OK, so today is Flag Day in Canada!  CBC, together with other partners, commissioned a survey to see what Canadians think are the characteristics of a good citizen. The result shows that immigrants are just as good citizens as those born here (sic.). They also tend to be more proud to be Canadians, 88% of immigrants vs. 81% of those born here, which is not a huge difference, but it’s still a difference.

Although the poll is not specifying it, let me guess, the lion share of those that are not proud Canadians, are from Quebec and this percentage can only get worst with the Harper Government.

Yesterday, the English language media got overly excited, because Justin Trudeau declared Sunday on Radio-Canada that he can understand the desire of Quebec to separate from Steven Harper’s Canada.

Trudeau’s opinion resonates well with how I feel about Canada. It was yesterday that we celebrated with my wife February 14th, which besides  being Valentine’s day, it is also the anniversary of us becoming Canadian citizens. I still remember how proud we were to take the oath of citizenship, how proud we were to cast our first vote and how proud we were to see our picture in a Canadian passport.

I think it would be a huge mistake by Canada’s Government (a.k.a. Harper’s Conservatives) to take these feelings granted. They should keep in mind, that not every immigrant that comes to Canada is desperate to come here. Moving to a new country, is a big thing and people shop around before taking a decision. Before deciding to come Canada, we had the choice to apply to other countries too, but we chose Canada, because of its reputation and its values, that we felt it would make us proud to be part of.

Unfortunately, day after day, when I look at the news coming from Ottawa, I feel that the reputation of Canada and its values that we cherish, are slowly eroded and replaced with a far right ideology imposed onto all of us, by a 40% minority (percentage that won’t reach 18% if we take in account the entire population of Canada).

I still have hope. I hope that next time, people will take more seriously their duty, to go out and vote and won’t let Canada sink into this swamp of backwardness.

Yesterday, was the first day of the first Startup Weekend organized in Montreal .

Startup Weekends are events where people come together from different areas: developers, designers, marketing, investors, etc. and spend together a weekend to build startups from scratch, it’s a bit like a matchmaking orgy for entrepreneurs. The way it works is that Friday night, people come up on the stage, one after the other, and they have one minute to present their idea, then it’s the voting period. Those who get more votes will go to the next phase, where they have to recruit people to get the project started and take it as far as possible by Sunday when a jury will decide who the winners are.

It’s a great concept, especially for those that would like dive into the world of entrepreneurship head first and all they need is a partner or some expertise that would make a difference.

Since lately, with my friends, we were bouncing around ideas of project we could do for fun on weekends, we said, let see grab this opportunity and pick an idea to pitch at SWMontreal. Who knows, maybe people will like it, and than we could get useful feedback and mentoring to get it started.

Before the pitch fire, there was a panel of VC from Quebec, there was JS Cournoyer from Real Ventures, Yona Shtern founder of Beyound the Rack, Chris Arsenault from iNovia and François Gilbert from Anges Québec. It was a very interesting discussion about how to get founded when you have a startup that has potential and all it needs if money. There were so many great advises given in such a short time, that I really hope someone was filming it and it will end up on Youtube to benefit as many people as possible.

Here are a few ideas I retained:

• Before approaching a VC make sure it is in the right league, don’t go with a something that needs seed money to someone that is giving minimum 250k and goes up to millions.
• VCs don’t necessarily look for amazing ideas, they invest in people, in their skills and their determination to go beyond their limits.
• Be ready to pitch an idea many times and if you got a number in your mind when you hear the word many, multiply that by at least ten, that is how many time you will be refused and you have to be ready to continue.
• Related to the previous point, if you know you’ll have a chance with a VC, don’t start with that one, because pitching is an art that needs to be developed over time, you need exercise. When you presented something 30 times, it sounds a way better than on the 10th time and on the 50th time is way better than on the 30th, so don’t rush it because you risk to burn some bridges.
• Be honest, don’t lie.
• If you don’t like the VC, be ready to refuse the offer, just as VCs look for great opportunities that fit their vision, you also have to make sure the VC you are approaching is someone from who you would accept advices. Be informed, talk to people that got funding from them.
• Yes, VCs are giving more than just money, be ready to accept advices, usually they know better than you.
• People are afraid to give up control, to accept advices and are stubborn, VCs don’t like people that are not flexible. Not because they want to run your company, no they don’t; these people are wealthy, they don’t want to work shit hours like you have to, they just want to make sure that the direction of the company is the right one. Mr Gilbert even paraphrased another investor, by saying the VCs are like grandparents, they like to give the candy, but they are not the ones to administer spanks.
• Be ready to commit heart and soul to the project, several of the presenters were bragging about how little time they spend with their kids and I could feel that they would look for people that would put as a number one priority on their life the advancement of the company. Of course, this is what every shareholder wants, that their investment would return one day multiplied by many, many times.

