Inverting The Colors on Your PC for Accessibility

Recently when developing styles for accessible form inputs an interesting challenge came up — how to handle the inverted color schemes that are available on Windows computers. But why invert the colors? Those with vision issues may want to invert the colors on your Windows PC for readability and accessibility purposes.

For reference, to switch a Windows PC to use inverted colors, you can use the keyboard shortcut:

By default, form inputs like

<input> and <textarea> will look fine and the colors will invert properly.

#html #web-development #css #css3 #inverted-colors #accessibility #web-accessibility

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Inverting The Colors on Your PC for Accessibility

Recently when developing styles for accessible form inputs an interesting challenge came up — how to handle the inverted color schemes that are available on Windows computers. But why invert the colors? Those with vision issues may want to invert the colors on your Windows PC for readability and accessibility purposes.

For reference, to switch a Windows PC to use inverted colors, you can use the keyboard shortcut:

By default, form inputs like

<input> and <textarea> will look fine and the colors will invert properly.

#html #web-development #css #css3 #inverted-colors #accessibility #web-accessibility

The World Needs Web Accessibility Now More Than Ever

I attended a talk last year by Mike Gifford where he said, “the web has actually become LESS accessible since 2011.”

It’s cheap and easy for anyone to create a website these days, and hardly anyone considers accessibility. And why would you? If it’s not in your daily purview, it’s not going into your list of website requirements. Heck, most people don’t even think of the end user, Disabled or not, when creating a website. Especially not when they use a “drag and drop” style website creation platform. Nothing against those, just that those platforms often don’t have accessibility built in, and it’s very difficult to make them so, even if you had the desire.

The other aspect working against website accessibility is when you say the word, ‘accessibility’ not every even has a concept of what that means. I asked a website designer recently if he makes accessible websites, and he said, “yes…we add alt-tags to all our images.” Ummmm, OK. Great. But can a screen reader read your website?

So let’s dispel some myths and dive a bit into the world of what it means to implement web accessibility.

First off, it’s important to note that the USA actually has very clear legislation regarding accessibility. It’s called the Americans With Disabilities Act, and it includes websites. US-based companies should be aware that not having a minimally accessible business website can leave you open to a law suit and fines. I’m Canadian with a Canadian registered company, so I do not actually have to worry about getting sued for not having an accessible website, but bonus, I have one anyway! I’ll explain why it’s beneficial to have an accessible website even if you are not a US-based company.

#accessibility #web-accessibility #accessibility-design #accessibility-testing #amazon web services

How to pick parts for a Deep learning PC when on a budget?

Introduction

I think I don’t need to mention the fact that like most people, we researchers, or more precisely PhD students are on a budget when considering computer equipment. I can’t speak for other countries, but here in Croatia, as a teaching assistant at a faculty you can expect a decent midrange laptop. For most people that’s great, because most of the PhD students I know, work a lot in the laboratory or do field experiments, and for them, a decent laptop capable of running excel, basic statistical scripts in R and/or Python, some GIS software or AutoCAD is enough.

For quite a time I thought a decent laptop would be great for my research related to Hydrology and Hydrological models. And it was really great, everything worked fast and nice (thanks to an SSD and 16 gigs of RAM). As I started to work with a lot of data, and especially often not really well-formatted (find out how to address this in my other article). At the suggestion of my Mentor and a friend who also worked at a similar position, I more and more started to think that I need to learn programming to shorten boring tasks related to data formatting, copying, etc. I decided to give Python a shot.

Instantly, I got thrilled what a great programming language it is, how easy it makes to do some tasks, on which I usually would waste 3–4 hours in excel. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a blame on excel, by all means it’s GREAT for some fast visualisations, data management or as a simple database. But more and more often I have tasks where a well written and well thought Python script just wins the game and makes life easier.

Let’s get back to the point of this story. When you consume Python and Data Sconce related content online, sooner or later you will stumble across the term “Machine Learning” due to Pythons popularity for such tasks. This is exactly what happened in my case. Pretty fast I got hooked, and started researching more about the topic.

