Stay tuned.

Me receiving over-sized gift card from Best Buy.

Now that we’ve covered all of the important stuff, I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about the making of the video.

Making a video without a camera

When I talk about the making of “Meet Sue,” I always end up mentioning the fact that I can not even begin to lift and hold a camera. It’s true. Although I wanted to enter the contest, I struggled with the idea of how I would actually create the video. But then I remembered something. Something I saw on YouTube months before I knew of this contest. It was a rather nerdy video, but what I remembered about it was its emphasis on text. Mind you, this is the first time that I have revealed where exactly the inspiration for the format of the video came from. It came from this:

Although my text effects are nowhere near as cool as the ones in this video, you should be able understand where the format of the “Meet Sue” video came from. Using text and music was going to be my alternative. All I needed to do was to tell the story. And that’s when it got fun.

Having a disability without “having a disability”

If you tell a story about a fictional character, you create the character. The reader (or listener) of the story comes to know the character as you reveal the character’s, well, characteristics. So the goal of the story became to tell people about the Sue that they would see if they were not distracted with the fact that she has a disability. In other words, I told many things about Sue before mentioning that she has a disability.

It is a personal issue in many ways. Sue is me. And “Meet Sue” is a fantasy scenario where people get to know me before knowing that I have a disability. Maybe it is some unknown need to peel away my disability to see what people think. I don’t know. At this point, I’m just speculating. All I know is that you can tell when people don’t take you seriously, and sometimes it happens. Not because people are bad or want to suppress people with disabilities before they infiltrate society at all levels in a massive attempt to take over human civilization. It’s just a matter of feeling uncomfortable and unsure around people who are different than you. I sometimes feel uncomfortable around people who have different disabilities than I do. It happens.

So the moral of the story is that we all need to understand the similarities that connect us and appreciate the differences that make us unique. So all that being said, I leave you with…

Meet Sue

And here is a transcript:

Meet Sue.
Sue is an employee.
Sue is an employer.
Sue is a manager.
Sue is a mentor.
Sue is a teacher.
Sue is a writer.
Sue is a speaker.
Sue is smart.
Sue is funny :-)
Sue is exciting!
Sue is engaging.
Sue is a wife.
Sue is a mother.
Sue is a person with dreams.
Sue is a person with aspirations.
Sue is a person with a disability.
Sue is a person.

(at 60 seconds, video fades to credits)

Created by:

Blake Watson
www.blakewatson.com

Thanks to everyone who made this incredible experience possible.

Oh, and I redesigned the blog.

I would like to thank Lucian Marin for his wonderful Andrea theme, which I have used for just over a year. I discussed the beautiful WordPress theme more in my post entitled “Needless theme change.” This new theme change is arguably more needless than the last. It was more about scratching an itch than anything. I’ve wanted to have my own design as long as I have had this blog. In the beginning, I opted for getting a jump start as opposed to designing a blog theme first. I was eager to write! But that eagerness was recently overshadowed by the lacking feeling of incompleteness. And so I have taken it upon myself to fix the situation. To balance my yin and my yang.

Introducing the official “I hate stairs” theme, creatively dubbed IHS. I originally set out to create a sort of backward, upside down, or otherwise crazily unique layout while still coming off minimalist. But what I ended up doing was not particularly mind-blowing. It’s just a regular old blog layout. But regular blog layouts work. They have become a convention (or a lull, perhaps). Try taking everything out of the sidebar and putting it somewhere that doesn’t look like a sidebar. Difficult. I did manage to pull off a few interesting stunts, however.

I tawt I saw a gwid!

That’s right. I built the layout on a 12-column, 940-pixel grid with a 21-pixel baseline. If you have no idea what that means, click this switch to toggle the grid. Note, however, that not all elements will line up perfectly. I have only thoroughly tested the grid in Firefox. If you are using Internet Explorer, some page elements might be way off. To my knowledge, the blog should look fine in IE6 and higher, but my testing was limited. But for most folks, the grid provides some structure and pays respect to the old saying “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”

My images are bigger than yours

The idea behind letting images break out of the normal reading area is to throw in some tension and shake things up. It’s like when your preacher suddenly yells out a powerful declaration and kicks you out of your daze (it is usually followed by an amen). I have to insert a disclaimer here. I don’t know if all this image trickery will work in specific versions of Internet Explorer, so I apologize if it is a mess. I do plan to do some more thorough testing.

What will our hero do now?

