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Increasingly, as a digital native, citizen of the internet, geek girl – call me what you wish – I find myself more and more discerning about how, when, and with whom I use the phone.

I could not have said this better. It’s exactly how I feel.

AARP commissioned a national telephone survey of the 50+ population, including an oversample of Hispanic adults age 50 and older, to gather information on this age group’s use of social media and technology and thereby better serve all Americans age 50+ through its website.

Key findings revealed:

• Two out of five (40%) adults age 50 and over consider themselves extremely (17%) or very (23%) comfortable using the Internet.  One out of five (21%) Hispanic adults age 50 and over consider themselves extremely (6%) or very (15%) comfortable using the Internet.
• The majority of those 50+ who access the Internet do so from a desktop computer (57%).  One-quarter use a laptop (26%), 4 percent use smartphones/blackberries, 4 percent use mobile phones, and one-quarter (27%) do not access the Internet.  The majority of Hispanic adults 50+ say they do not access the Internet (55%).
• Approximately one-quarter of all those 50+ use social media websites (27%) with Facebook being by far the most popular (23%).  Approximately one-fifth of all Hispanics 50+ use social media websites (21%) with Facebook being the most popular (13%).

 

The survey was conducted via telephone by GfK Custom Research. Questions were included on GfK’s OmniTel and Hispanic OmniTel surveys during May 12-17, 2010. A nationally representative sample of 1,360 adults age 50 and older, as well as 503 Hispanic adults age 50 and older, completed the interviews.  For additional information, contact the author, Jean Koppen, at 202-434-6311. (13 pages)

Don’t discount those over 50 – social media is NOT a kid thing.

Enter Aimee Mann, an Oscar nominated singer/songwriter, who Tweeted a simple opinion: “Christ, there is no reason in the world anyone should ever have cast Ice T in a television show.” Aimee was about to become famous in a very different way than as a singer/songwriter, and becomes the latest example of Twitter failure (and then success, in this case).

Someone sent Ice T, a prominent Twitter user, a retweet of Aimee’s post. I pieced the “conversation” here in chronological order (reverse from Twitter default), with comments below:

It ended well, as you can see. Aimee apologized, Ice T showed his continued coolness by accepting and moving on. In the mean time, Ice T’s post (and therefore Aimee’s Twitter name) made it into several big sites due to it’s awesomeness.

• Presenting The Single Greatest Tweet Of All Time, Starring Ice-T, Aimee Mann, And A Hot Bowl Of Dicks
• Billboard.com’s Top 20 Tweets of the Week: 4/10/10

There are a couple of lessons here. Sure you learn to be careful what you Tweet, because it could become a famous Tweet, but, look at Ice T’s Twitter stream. In all the ruckus, many people Tweeted negative comments about Ice T. So he retweeted them! That’s right – he straight out retweeted the negative comments, and let it go. He could easily have been pulled into a downward spiral of stupid insults, but he didn’t take the bait.

In the end, what we see here is two people with class. Aimee apologized quickly, declared her carelessness, and did it in a way that showed her personality. Ice T accepted the apology and moved on, even trying to stop those who continued to Tweet negative comments about Aimee with this post, ”Once again. She made a comment.. I replied… She apologized. Peace!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FLTG. Mooooovin!”

Peace.

Scary, right? It may not be true if you’re using colors with color blindness usability in mind. But most designers ignore this huge segment of the population. And color blind people notice – and vote with their wallets – when a site uses poor color choices, especially with navigation.

From Usability Interface, Accommodating Color Blindness: There are two major types of color blindness. The most prevalent causes are confusion between red and green. This type affects approximately eight to ten percent of the male population. In another type, an additional one to two Percent of men suffer from a deficiency in perceiving blue/yellow differences. Less than one percent of women suffer from any form of color blindness.

Odds are you have a friend or relative who is color blind. You may not notice because in reality it should be named “color weak.” Only 0.005% of the population is truly color blind, meaning they see mono-chromatically. The rest have varying degrees of perception deficiency. The vast majority of the color weak have red-green deficiency. If you’re interested in knowing more about color blindness, go to WeAreColorBlind.com.

Life as a “Color Blind American”

Most people will be surprised to find out that I am color weak. Yet I design logos, graphics, web sites, etc. It sounds like it could be a problem, but I have adapted. On the positive side, my designs are automatically color blind accessible. Then, I use tools like Photoshop’s color picker, online color wheels for recommended color combinations, and the eyes of my son, wife, or anyone else nearby. It is common for me to say to someone, “can I borrow your eyes?” You’ll also notice my logos all look good in black and white, which should always be the case anyway since people still print with black and white laser printers.

