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I’ve noticed that disability comes up in a few threads here, but that it’s not one of the big topics, such as gender, which are under continual discussion. I think Barbelith is a great place, but I’d like to make a few observations and suggestions. Of course, I am by no means representative of all people with disabilities, nor will I have thought of everything or necessarily come up with the best solutions. As I'm speaking for my own experience here, I should say that I’ve got ME/CFIDS and Meares-Irlen Syndrome, and I’m mostly principally having problems here with vision, memory and matters of behaviour/etiquette.
Visual layout
While it’s possible to set browsers to override a site’s layout, I find that it most often makes the site harder to read, mainly because the entire screen ends up with the same colour background, increasing glare and difficulty in navigation. (However, it might be useful for those of you who don’t want to make it obvious you’re on Barbelith at work.) I’d particularly welcome thoughts on this matter from anyone who is blind, partially sighted or dyslexic. Generally, the site is doing pretty well.
Good points:
• Simplicity and elegance of design.
• Black text on plain pastel background is usually very easy to read in terms of contrast, as is the system of alternating two shades of the same colour for comments.
• Having a different colour for each forum facilitates remembering what occurred where.
• Text box width for threads is about right, tracking from the end of one line to the next works well even if your eyes are especially bad at it, as mine are.
Room for improvement:
• The white page background produces glare. I’d suggest black, a dark version of the forum colour, or a very simple pattern in toning dark colours.
• Some of the individual forum background colours could be a smidgen lighter to improve contrast.
• Since the range of colours improves navigation and remembrance, it would be great to wring one or two more out of the rainbow. There are currently four fora in grey and I find that they blur together in my memory, mainly Conversation and Policy.
• The “Reply” page puts the thread summary text down a size, making it harder to read, and it’s a little smaller, or at least more cramped-looking, than the reply box. If you increase the font size of the whole page, the text in the reply box in particular becomes uncomfortably large. It would read more easily if the thread summary text was the same size as elsewhere and the font used for both boxes was the same. It would also help if it were possible to see the thread while replying.
• The font is not the greatest, though it’s pretty good. It comes up a little small and cramped (but too large when the overall page font size is increased), italics are difficult to read, and large stretches in bold are hard on the eyes.
Thread layout and structure
Good points:
• It’s easy to see what’s currently under discussion, and threads can keep going indefinitely, which keeps a wealth of discussion on the same subject condensed in one space.
• The linear format often helps to keep threads from straying wildly off-topic.
Room for improvement:
• The board seems geared towards the long-standing members. It takes a very long time to get to know your way around, requiring powers of memory that some of us just don’t have.
• There is no effective, permanently visible way of knowing what’s been discussed and where, unless you’re a long-standing member who can remember all of the discussions and/or are prepared to spend hours working through old threads to find something. Since it’s frowned upon to start a thread on a topic that’s already been discussed, I suspect I’m not the only one refraining from starting new topics because I’m afraid I’ll do this by accident (a bit like the fear of accidental plagiarism in academia). The search function doesn’t help much, unless you’re looking for a specific word which is very rarely used. I just put “coming out” into the search and got 7420 results, which doesn’t tell me if there’s currently a thread on the politics of different types of coming out (e.g. as queer, disabled, Jewish). I know that there’s a thread somewhere where you can ask if a topic’s been covered, but it’s not easily accessible, rarely used and you still have to rely on people’s memories.
• Threads sooner or later tend to cover a variety of sub-topics, which is a good thing, but the linear design makes it much harder to follow the twists and turns of conversation, especially since there are usually cross-posts and different strands being discussed simultaneously. There’s no way of bookmarking sub-topics. Branching designs, such as that used by Livejournal, are much easier to navigate, though that’s probably too major a change for here. This problem is made worse by the fact that:
• Threads get very long indeed, and members are usually expected to read the whole thing, remembering what was said and who said it, before they comment. It can take hours of reading to get through a thread, by which time I’ve forgotten a fair amount of it, let alone keeping track of the people involved. Picking up on a point that came up earlier in a thread can be very difficult when you’ve had to go on and read the rest of the thread, and you then can’t find the point you wanted to respond to.
Writing style and etiquette
Good points:
• It is customary and strongly encouraged for members to write in well-argued English with correct spelling, punctuation and grammar. This is much easier to read. I frequently have to ignore posts on other boards because I can’t get through the endless sentences, textspeak and “LOL”s every other word, which is frustrating when I actually want to read them despite their poor style.
• Discussions are lively, intellectual and often of a higher standard than I’ve seen on any other board.
Room for improvement:
• It is customary and strongly encouraged for members to write in well-argued English with correct spelling, punctuation and grammar. If you don’t, you may be mocked, sometimes quite unpleasantly. I’m always worried that someone’s going to leap on me for a typo or muddled sentence, especially since editing is difficult (though the threads would be chaos if people were self-editing all the time, I do realise that), and I wouldn’t fancy being dyslexic on this board.
• Paragraphs are frequently very long indeed, and thus harder for anyone with visual or concentration problems to get through. Shorter paragraphs, with subject headings in bold if appropriate, are much easier to read and make page navigation easier.
• As well as the expectation that someone joining a conversation will be able to catch up with twelve pages of previous discussion, which neither my eyes nor my concentration can handle, there is a custom of directing people towards links so that they can be better-informed, and expecting them to read them before they can participate in the discussion further. This works beautifully when it’s something short, but all too often it’s hours of reading. For example, I recently saw a thread where someone linked a thirty-nine page, poorly formatted PDF document, with no suggestions as to which sections were useful, where a simple definition of a few lines was what was really required. A while ago somebody jumped on me for making a harmless analogy which was apparently not favoured here, linked me to several long threads, and then bit my head off when I protested that I didn’t have time to wade through all of that. This was the point at which I left the board for a while.
General stuff
• The board isn’t particularly personal, which has its good points and its bad points. People don’t have blogs, as in some board systems, individual profile pages, as in others, or even avatars, which help with visual recognition. Combined with the facility to change your name every month, this makes it incredibly difficult to remember who is who and also makes it harder to keep track of what is being said where, especially if you’re not visiting the board on a very regular basis. Perhaps something like a profile page for each member, where all of the names that member had used so far would be listed? It’s particularly awkward when reading older threads where someone is referred to by a name they’re not using any more. Avatars help as well, though if neither names nor avatars are constant it would be confusing. On LiveJournal, for example, names are constant but avatars can be changed, which is occasionally confusing but usually memorable enough that you can keep track of people.
• The quality of discussion here is often very high, which is what I love most about this board. However, there’s a lot of aggression flying about, and I am constantly surprised at the level of rudeness which seems to be acceptable. This is going to be particularly off-putting to anyone who is lacking in confidence due to the reasons I’ve outlined above, or someone with mental health problems. Same goes for the bias towards long-standing members.
• Blake Head pointed out that there isn’t yet a Disability 101 on this board. I think this is an excellent suggestion, and I’m seconding it, though I’d prefer it if someone with more board experience were to set it up.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great board. But for me, it’s a nightmare to navigate, I spend huge amounts of time being lost, it requires an enormous level of commitment just to keep up and it’s exhausting to do so, I’ve been around for months and I still don’t have a clue who most people are, and I’m still finding it intimidating in ways I think are needless. I realise that much of this may not be changeable, and some of it is the flip side of the things which make this board so good, and I also gather that there are problems with changing any coding. Some of it is a matter of taste or reflects the spread of members: again as in academia, the board feels very male-dominated, for example in the tendencies towards aggressive argument and away from the personal. I think it’s worth discussing, at least. |
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