. Let the user decide how they would like large passages of text rendered on their machine. Josh: Has “baked subpixel anti-aliasing into fonts in the past.”

Question: Are there any issues of transparency in sIFR? Mike: Yes, but it’s “local to plugins,” not sIFR, and mostly in Safari and older browsers and Opera. “I never recommend using transparency with sIFR, but some people have used it to fine effect.”

Mike hates every font manager out there. Shaun drags fonts in and out of his ~ font folder as necessary. Josh tried Suitcase for a while “and it was horrific,” since he installs so many fonts.