Okay, I'm wearing white contacts in this photo.

Before I was diagnosed as a child, I had trouble in school. I colored in trees either all brown or all green – trunk and leaves. Same with grass. My kindergarten teacher used Color Phonics to teach reading, and they had decided I was learning-disabled until my mother decided to teach me how to read old-school style with books and practice. Even knowing I was color weak, my 7th grade art teacher failed me for not getting color wheel questions correct on a test. And I can’t tell a live lawn from a dead lawn.

A perfect example of a color blindness usability failure is traffic lights. Red-yellow-green is the worst combination possible. I use the position of the lights – the top is red, the middle is yellow, the bottom is green. Heading towards a flashing red or a flashing yellow, I don’t know which it is, so I don’t know whether to slow down or stop. Do you use the red-yellow-green paradigm for navigational instructions on your site?

Most of the time when I tell someone I’m color blind, they start testing me. “What color is this shirt,” “what color is that wall?” There’s usually a lot of laughter and wonder, then an uncomfortable moment when the person realizes they might be offending me. Don’t worry – it’s not like asking someone in a wheelchair, “can you climb these steps,” “can you jump over this box?” Color blindness is mostly just an inconvenience – unless we’re broadsided while running a red light we thought was yellow!

My online experience is similar. Many many sites use color as visual cues for navigation and presentation of information. I often will be stymied while browsing. If it’s bad enough, I leave the site completely, usually angry. I find the worst offenders to be Christmas sites – with all that red and green all over the place. It’s enough to make me a Grinch. Here are some examples:

Jeffrey Veen Blog – There’s links somewhere in the paragraphs. I didn’t know that until someone told me.

Gizmodo – This pie chart is a good example of an unusable graphic for the color blind.

Want to see a graphic that will knock out every color blind person? The person who did this should be slapped. Physically. Then fired. (See the anger I was talking about?)

Design Best Practices

The key to visibility for the color blind is color contrast. Colors on the opposite ends of the spectrum are the most contrasting. Black and white is the best example. A good way to start a design is to use gray scale. Then, add colors for interest, always keeping in mind contrast, especially regarding usability elements, like navigation and buttons.

Don’t use colors to differentiate links from non-links. Use the universally accepted underline.

Don’t use color as your sole visual cue in presenting information. Colors are okay, but additional cues, such as shapes or arrows, help. Here’s an excellent example of well done charts, where they connect the legend to the chart, so color vision is not required to understand the information.

Use bright, bold colors. Color weak people can see colors, they just have trouble differentiating between certain hues. Put orange and red together, or green text on red, and you’re courting trouble.

Tools

The best tool is to find some color blind friends to look at your designs and tell you what they think. Barring that, these sites can help you understand and simulate color blindness.

We Are Color Blind – many tools and examples.

Vischeck – see web pages and images similar to how color blind people see them. Includes a free Photoshop plugin!

Accessibility Color Wheel – analyzes the contrast of a color pair and shows how color-blind people see them.

Think you might be color blind?

Here are two online color blindness tests:

Ishihara Test for Color Blindness

Color Vision Test

If you suspect you may be color weak, see your optometrist for a definitive diagnoses. It really does help to know.

Your Turn

Let me know about your experiences with color, whether you’re color blind or not.

Even though there are two receptacles, this is a One Man Restroom, so lock the door! Do you really think one guy is going to use the urinal while the other sits on the toilet taking a dump? Maybe in France or in the bathroom shared by Republican Congressmen and their young male Pages, but not here.

How ridiculous that I walk into the pictured Men’s Room (Starbucks in Fishers, Indiana), and there’s a guy at the urinal.  I thought about just sitting down on the toilet and staring at him, like, “yo, what’s up?” But I realized odds were good he would not get the point. Sigh.

As I took Petey out this morning for his first, er, constitutional, he, as usual, tried to find some rabbit poo to eat. We have a warren of rabbits in the park behind our house, and they come into our yard regularly to eat, have babies, hang out, and poo. Petey will chase the rabbits when he sees them, unless he’s tired, but he never catches them. I’m not sure if he wants to or what he’d do if he did. And maybe it’s the excitement of those chases that has gotten him to think eating rabbit poo is the greatest treat in the world.

Before you freak out, we do try to stop him, and usually succeed. But he’ll trick us, kind of wandering around, then jamming his snout into the grass and chowing down as much as possible before we yell at him to stop. We also try to find the poo and clean it up, but it’s little pellets in our 4″ tall grass, and we don’t have the olfactory powers of one Petey Lasker.

