The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility

Shlomi Fish shlomif at iglu.org.il
Fri Mar 18 14:03:39 UTC 2011


Hi Chris,

On Friday 18 Mar 2011 14:36:35 Christopher Brannon wrote:
> Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> writes:
> > I've been thinking that maybe such two-column and ASCII-art-bases
> > signature is not very accessible to people using screen-readers and/or
> > Braille-devices
> 
> I took about 30 seconds to completely digest it.  I use speech.
>   Not bad, really.

Does not sound too good.

> The sig at the end of your message is perfectly readable, though.
> 

Nice, thanks.

> Signatures have never bothered me, either way.  If I'm going to
> complain about email practices, I'd rather complain about overquoting.
> I've seen people reply to messages, where the reply contains two lines
> of text, with the entire thread quoted at the bottom.

Yes.

> Seriously, some replies have included 5 or 10 quoted messages.
> It seems to have been popularized by Microsoft Outhouse,
> so I've taken to calling it "outhouse-quoting".

"Outhouse", heh. I've seen it called "Microsoft Lookout" at times, although 
there's a search engine for MS Outlook called that. See:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/24.html 

> That's not fair, though, because I've seen it done in mutt and
> other email clients.  It's a combination of top-posting and a failure to
> edit the quoted text.

Yes, right. Someone I know (who is BCCed to this message and is deaf), who 
used to bottom-post complained, that when he uses his mobile phone to read E-
mail, he needs to scroll past the quoted texts in bottom-posted E-mails and as 
a result now prefers top-posting E-mails. I think it's a UI problem of the 
mobile phone E-mail applications, which as noted in the book "The Design of 
Everyday Things" [DOET] are repeating the same usability mistakes that 
happened in previous generations of devices (e.g: Web-based user-interfaces, 
GUIs, terminal-based UIs, etc.). For example, even a premium WordPress.com 
account suffers from some usability problems (such as no way to allow for 
preview for comments) that are non-existent even in the gratis accounts of 
livejournal.com .

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[DOET] :
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0385267746

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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