currybetdotnet Product review archive

Reviewing the Instablogs 'citizen journalism' platform
A couple of week ago I was contacted by the team at Instablogs, asking whether I would be interested in having a look at their site. I normally shy away from this kind of promotion, but I was rather intrigued by the premise of the service, so I did have a look, and had a bit of email to-and-fro with the PR manager. In one sense, Instablogs is just another simple blogging platform. However, it combines the regular concept of...

Read the full post - Published April 4, 2008 in Blogging, Media, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 9 - Daily Star
Although I originally only intended to review 8 newspapers in this series of posts looking at the accessibility of Britain's online newspapers, The Daily Star has recently re-designed. I therefore thought that it would be worth running my eye over the new design for accessibility features, in the same way that I have tested the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. Text resize Sadly it seems that the new Daily Star...

Read the full post - Published November 16, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Star, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 8 - The Times
I've been looking at how accessible British newspaper websites are, testing the most popular online papers against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun and The Telegraph. Today, I'm looking at the accessibility of The Times website. Text resize The Times, along with The Mirror and The Guardian was one of only 3 out of the 8 newspapers I tested who allowed users to resize their text...

Read the full post - Published November 15, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Times, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 7 - The Telegraph
Over the last week and a half I've been looking at the accessibility issues surrounding British newspaper websites, and testing some of the most popular against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, and The Sun. So in broadly alphabetical order, provided you count the 'Daily' bit but don't count 'The'. Sometimes. Anyway, today it is the turn of The (Daily) Telegraph. Text resize Allowing your users to control...

Read the full post - Published November 14, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Telegraph, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 6 - The Sun
I'm writing a series of posts about how British newspaper websites perform in a series of accessibility tests. These include simple things, like whether the text on a site is re-sizeable within major browsers, and more complex issues like how the site is rendered by screen reading technology. So far I've examined The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian and The Independent's sites. This post looks at the accessibility of The Sun's site. Unfortunately for me, after I'd done...

Read the full post - Published November 13, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Sun, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 5 - The Independent
Last week I started a series of posts testing British newspaper websites against various accessibility standards and issues. So far I've looked at The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Guardian. Today it is the turn of The Independent. Text resize The Independent appears to be almost almost alone amongst the major newspapers in the UK in having a stylesheet 'widget' on the page to allow users to adjust the size of the text that they are viewing...

Read the full post - Published November 12, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Independent, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 4 - The Guardian
I've been doing a series of checks on British newspaper websites to see how they match up to their accessibility responsibilities. So far I've looked at the Express, Mail, and Mirror. Today, in the last of this week's reviews, it is the turn of ex-broadsheet The Guardian. For each set of tests I have been looking at the homepage of a site, and then the top story from that day's paper, in order to access both types of template. For...

Read the full post - Published November 9, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Guardian, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 3 - Daily Mirror
This week I'm looking at the level of accessibility built into British newspaper websites. I started with the Daily Express and Daily Mail, and today I want to look at The Mirror. I'm assessing the paper's homepage and top story page against a number of accessibility criteria. Text resize One of the simplest tests for accessibility is to see whether a site uses relative font sizes or fixed font sizes. Relative font sizes means that users can control for themselves...

Read the full post - Published November 8, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Mirror, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 2 - Daily Mail
Yesterday I started a series of posts looking at the accessibility of British newspaper websites with an overview of the accessibility performance of the Daily Express website. Today I'm continuing the series by looking at the Daily Mail. I'm testing each newspaper homepage, and a subsequent story page, against a range of accessibility criteria. Text resize The Daily Mail is one of the newspaper sites that uses fixed font sizes in its homepage and story page display. This means that...

Read the full post - Published November 7, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Mail, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express
The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act put the force of law behind the principle that businesses should not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their goods and services. Although yet to be tested by major case law in the UK, it is generally accepted that 'services' includes a business web site, and that therefore businesses should take care to make sure that their sites are as accessible as possible. In theory, this is trivial to accomplish. All that...

Read the full post - Published November 6, 2007 in Accessibility, Articles, Daily Express, Newspapers, Product review, Web

Gatwick Yotel not quite so swell

Published October 11, 2007 in Product review, Transport

5 quick usability wins for the BBC iPlayer beta trial installation process

Published August 6, 2007 in Application design, BBC, Product review, Television, Usability, iPlayer

Playing with the Virgin Radio player beta

Published March 2, 2007 in Media, Music, Product review, Radio, Usability, Web

"Schmap: Zaragoza Photo Inclusion"

Published September 5, 2006 in Flickr, Product review, Widgets

Catalog [sic] your books at Library Thing

Published September 4, 2006 in Product review

Search across photo-sharing sites from Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish and PictureTrail

Published August 28, 2006 in Product review, Search

Searching for pictures on ImageShack and Yahoo! Photos

Published August 8, 2006 in Product review, Search, Yahoo

Using image search on Slide

Published August 7, 2006 in Product review, Search

Using image search on Photobucket

Published August 3, 2006 in Product review, Search

How Vox handles audio, books and photographs

Published July 25, 2006 in Product review

Looking at Six Apart's new Vox service

Published July 24, 2006 in Product review

Searching The Sun online - part two

Published July 18, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search, The Sun

Surveying search across British online newspapers

Published July 13, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Daily Star and The Sunday Sport

Published July 12, 2006 in Daily Star, Music, Product review, Search

Searching The Daily Express

Published July 11, 2006 in Daily Express, Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Financial Times

Published July 10, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Scotsman

Published July 7, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Telegraph

Published July 6, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Guardian

Published July 5, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Daily Mirror

Published July 4, 2006 in Daily Mirror, Media, Newspapers, Product review, Search

Searching The Independent

Published July 3, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Searching 'This Is London' from The Evening Standard

Published June 30, 2006 in Evening Standard, Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Daily Mail

Published June 29, 2006 in Daily Mail, Media, Product review, Search

Searching The Sun online

Published June 28, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search, The Sun

Searching The Times online

Published June 27, 2006 in Media, Product review, Search

Usability issues with OTEnet's On Wireless wifi service at Athens airport

Published June 22, 2006 in Greece, Product review, Web

Looking at Edgeio

Published May 31, 2006 in Product review

Trying out T3h Blox0r - part two

Published May 18, 2006 in Product review

Trying out T3h Blox0r - "The best online aggregator ever!" - allegedly

Published May 17, 2006 in Product review

Testing Google Reader - part two

Published May 12, 2006 in Google, Product review

Testing Google Reader

Published May 11, 2006 in Google, Product review

coComment - a solution to a problem I didn't know I had? - part two

Published May 9, 2006 in Product review

coComment - a solution to a problem I didn't know I had?

Published May 8, 2006 in Product review

Exploring Rojo - part three

Published May 3, 2006 in Product review

Exploring Rojo - part two

Published May 2, 2006 in Product review

Exploring Rojo

Published May 1, 2006 in Product review

Taking a look at FeedLounge - part three

Published April 26, 2006 in Product review

Taking a look at FeedLounge - part two

Published April 25, 2006 in Product review

Taking a look at FeedLounge

Published April 24, 2006 in Product review