This whole topic got me thinking about all the things Petey likes to eat. Here are some of his favorites:

• Bananas
• Peanut Butter
• Meat (okay, like all dogs)
• Carrots
• Sweet Potato Treats
• Popcorn (more than anything in the world)
• Rabbit Poo (we do what we can to stop this, but he sneaks when he can)
• Toilet Paper and Paper Towel Rolls (actually he just likes to tear them up)
• Sale Papers (not newspaper, just the shiny sale papers, just to tear them up and make a mess)
• Stuffed Toy Stuffing (he doesn’t swallow, but he works intently to get the fuzzy stuff out as quickly as possible)
• Greenies Pill Pockets (he’d eat these for dinner)
• Ham (I know this is meat, but he gets especially excited about sliced sandwich ham)
• Purina Carvers, Beef or Chicken
• Three Dog Bakery Treats (I use these most as rewards for tricks, as seen in the video, above)
• Ice (I believe it’s his main hydration source he eats so much of it)
• Flowers (we bring home fresh flowers and hold them for him to smell and he just wants to eat them)

While Petey would eat almost anything, he does NOT like dry dog food, most manufactured dry bone treats, and anything he thinks we want him to eat.

Why do I bring all this up? Good question, because I have no idea if anyone cares. But I’m sick yet again, and bored to death, so I decided to type and this is what came out.

I have been working with Miva Merchant for over seven years as a user, a consultant, and now as owner of MerchantTutorials.com, a Miva Merchant Flash Video Tutorial site and Miva Merchant Educational Partner. Why do I prefer Miva Merchant over other shopping carts, especially when some carts are “free?” Here are my 10 reasons:

1. With hundreds of third party modules available (usually for $20 to $100), adding functionality is extremely easy. Alternatively, most platforms, especially open source, require custom programming or, worse, have free open source add-ons that are not supported well.
2. Miva Merchant can be hosted with any of dozens of hosts who specialize in Miva Merchant. Many platforms require you to host with the company itself, reducing your options and leverage for support. Additionally, if you’re hosted with a shopping cart company, and they die, your store is gone forever. All good Miva Merchant hosts will move your site to their servers at no charge.

   

3. Miva Merchant is one of only a few platforms who are investing the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be PCI PA-DSS Compliant by the July 2010 deadline. Any platform that is not compliant will not be able to (legally) accept credit cards after that deadline. Many shopping carts, especially open source, will have to close up after the deadline. http://www.tophosts.com/articles/009189.html
4. Miva Merchant 5.5 is based on MySQL, which is much better than the dBase database format of version 4. It allows unlimited numbers of products, categories, customers, etc., without a loss of site speed. Sites on Miva Merchant 5.5 are significantly faster than the prior version.
5. Most other platforms are written in PHP. This commonality has made PHP applications a target for hackers. All PHP applications, like WordPress, need updates constantly. Usually a security flaw is discovered only after hundreds or thousands of sites are compromised. Miva Merchant is written in their proprietary language (MivaScript), and then compiled so nobody can see the source code. I have not heard of a single security vulnerability with Miva Merchant 5.5.
6. Done right, Miva Merchant can be easily understood from one developer to the next. So, if something happened to your site developer, you could find someone else in the industry who can get in and, within an hour or two, know everything about your site’s setup. With most other platforms, there would be so much custom functionality you’re pretty much forced to use the same developer, and it’s expensive to pay a new developer to reverse engineer his code.
7. Some carts actually charge a percentage of all sales, leading often to hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in fees. This is especially true of Yahoo Stores and Amazon. With Miva Merchant, you can lease your license through a Miva Merchant expert host usually for less than $10 a month when you host with them.
8. Miva Merchant has a dynamic user and developer community that is willing to help with almost any question at the user forums and/or directly. I learned all I needed about Miva Merchant from other users (since my tutorials were not available), so I contribute back as much as I can on the forums. Competing developers, hosts and consultants are very cordial to each other, unlike any other community I’ve seen. This makes the annual Miva Merchant user conference as enjoyable as any conference I’ve ever been to.

   

9. Once you get used to it, Miva Merchant is extremely easy to manage. Check out this video tour of the Miva Merchant administrative area I created to help you see how quickly you could be up to speed.
10. Miva Merchant is extremely flexible. It defaults to a base structure – header, footer, left column navigation, content section, navigation bar…
    

    But you are not stuck with that structure like most carts. There is simply no limit to how you can customize your store with Miva Merchant. Check out the Miva Merchant Store Galleria and you’ll see what I mean. If you are not a designer, you can purchase one of dozens of Miva Merchant skins to get your foundation quickly, and be online with minimal work.

Do you have reasons I haven’t listed, or even reasons you don’t like Miva Merchant?

As a 2009 Republican:

I COMMIT TO protect my personal income as highest priority, even if the Party represents none of my other principles.

