Accessibility, is it worth fighting for?

Many people see the home computer as the ultimate freedom. No longer do we require professional services to be able to do a variety of tasks. Gone are the long queues outside the offices of accountants, printers and book publishers; we can just do it ourselves. The home computer, with Bill Gates' vision of a computer in every household becoming more and more of a reality, is the ultimate DIY tool.

There's only one small problem. Without the professionals performing the tasks, they are being completed by amateurs - complete amateurs! Since I cannot really criticise the amateur accountants, and since I am one of the people who thrives on the fact that I don't require a publisher to get my message across, I would like to concentrate my backlash on the makers of The Computer Printed Sign(tm).

Phrases like I'll just do it on my computer used to be the exclusive domain of the few intelligent and affluent people who could afford personal computers, and would usually precede a home-made sign or notice that looked mediocre, at best, but was slightly better than its felt-tip equivalent. As computer technology improved and people bought slightly better printers and paper, the black and white striped dot-matrix printed signs were replaced by colour versions, often with a variety of fonts and clip-art. As more people spent their thousand pounds on home computers, these signs proliferated.

We have now reached a point where people genuinely believe that they are better off producing signs themselves, rather than pay a printer. We've gone beyond the stage where it is just the home users doing it. Businesses, charities, government organisations and even the army are all involved. They probably think that this is freedom of speech at work, I think that it's maverick behaviour, guaranteed to produce poor results. Let's have a look at some of the normal facets of the home made sign.

• Spelling errors, a good example of which was found at a recent charity collection.
• Apostrophe errors - printers can make mistakes but amateur signmakers are worse - see all of apostrophell for more.
• Multiple colours - sometimes garish, sometimes rendering the text unreadable, these are done mainly because the creator wanted to show that they knew how to do it.
• Millions of fonts - big ones, small ones, some as big as your head. Don't try to read such a sign, just walk on by.
• Don't forget bendy words - we have Microsoft to thank for "WordArt" a way of making words fit into special shapes that are pretty at a glance but impossible to decipher.
• Clip art frenzy. I'll admit that I've been guilty of this in the past. The computer user becomes so transfixed by their clip art collection that they include every image they can find, covering every square inch of the page and wasting ink!
• Alignment nightmares. Caused by astigmatic computer users - each item on the page starts with a different margin, sometimes slight, sometimes completely skewy - they'll do your head in if you look at them too long.

What I'm trying to say is that a sign should be made by a sign maker. They are trained to get them right! Who said that just because something was possible on a home computer, it was best to do it yourself?

Give signwriters a break - let them do their jobs!

11 May 2001
Ashley Frieze