In no time I found myself enrolling the Udacity course “AI Programming with Python Nanodegree”, using the 30 days free access to certain Udacity courses during the lockdown. The final goal of the course is to create an image classifier for flowers. In short, you’ve got an input image, and the code classifies it into one of the defined labels. It took me about one and a half months to pass the course.

When you start with Machine Learning tasks, and Deep Learning in particular, you often find out that some of the “green juice” (NVIDIA GPU 😉) could make your decent midrange laptop or PC a lot faster. Why is that so? The answer is, CUDA cores. Why are they so important, read here in this great article! So, on a budget I started to check the computer enthusiast forums and sites with used parts for second-hand hardware.

I will not provide any test results, this is more an advice type of article, from my perspective and years of experience of buying second hand parts over forums and different sites. I will try to explain what parts can be bought second hand, to save some cash, or get better performance for same money, without taking unnecessary risk.

#deep-learning #cuda #pc #gpu #budget-pc

Why Color Is Key for Data Visualization and How to Use It

The objective of data visualization is to communicate hidden patterns uncovered during analysis. And while a visualization must look aesthetically appealing, its primary objective is not to ‘look pretty’.

Use of color in visualisation should be to help disseminate key findings and not to chase some artistic endeavor

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More is not better when it comes to color

Use of color must be carefully strategized to communicate key findings and this decision, therefore, cannot be left for automated algorithms to make. Most data should be in neutral colors like grey with bright colors reserved for directing attention to significant or atypical data points.

Sales in million USD from 1991–1996. Red colour is used to draw attention to unusually low sales in 1995. Nearly uniform sales in other years are all rendered in grey. [made by author]

Colour can help to group related data points

Color can be used to group data points of similar value and to render the extent of this similarity using the following two color palettes :

[made by author]

A sequential color palettes is composed of varying intensities of a single hue of color at uniform saturation. Variability in luminance of adjacent colors corresponds to the variation in data values that they are used to render.

[made by author]

A divergent color palettes is made of two sequential color palettes (each of a different hue) stacked next to each other with an inflection point in the middle. These become helpful when visualizing data with variations in two different directions.

The chart below on the left uses a sequential color palette made of a single hue (green) for values ranging from -0.25 to +0.25 while chart on the right uses a divergent color scheme with different hues for positive _(blue) _and negative (red) values.

Percentage change in population in the USA from 2010–2019. The divergent color scheme made of two hues (red and blue) with an inflection point at zero is more suitable than a sequential color scheme. [made by author]. Source of data.

In the map on the right, positive and negative values can be identified immediately based on color alone. We can immediately conclude that the population of mid-western and southern towns had declined and that in the east and west coast has increased._ This key insight into the data is not immediately obvious in the chart on the left where not color itself, but the intensity of color green must be used to read the map._

#data-visualization #visual-design #colors #color-theory #data-science

Improving Accessibility of my GitHub Timeline App

This article shows how I improved the accessibility of a simple GitHub Timeline app I built.

A few weeks ago, I worked on a little GitHub Timeline project. When you enter a user’s username you can view a timeline of their public repositories in a chronological order — the most recent repo on top.

I chose a design, a colour palette, settled on React, and off I was to build my timeline app. Here’s a gif of how it eventually looked like:

GIF of how the app works

Everything worked perfectly, right? I ensured it was responsive, the font and colours looked okay, and I ensured there was feedback when a user wasn’t found or when a user existed but without public repositories. I was ready for deployment, right?

Wrong.

What I described above is the default path of most developers. As long as we feel like the product/app works using ourselves as the standard, we make mistakes. The above application works and looks ready for deploy but let’s do another test. An accessibility test, and let’s see what we find. I will be using WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool, and we shall start with the homepage. Here are the errors and alerts found:

#frontend-development #front-end-development #accessibility #accessibility-testing