The Fluid Project

This article is the first in a series of articles about the CulturAll 2.0 Network, a national multisector network developing innovative approaches, tools and strategies to ensure that everyone in Canada can participate in the Canadian cultural exchange online.

As the Web becomes a participatory forum for bidirectional communication, social networking, cultural innovation and collaborative cultural production, it becomes even more important that people with disabilities not be excluded. Through strategic applied research and pioneering exemplars, the CulturAll 2.0 Network will work to make certain that inclusive design becomes a naturally integrated component of Web 2.0 technologies and reaffirm that advances benefit all Canadians.

The recent shift in web technologies to richer, more interactive experiences has made it easier for artists to share their work online and for Canadians to experience that art. There has been an explosion of software development tools that anyone can use to create interactive websites, allowing everyone from punk rock musicians to museums to share their art with the world.

For people with disabilities, however, rich Internet applications are often a barrier to access. Artists and audiences within the Canadian cultural domain have very diverse needs and preferences. A Web application interface that is engaging, entertaining and informative for one user may be completely opaque and inaccessible to another.

The Fluid Project is working to change that. Fluid is an international community of user interface designers and web programmers working together to create tools that will make it easy – even automatic – for website developers to create user interfaces that are consistent, easy and intuitive to use, and that are accessible to people with disabilities.

SHAREABLE, CUSTOMIZABLE USER INTERFACES
The Fluid Project is creating a library of shareable user interface components that are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of usability and accessibility. Web developers will be able to use these components in their applications, customizing them for their own purposes, while remaining confident that their interfaces will be accessible to all visitors.

For example, Fluid has created an accessible Lightbox component that allows users to re-organize images within a collection by dragging-and-dropping thumbnails. The Lightbox is fully keyboard accessible, providing non-mouse users with a direct and convenient way of re-ordering images with the arrow keys.

Fluid components will support adaptation of the user interface to meet individual needs. For example, multicolumn views may be flattened into a single column, or keyboard shortcuts may be customized.

TOOLS FOR DESIGNERS
Fluid is also creating a User Experience Toolkit: a collection of resources that will assist web designers in creating more usable, accessible interfaces. The toolkit includes design patterns (proven solutions to a problem in context, serving as a kind of recipe for creating effective new user interfaces), tools for assessing user experience, testing techniques and guidelines, and a library of user profiles to help website creators understand their users.

ASKING THE USERS
To create user interfaces that are truly usable, the Fluid interface designers work with the people who use the software to determine where users have difficulty and what changes they would like to see. Then, the designers work with the Fluid team’s software developers to create user interface components that meet those needs, using HTML, cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript.

By creating accessible, usable interface components that are freely available to everyone, The Fluid Project hopes to enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse needs of all Canadians. For more information about Fluid, please visit the project website, http://fluidproject.org, and for more information about CulturAll 2.0, please visit the research network website, http://culturall.atrc.utoronto.ca.

The Fluid Project is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. CulturAll 2.0, including the extension of Fluid to online cultural exchange, is made possible by financial support from the Department of Canadian Heritage through Canadian Culture Online.

For more information about Fluid, please visit the project website, http://fluidproject.org.

Anastasia Cheetham is a software engineer working on The Fluid Project. She has been working in the field of technologies for people with disabilities for over 15 years. She can be reached at a.cheetham@utoronto.ca.