Just made a tweak to my layout here that should make my web site a little more readable (read: a little less unreadable) on phones: the right-hand blog navigation doohickey should drop out on small screens.

Since migrating to a CMS, I have, admittedly, been rather lazy about making sure this site scales well, is accessible, etc. For what it’s worth, I apologize for that. I can do better.

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I used to complain rather frequently — and inarticulately — about how I didn’t like the approach HTML had to accessibility. It all felt very static, like a printed out web page with some explanatory notes written on it. And, I thought to myself, we can do better than this. Blind or sighted, you’re probably viewing web pages on a computer. Adding more explanatory data to your forms and images and site headers is good and all, but computers can do more. They can adapt to things. A browser could make intelligent decisions about what to present to the user based on screen size, ability to see images, whatever. HTML authoring tools could make cleaner markup and enforce basic accessibility guidelines, for those authors who can’t be prevailed upon to care. (Many will disagree, but I firmly believe that victory can only be had here if the people who just don’t care about accessibility are unknowingly making accessible markup anyway, because we’re encouraging the adoption of visual layout tools that do this for them. I think trying to make those people care is a waste of energy.)

Thankfully, this sort of adaptive presentation of web pages seems to be pretty common now. It would seem I checked out of web design right as this sort of logic was getting standardized — right as smart phones became popular.

I have a lot of learning to do.

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Today’s update isn’t much, but it’s a start. This web site doesn’t use what you’d call an adaptive design, and it will take a long, long time — or, perhaps, a clean start, a nuke-the-site-from-orbit type overhaul — for me to get it where it needs to be.

But, for what it’s worth, I’d very much like to put in the effort towards getting this where it needs to be. It’s a bit overdue.