As the average age of the room was in the early twenties and I was wondering about this last point. Is it really the only way to succeed in this field, by committing 110% and sacrificing everything else? It’s nice and dandy to push forward success stories, of people that did not care about their family and than by hard work they ended up to become millionaires. But what about the others, those that screwed up their personal life and went bankrupt? I don’t have hard numbers to back this, but something tells me that the wast majority ends up screwing up everything for nothing.

With my friend, we knew that if our idea won’t get enough votes to go further we would leave and not because we wanted to break the party, but rather we knew that our life is wired differently and we won’t be able to commit to other people’s projects on a full time basis.

Yesterday there were more than 50 ideas presented, and out of these 50, 18 ideas where selected. There were a few really great ideas, that I hope will go further to become real products one day.

It was good to see so many bright people gathered in one place, fuelled by their ambition to do something in life and I know that a handfull of them will end up as successful entrepreneurs. I wish all of them good luck!

Spring, summer, autumn, winter! Loving, rising and falling, living a human life is the main subject of Pina, the latest movie of Wim Wenders, dedicated to the memory of the German dancer and choreographer, Pina Bausch.

I think Wim Wenders, succeeded in transmitting the emotional charge of Pina Bausch’s choreographies. The gestures, the facial expressions, the music and the surroundings create a whole that will capture your soul and mind. From one scene to the other, you will go from infinite sadness to unbearable joy of life, from despair to quite acceptance.

As the closing credits ended, we looked at each other and wondered how this could be possible? Should we go get tickets for the next screening and come back? Will we be able to handle this much emotion? No, we wont… We’ll have to come back another day.

One of my resolutions for this year is to profit to the max from the existence of so many excellent museums, here in Montreal. I would like to go at least once or twice every month, see an exhibition and leave my comments here on the blog. I know, I will always have besides me an excellent guide, my wife who has an MA in museology and if any of you would like to join us, just let me know.

I will probably start with Pointe-à-Callière (PAC), that is having on display the Colors of India until April 22. Those that know me, won’t be surprised, you already know that I love the Indian culture, I’m a big fan of  their music, philosophy and cuisine.

Apart the objects received from the Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet in Paris, there are also photos by the internationally renowned reporter and photographer, Suzanne Held.

At the Ramlila festival, in Ramnagar, this young boy, arrayed liked a god, his eyes highlighted with antimony, wears the mark of Vishnu’s trident painted on his forehead. In a few moments he will pay Lakshmana, Rama’s faithful brother, in a performance of the “deed of Rama.” ©Suzanne Held

I know in May we will go back to the PAC, when Samurai – The Prestigious Collection of Richard Béliveau will open its doors.

Richard Béliveau, who is university professor, famous for his work in the prevention and treatment of cancer, happens to be a great collector of Japanese artifacts. It is the first time that he agreed to present to the public part of his collection.

Here are some teasing details from the press release:

Samurai — The Prestigious Collection of Richard Béliveau will showcase some 200 pieces, such as full armours including helmets, masks, and clothing, as well as spears and swords, not to mention functional objects relating to the warriors’ daily lives and culture: tea bowls, calligraphy scrolls, and face masks—very rare items that are not often seen on display. Mr. Béliveau’s collection is distinguished by the fact that it includes complete pieces, richly decorated and fashioned from high quality materials, made by the greatest masters of the era. The objects presented as part of the exhibition—all of which are true works of art—are mainly from the Azuchi-Momoyama period, which stretches from 1573 to 1603, and from the Edo or Tokugawa period, which began around 1600 and came to an end in 1868. Some of the objects are even older, dating from the 13th century.

