About this site

This is the site of Alastair Campbell, my interests are web usability, accessibility and development. Not politics. I have no connection with any political party or spin doctors. Seriously, no hate mail, and any after-dinner speaking invitations are on a cash up-front basis!

About Me

My background is psychology and HCI, the last few years I’ve been focusing on front-end code and the different interactions that people have with the same applications or content. My role at Nomensa oversees both usability and development aspects at a very multi-discipline company.
I’ll put up a picture of myself when someone manages to take a decent picture of me. Don’t hold your breath.

The site

It’s my personal site, not affiliated with any other entity, company or person. I put up what interests me at any particular time, and speak only for myself.

As someone who uses web standards as part of my job everyday, the site conforms to the usual technical & accessibility guidelines. However, as my personal playground, I will not be doing lots of cross-browser testing. (Except for some of the test cases, obviously.)

What’s this kything thing?

Wordpress likes you to have a tagline, and I went for something a bit more esoteric than “blog about usability & accessibility and stuff”. I came across the word “kythe” from a Sci-Fi book by David Zindell, where the characters could swoop over an information space, kything (collecting for thier own use) certain information. This typifies most blogs for me, they collect bits of information from all over the place to form a useful entity on a certain topic. Therefore I kythe information on ‘web interactions’ (people using the web).

Apparently the older meaning (going back to Chaucer) is quite similar, To make known; to manifest; to show; to declare.

Quite a bit of web accessibility is hidden from the masses, so that topic appears strongly on this blog.