I COMMIT TO scorn the needy as lazy, drug addicted or criminals.

I COMMIT TO concern myself with self first. I got mine, screw everyone else.

I COMMIT TO fear, hate or scorn all non-Americans because they either hate America or are trying to steal our jobs.

I COMMIT TO call all proposals by the Democratic Party Socialist or Fascist, even if the same idea was proposed by Republicans in the past. If necessary, I’ll call Obama a Nazi or Hitler or Chavez.

I COMMIT TO equate Socialism to Communism so people fear it, ignoring the examples of Canada, Australia and all of Europe.

I COMMIT TO attempt to convince everyone that Socialism is a political system, not an economic system, so they think it eliminates voting and means government oppression.

I COMMIT TO lie about the health care systems of other nations and, regardless of the facts, declare that America has “the best health care system in the world.” When I hear people from countries with universal health care state that they love their health care system, I will place my fingers firmly in my ears, yell “neener neener neener,” and watch 4 hours of Glenn Beck to clear my head of information that does not support my current beliefs.

I COMMIT TO calling Medicare a failure even though it gets over 90% approval ratings from Medicare recipients, to calling the Post Office a failure while paying only 42 cents to send a letter 3,000 miles away, and to using the department of motor vehicles as an example of bad government because they were terrible many years ago.

I COMMIT TO assume Americans are gullible and stupid, easily falling for soundbites, catch phrases and visual images of us dressed up like rebels while we tear open Lipton tea bags over a Midwestern river.

I COMMIT TO accuse those who disagree with us of being unpatriotic, Socialist and anti-American, while acting offended if the same tactic is used against me. The difference is, we’re right and liberals hate America.

I COMMIT TO never doubt that Jesus was a white Republican and that He preached guns, small government and government-enforced Christianity.

I COMMIT TO believe everything Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity say and to do whatever they tell me to. I will declare this godly triad to be impartial, educated and not drug addicted.

I COMMIT TO lie and exaggerate when necessary, like saying there were 1 million people at the September 12 DC protest when the official estimates were around 70,000, knowing the ends justify the means, and that Jesus will forgive me.

I COMMIT TO defend the racist things I do by saying, “There you go again with the race thing. It’s not about race.” This will silence my enemies, even though they will still know I’m racist.

I COMMIT TO attempt to convince other American workers that it is in their best interest to defend the wealthy, letting them think we are the Party of the little guy. Even though deregulation and the Bush tax cuts for the rich failed and caused a massive worldwide economic crisis, I’ll still call for more of the same because it worked in the 1980s.

I COMMIT TO believing that the wealthy and corporations have the best interests of America and the little guy, while volunteers, non-profits and community organizers want nothing but to destroy America.

I COMMIT TO crying out for “small government” without defining it when the Democrats are in power, then defend massive spending by Republicans when we are in power. If a liberal calls me on this, I will claim that I “was the first person to speak out against Bush and the massive government spending,” without any evidence of this, such as a single tea party or DC protest.

I COMMIT TO forgive all Republican sexual indescretions, even the homos, while still acting like it’s the Democrats that lie and cheat on their wives.

I COMMIT TO using opposites to confuse the stupid, like saying the public option will reduce our options, and saying, “I don’t want the government between me and my doctor” while calling for laws to put the government between a pregnant woman and her doctor.

I COMMIT TO put up token minorities in figurehead positions to distract from racist and xenophobic policies. Black men are preferred to them Mexicans.

I COMMIT TO say I want “the government out of our lives,” while forcing others to obey my rules on marriage, abortion, sexuality, and anything else that I believe is right.

I COMMIT TO  watch only Fox News. If someone calls me on that, I’ll say that I watch CNN, too, even though that’s only to watch Larry King.

——-

Right wingnuts can disagree with this, but they’ll have no evidence or facts to justify their opinions. Most likely they’ll call me names, call me unAmerican, or threaten me.

I think I have a good solution that Twitter could implement with a simple new addition to their Terms of Service. And now’s a good time, since they’re in Terms of Service change-mode.

My suggestion is to implement a Terms of Service addition that says that all automated systems that Tweet and/or auto-DM to Twitter users must have an opt-out option. Any system that does not provide an opt-out, or makes opting out difficult, will be blocked from the system.

Of course, there will be apps that don’t comply or use tricks to get around the rules. There always are. But this could cut down on so much I think it would be worth it.

If you agree, please Tweet “RT @chucklasker @Twitter Plz implement automated Tweet mandatory opt-out suggestion at http://bit.ly/13B1BM #AutomatedOptOut”. (use hashtag #AutomatedOptOut for this issue)