I’d say, this is a must see!

Samurai armour, Richard Béliveau's collection. Pointe-à-Callière

In case you didn’t heard about it, the PAC has an original idea to attract visitors during the chilling cold weekends of January and February. During these two months, every Saturday and Sunday they will reduce the price of admission by a percentage equal to the outdoor subzero temperature recorded that morning. The weather forecast for tomorrow morning (Sunday) says -22, so if you’re brave enough, you’ll get a great deal.

I just arrived from my first trip to the South and coming from the Canadian winter (which was quite mild so far, no complains) and landing in a tropical weather, the first thing that strike me, was the sky and the light; it was completely different and new to me. Here I have a few samples from my attempts to capture the beauty of mornings and evenings.

…well, at least the new version of his website it is.

As you can see on this picture below, as the browser window is shrunken, the layout will adapt, by reducing the size of the images, the way they are presented and if we go really small, you will see major changes in the navigation too.

You can try it out for yourself by resizing your browser window.

The website was developed with a “mobile first” approach, meaning that first of all, the website had to look good and to be easy to navigate on a mobile phone. Once that is sorted out, they move up to larger screen sizes. Here is a short interview with the head developer and the design director of the new BarackObama.com.

Let me finish this post by paraphrasing a famous speech:

I have a dream that one day the web development community will rise up and live out the true meaning of the Internet: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all websites are created equal. Free at last! Free from the slavery of App stores!

It was back in 2008, that I was approached by a friend to make a logo and a webpage for a girl with AIDS, who wants to create a foundation. Since it was a non-profit project, that could potentially help many people, I accepted it. The name of the foundation was the Lara Roxx Foundation with the mission to spread awareness and provide proper care to people living with HIV/ AIDS.

Here are a few lines about her I reproduce from the original website:

In March of 2004 Lara Roxx took a plane to Los Angeles leaving her native Montreal in search of a quick fortune in the Adult Entertainment’s land of opportunity known on the map as San Fernando Valley.

Her plan was simple. She would first meet her agent and then embark on a busy work schedule. The more scenes, the more money, and in L.A a young woman could perform several scenes a day and easily earn as much as $10,000 to $15,000 a week depending on how open minded she was in terms of her physical boundaries.

Eager to get to work Lara Roxx performed her first scene within 24 hours of landing on American soil. What was meant to be the first of many lucrative scenes was destined to end her career before it ever got off the ground.

Here is the logo I did:

and a screenshot of the page I designed:

Fast-forward to 2011, this week I overheard a dialogue about a girl invited to Tout le monde en parle at Radio Canada, the most popular talk-show in the Francophone Canada. I asked them if it was Lara, and to my surprise I learned that there is a documentary film about her life, that just came out.  I hope the experience of participating in this documentary project helped her get back the joy of life and hope for a better future.

Here is a short trailer of Inside Lara Roxx, a documentary directed by Mia Donovan

Do you remember the day when it was cool to have a Flash intro on your home page? All the creative people were trying to outdo each other and to come up with more and more complex animations, spiced up with sound effects and music that would enforce the visitors impression about the owner’s good taste.

I can see you’re nodding… Those were the days…

But than, people started complaining about the background music, and would find it too intrusive. Music got muted by default and sound effects slowly, but steadily disappeared as an accessory for web design. It didn’t took too long to realize, except all the self-absorbed “geniuses” and misguided clients, that Flash intros are a huge waste of time, they are not accessible and have zero SEO value, not to mention the high bounce rates.

Good!

The other day I clicked a link shared by a friend on Facebook, it was the portfolio of a photographer with a series of images shot in India. It was done with Flash, the fancy way, I could click back and forth, there was even a full screen mode or I could just sit back and let the slideshow play. I did not had a lot of time, I wanted to quickly go trough the images, but I couldn’t. The pictures would appear one after another, with a loading counter between them, but what I wanted to have a general view and not to be forced to wait.

Today there are less and less devices that play Flash, even Adobe stopped developing the mobile version, so why put your eggs in a basket that is sinking?

It was about this time two years ago, that I was invited to the wedding of my best friend, Raj, and he also trusted me to take pictures during the ceremony.

