21
April
2007
I was in Bristol this week for accessibility training from Nomensa, I learned a decent amount of stuff and had chance to double check if the kinds of things I was doing were the right things to do in terms of writing accessible HTML.
It was a great day and many thanks to Emily for delivering a great training session, really useful. I will back track eventually on what has happened and why this site seemed dead for a while. I have a new job, which going forward I’m really excited to have and thus work has been taking a lot of my attention and time and that’s where the trip to Nomensa came from, however it’s all good, got Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in York soon, that should be fun, but I can rub off some accessible approaches to SEO there now.
I think also I’ve managed to fix the css on / images off issue with one of the image replacement techniques, allow me some more time and I’ll do a proper update on this with examples. Based around the Phark method there must be a way (with JS) to detect when images are off and thus write a new style rule into the DOM for the text-indent line and when JS isn’t there my theroy is that a :hover pseudo class can snap that text back into the viewport when focus is given, my only issue with that is does :hover get focus to something without a mouse, so can a keyboard tab press bring focus to an element and trigger the :hover, I’m sure it can. If you understood that congratulations, you are a top notch web developer! I haven’t tested, the code is not there, however it’s the kind of thing you think of when in the fast lane on the M5 coming back from Bristol as the sun sets, again that is if you are a geek like me.
Photos
Anyway to conclude this unneeded waffle, if you don’t want to read my geek speak but have got this far then after the training session was over I wandered around Bristol city centre obviously camera in hand, groovy place, fountains and water falls a plenty, so as a reward for getting through the brain dump, here are some photies to look at:
The use of water in Bristol is amazing, click for more photos
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3
April
2007
I’m considering an open letter to anyone willing to read it to urge a better response to skin cancer in this country, why because the awareness isn’t working and it’s not because people aren’t listening, I know people listen and people are concerned.
The ABC of Melanoma isn’t getting through, it’s not even being given a chance to reach people, this is shameful and equates to failing another generation of young people on skin cancer, condemning at risk people to later detections of melanoma.
At every level the educators have fallen into the “human induced global warming” trap, in that the message is very narrow and a small part of the bigger picture. It’s not working because the messages aren’t diverse enough and everyone follows sunSmart and hardly tries to shift focus on to skin and skin exams.
It’s rather like pinning all your hopes on the notion that a reduction in CO2 will stop bad things happening to the weather, it’s a false economy and doomed to fail. For me the two are running parallel to each other and I’ve been able to see a radically different perspective; there is an indoctrination on prevention in all this and everyone is missing the bigger picture that we need to be focusing on skin and not just protecting skin from UV but also looking at what happens after the sunburn or the suntan.
The solution is simple:
Detection, Detection, Detection
Sunsmart, the leading light that everyone follows, launched today, with the focus firmly back on “preventing” skin cancer not detecting it or making people aware of what it looks like and why it’s important to act urgently. As an at risk individual I feel let down again and even more so because it’s gunning down melanoma under false pretenses, you have to be seen to be doing something to slow the deaths from skin cancer which are higher here than in countries which have a huge issue with it, yet you don’t educate about how to spot a skin cancer early, you prefer to tell us what we know that the sun is dangerous and add the mole bit on at the end.
We also can’t stop or prevent people from doing something enjoyable. I enjoy a bit of sun, the perception out there is catching the sun makes you look better, you can’t change those thoughts and connotations overnight and you’ll be fighting a loosing battle against the urge to tan anyway to the detriment of a national skin cancer screening service which actually will help us beat skin cancer.
This is why I’m pinning my hopes on SAFE (Skin Awareness For Everyone) which I really do think has a really good chance at success if they don’t emulate sunSmart.
There’s not enough connotation around skin cancer to get people to think, about checking their skin. We have TLC for Breast Cancer and national screening programmes for it to detect it, yet detecting skin cancer doesn’t involve harmful scans, it relies on our eyes so it’s a non starter why isn’t skin cancer being detected early and why is there a shameful lack of focus on screening and detection?
I really honestly don’t get it where are the ABC of Melanoma campaigns and the insistence on yearly skin check ups, none of that is happening, until that happens then sorry we really aren’t taking this seriously enough and more young people may loose their battle with melanoma because the educators would rather talk about how dangerous the sun is as opposed to supporting us to get our cancers found and detected early on.
Get moleAware.
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