The other day I added up the time I spend on volunteer work, you know, contributing back to the community and the like.
I used to see this as just an hour here, and hour there, no big deal. I just consider it to be part of what I do.
However when I added it all up and came up with a yearly average. It was a bit of a shock.
The amount of time I spend volunteering is a little over an hour for every workday. It’s around 240 hours annually.
When was the last time you read about how to apply a certain UX technique in detail. Or read about the failure of a method in particular situation, and the subsequent analysis as to why.
Yes within the web industry we have the zealots, true believers or the like. These are the people who back and promote causes towards best practice, inclusive design, standards adoption to responsive design.
Sure they will talk about their successes and sometimes document them .
Still it’s rare they talk about their failures.
It’s become apparent we really aren’t focusing much on the accessibility needs of our aged population; and by aged I’m dumping middle-aged people like me in that group to – that’s anyone 40+.
Now I’m well on the way to being truly on the wrong side of 40, so these accessibly issues are starting to become noticeable day to day on a personal level. So this issue is a little personal.
By focusing on the aged community is not t to say we should ignore the needs of the traditional accessibility community. Just let’s give some consideration to the aged people too.
Over the last few years I have really come to question the point of various web industry professional associations.
Yes, it’s all about member benefits, relevancy, and value for money. What I also look for is the chances to network, face to face or online, ways to enhance my professional development (offline and online). Also the validation that you are following industry best practice as well.
Still the most important requirement is a sense of community and belonging.
Gary Barber
I’m an independent User Experience Consultant.
I design interfaces, build information architectures, prototypes, do UX research and conducting usability & accessibility tests and audits.
I can work within your existing team or as an external consultant on a contract or adhoc basis.
You can contact me via my company, radharc.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