Enough about the design. Let me fill you in on what’s going on with me. I figure my difficulty finding a job in Web design stems from our crappy economy and the fact that there aren’t as many jobs in Mississippi as other locations. Nonetheless, some exciting developments are taking shape. First, I’m laying the groundwork for forming an LLC through which I will do professional Web design work. Second, in order to gain experience and help out the community which has helped me so much, I’m planning a “project” through which I will offer free Web design services to charitable, non-profit organizations based in Mississippi. Will share more about that soon. Third, I may be getting involved with a local organization who has made it a priority to stop SMA. This involvement may go beyond the aforementioned charitable project (i.e., Web design) and include attending meetings and contributing to projects. I apologize for being so shady, but all these things are in the early stages of development.

Stay tuned. Cheers.

http://ihatestairs.com

Fellow stair-haters, I have an important update for you. Way back in July, I introduced an idea that my brother and I had. The name of the post was “Disabled people are funny looking” and it presented several ideas for funny T-shirts. We got some good feedback (and a record 23 comments) and we’ve been thinking about how we should go about producing them. Well, almost 9 months later, we have finally figured it out!

We are going to be using CafePress to produce and sell the t-shirts. The great thing about CafePress is that we can upload designs very easily can sell a variety of shirts and sizes without having to make a big upfront investment. CafePress more or less makes the shirts to order, so we don’t have to pay anything upfront.

I am going to be working on a website to showcase the shirts and I will link to the CafePress store. I’ll try to get that finished as soon as possible but school is going to be a little busy during the next 2-3 weeks. Until then, I do have some things I can share with you. First, check out the new design! It will be available on black, navy, and white. Here’s what the black and white versions look like:

I hate stairs t-shirt preview

I hate stairs (original dark)

I hate stairs (original white)

The description:

You hate stairs. When you pass them, the visions of you tumbling to your inevitable death make your palms sweat and your breathing shallow. Now you can confuse passers-by with this simple declaration.

The “I hate stairs” design is artistic and expressive. And even though it’s funny there is some significance to it as well. The lower case “i” kind of looks like a little stick person, distressed by the obstacle that is keeping him from reaching the rest of the phrase. The stairs are a barrier. The stairs could be any barriers. You don’t just hate stairs. You hate barriers.

Stay tuned for more updates on the shirts. Any feedback would be awesome. I’ll make sure to let everyone know when I finish the website. But before then, if you really really really want to buy a shirt, e-mail me and I’ll hook you up.

Cheers.

To combat the invasion of atrophy in my hands, I’m looking into some adaptive technology. The plan is to try a combination of speech recognition and on-screen keyboard software. Since I’m using a Mac, I can’t use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the popular PC speech recognition software. But I can use a spin-off for Mac called MacSpeech Dictate. It’s built using the Dragon engine. It does lack some of the features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but the core functions are there.

I’m thinking of using an on-screen keyboard called KeyStrokes. It’s got some nice features, such as predictive text.  In fact, I’m using it now. It’s a bit slow, but we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I’m going to bed.

Cheers.

Leave a comment on this post and include the URL to your submission, or better yet, use the official article submission page.

Don’t rush to replace a good design: you will grow bored with it long before your readers do.

Well, if you have been to my site before, you’ll notice that I simply ignored this rule. And I told myself I wasn’t going to. But I did. But I had a good reason for doing it, besides being bored with the old design.

I had a complaint about the readability of the site. The main body text was light gray on dark gray. Admittedly, the contrast could have been a little better. The navigation menu’s contrast was arguably worse.

Bad contrast in old menu

This site is about disability, which makes it even worse to have such bad menu. So what did I do?

Introducing Andrea, the most beautiful WordPress theme ever made. Or at least that is what Lucian Marin, the theme’s designer says about it. While it is a bold proclamation, it definitely gives a lot of WP themes I’ve seen a run for their money. It’s simple and clean, which I’m a sucker for. But even in its simplicity, it creates a mood. In fact, it allows the content to set the mood, which is the mark of a good design.

Besides its pleasing aesthetics, it solves some usability issues for me. The body text is bright and draws the focus of the reader. The menu has better contrast than the old one. The comment links draw more attention because they are inline with the heading. Visitors to the site should find it easier to spot, and use, the comment links.

On a lesser note, I liked being able to incorporate my stairs logo into the design. It was quite painless to customize.

So let me know what you think. Is it easier to read? Is there anything missing from the old theme from a usability standpoint? I appreciate your feedback. We will get back on disability topics next update.

In short, I’m a graduate student at Mississippi State University studying business. I did my undergraduate work in Business Information Systems. I’m a part-time, freelance Web designer for now.

I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy type II, a nueromuscular disease.

That’s all for this update. I encourage you to check out the new pages if you’re interested.