Friday I talked about the DePo Masthead theme for WordPress.com blogs, but now I'm going to talk about something close to my heart - Movable Type!
I've been using Movable Type, made by Six Apart, for several years. It's often lagged behind WordPress in the number and variety of styles and templates that were available. In the last few months, things have started to look up, especially with a lovely new template set called Mid-Century. Mid-Century was designed by Six Apart lead designer Jim Ramsey, who is using it on his blog right there if you want to take a look.
Ramsey had previously designed and Six Apart released the Professional Website template set for Movable Type, which honestly was a badly needed breath of fresh air in the Movable Type community. As soon as I upgraded to the version of Movable Type that I needed to try it out, I actually installed that template set on on my professional website.
I was sorely disappointed.
Again, like DePo Masthead, lovely. Again, like DePo Masthead, links not underlined in posts. And it was actually worse. The Professional Website template set comes in three colors. Using two of them, I couldn't even find the links in my own posts without hovering over them. The dark green / black and dark blue / back combinations of links and text just did not work for me.
As a Movable Type user, of course, I have the power to change my link color and decoration whenever I want. I was sad, though, that Six Apart chose to release this template set in a way that made users work to make it accessible, rather than leaving it up to the user to de-accessify their site should they so choose.
So when the beta of Mid-Century came out, I looked at the screen shots. Again, no link underlining. So I pulled together all of my courage and commented on Six Apart's post. Seriously, y'all, I feel completely intimidated by my imaginary vision of the "Movable Type community" full of hackers, coders, and CSS jockeys. I'm just me. So I was really nervous about it. This is what I said:
The mid-century template, like the universal template, is quite professional and I appreciate seeing these templates/styles coming from 6A.
I do wonder, though, whether Jim Ramsey has bionic eyes. These templates come with links not underlined or decorated in any way in the text of posts and pages - and the color combinations are really low in contrast. Anyone with red/green color blindness would be out of luck with a couple of them, and I realized as I was using one of the UTS templates that even I couldn't tell where my links were without mousing over.
I know that the links can be made underlined with an edit or two in the CSS, but since 6A prides itself in being "serious about design" it does leave me scratching my head as to why designs are released that by default are fairly unfriendly to anyone with impaired vision or color vision (especially as the population of the U.S. ages). One of the things I've always appreciated about TypePad, unlike WordPress.com, is that the themes have links underlined by default. It's friendlier and more accessible that way.
As I am a tiny fish, I just congratulated myself for the act of speaking up and didn't think anything would come of it.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this appear later that day, directed at me, from Byrne Reese - the product manager for Movable Type:
thank you so much for your feedback. I will see to it that Jim sees this. I was hoping that my post made it clear that this was a preview and not an official release. As a "preview" it is kind of like a "beta" meaning it has bugs we should probably fix. I know that Jim has already made a lot of enhancements to the theme even after I have posted this download. Stay tuned!
When Mid-Century was officially released, the links were underlined. You can't see it in the screenshots, but I installed it on a test blog, and it's true.
I have no idea if it was me. For all I know, it was already changed before I even saw it. However, I'm quite happy that it happened. Six Apart released a beautiful template set that includes a key element to make it accessible to people with color blindness, anyone whose color perception has diminished as they've grown older, and even people new to the web or with cognitive disabiities who are looking for that tell-tale underline to know when something's a link.
Now I have to start a new blog so I can use it, right?
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