As a photographer weddings always make me nervous, because the pressure to have great result is huge. There is no going back, it’s a unique event for the groom and maid and their whole family. Raj told me not to worry and to be as creative as I want, because there were two more photographers hired to document the event.

It was the first time I witnessed a Hindu wedding, so to make sure I’m familiar with the ceremony, beforehand I watched a couple of time the video recording of another Tamil wedding.

I decided to go for a more journalistic approach and to focus more on the small details, those that are usually the first to fade from the memory.

Here is a small sample of some of the pictures I took that day:

Developing an accessible website

We’re getting there, the website is in its final phase of development and polishing. The launch date is getting closer and closer and we want it to be perfect. Of course, the many years of designing for the web, taught me that there is no such thing as perfect when it comes to websites. The good thing bout the Web is that it’s a platform and a product that can be tweaked and improved even after it lives in the public realm.

From the very begging of the planning and development of the website, we wanted to make it accessible. Everything was checked and double checked, to make sure that the design, the navigation and the content will make sense for a person using a screen reader.

The technology

Our choice of Drupal as a CMS, proved to be the perfect match for developing an accessible website. It comes with many built in functionalities that help develop accessible websites.

There are other CMS-es too that you can use to make accessible website, the tool is not as important as the way you implement it and use it.

The design

Everything on the website has to have a meaning, we reduced the number of decorative elements to a minimum, in order to speed up the loading time and also to direct the attention of the visitors to the main content.

The color scheme, while following the visual identity guidelines of the City, it is used in a way that even color blind visitors will be able to navigate it. The contrast is high enough that even users with poorly calibrated screens will understand the structure and the navigation.

Links in the content are underlined and in the navigation, there are visual clues to highlight a roll-over or an active link.

The navigation

While we were working on the tree view of the navigation, we organized the links in a logical way. Ulterior testing with users helped us fine-tune it even more.

The first link screen readers will get is a “Skip to content” link, that helps the users skip the whole navigation of the page and get to the juice of the content. This is hidden for other users, not to clutter the menu and unnecessarily confuse people.

On the bottom of the page there is an expanded sitemap with the main pages organized by section. This is to help people navigate the site without having to deal with the drop-down menu.

The content

The content is organized with headers, to give a logical hierarchic order.

Illustrations, all have alt attributes, where there is a description of the image for the screen reader. It was quite funny to see that the blind lady, who was so kind to accept to test the website, had found a typo in one of the alt texts. Something that we overlooked, she was fast to find.

Tables are used only for tabular data only, there is no table used for design. They are structured with thead and tbody, as well as with th and td, to make a clear distinction between table heads and the rest of the tabular data.

We built the forms in a way to make it clear for the screen reader what is the label for the input.

The test

Testing was a very important part of our development. Having the website tried out by people of different age group and different familiarity with the Internet, gave us important clues about how to tweak the website to make it better. We had one test subject who is using a screen reader and she loved the website, she had no problem navigating and understanding the content of the site. There was one exception, that we’ll have to sort out in the coming days, before going live with the website.

Conclusions

The first step is to recognize the need to pay attention to it, at the very beginning of the project.

Think of the user who can’t see the website, or can’t identify colors, or even the one that can’t use a mouse to brows, how will they see or navigate the content? Answering this questions will have a huge impact on the wireframe and the layout mock-ups.

Following web standards will already place you on the right track, but there are other great resources to learn about accessibility. I learned a lot from WebAIM, they have a great collection of resources and articles about how to build accessible websites. Of course the W3C WCAG 2.0 is the ultimate source of web accessibility info and if you live in Quebec, you should follow the standards developed by the Gouvernment (in French only).

The good news and the bed news is that, even after the development of the website is done and all the initial content is integrated in an accessible manner, the job is not finished. There are always tweaks you can do, to make it better and if you are not the only person contributing with content to the website, be prepared to give proper guidance to the other contributors about accessibility.

The cherry on the top of the cake

If you have a hard time convincing your client or boss, about the importance of accessibility, tell them that Web Accessibility is not rocket science and it’s not difficult to achieve. If they still don’t listen, you can always pull out the ultimate ace, Google is the biggest blind on the Web, so you better make it accessible if you want to have a decent ranking.