Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

Is it acceptable to use flag icon links for selecting desired languages? Would certain English speaking countries be offended if they had to click the ‘Union Jack’ even if they weren’t British? What about the many millions of Spanish speakers in South America. Do they mind clicking their coloniser’s flag? Or is it only fare that the country who invented the language be attributed with this honour?

The W3C has a couple of paragraphs to say about the matter: Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content - Don’t use flags to indicate languages.

The discussions in “Why you should not use a flag as a symbol of language” illustrate the main arguments for and against flag language indicators and buttons. Personally I feel that the flag as a language icon is so recognisable to the majority of users that it is the best option for now. It is so nice to get your meaning across with a 16px by 12px png! If there are objections then we will have to think again and perhaps use text instead.

For the past 2 months I have been designing a multi-lingual web site using Drupal. Working with such a popular open source cms has been so refreshing after spending so much time with another cms called ObTree. With ObTree you feel alone in a place where nobody can hear your frustrations, while in total contrast the Drupal community is thriving and always willing to help. The reason can simply be attributed to the number of individuals involved with such open source projects.

ObTree isn’t totally bad. In terms of it’s object oriented approach it is a very powerful system. It just needs more input and consequently so much more development in resolving bugs and its many usability issues.

The first thing anyone learns about creating accessible web sites is to remember to add descriptive alternative text to all meaningful pictures and images so that those who cannot see them can still understand, depending on the authors interpretation of the imagery. What I have never quite understood is why in the ie browsers a tooltip popped up sharing this supposedly alternative text every time a user hovered over it. I thought this was one behaviour that would be left behind with the new improved ie7, but I was wrong. Personally I find this obtrusive, unsightly and unnecessary. Maybe some disagree with me and find it useful!

This has also lead to the complete misuse by many web designers of the alt text method, to describe destination links instead of the image itself. That is what the title tag has always been there for.

It still amazes me how many well known web sites have general usability problems that effect their ease of use. The latest I came across was ironically the London Design Museum website.

The index page looks quite nice, as you would expect from a site exhibiting and promoting good design, but it’s when you actually get beyond this that things start to go wrong. The main problem on both flash and html versions is the menu that appears when you rollover the shaded bar on the bottom of the new popup window interface. It seems to work sometimes and disappear on other occasions creating a frustrating environment for the user.

Another issue that may be more of a personal dislike is the switching between several browser windows whilst interacting with the site.