I like being left handed, it means I might have a gene that makes me left handed, but they aren’t sure about that yet. I also notice quite a bit when other people around me are left handed. It makes me feel special. I’m an oddity (I’m sure most people would agree with that). Being left handed also makes me adept at using my right hand better then right handed folks can use their left hand. Some call this ambidextrous, but truly, I am not. I’m not equally dexterous on both sides of my body which is why I’m more mixed handed. I can’t throw things with my left arm and I play baseball (as well as most sports) with my right arm. I am also right footed and right eyed. There are few things that I can only do well with my left arm/hand.

What I don’t like is when people don’t consider the left handed folks when designing things.

Spurring on this rant was a recent discussion on a well known and widely read interaction design mailing list. The discussion was around mouse clicks on a web app/site. More to the point they were talking about the use of contextual menus being accessed via a “right click”. I’m sure you might be thinking this is a little nit-picky and perhaps it is. However the problem persists, people do not think out side their own means. They tend to think of what they can do and not what others do or can’t do. For crying out loud these guys design interfaces and interactions. What happens if they design something strictly for their means not considering how others may use it and someone dies?

Taking this a little further, there has been research on the effects of left handed people using right handed mice. It can cause some issues with posture. Which makes you wonder if ~10% of the worlds population is cared about by the other 90%. It seems that the 80/20 rule shouldn’t apply for handedness. But alas it does and designers, business people and right handed folks don’t see the value in accommodating the southpaws of this world.

We might be an edge case in some people’s minds but wouldn’t people with disabilities considered edge cases? It basically the same thing, people with psychical disabilities could have a hard time doing things that people without disabilities do with ease. People who are left hand dominate could have difficulties with things that are designed for the right handed world.

Equality for all? No. Not until the right handed world stops being selfish.

A little background to set up the scene: I work at a university, we have a rather large system that is built on MOSS. Which in of itself isn’t a major problem but still proves to be an interesting challenge.

One of those challenges is to create a development environment that is available anonymously (not logged in) to the developers only on the local network. Pretty common in the Apache world and should be fairly easy to setup on the MOSS system (or so I thought). Well it turns out that it’s not overly easy, and currently can’t be done so that it is limited to the local network. Something with how they have the firewalls setup or something.

In order for the developers to work we needed anonymous access turned on so that we could test our code as how the rest of the world would see it. Now this really isn’t an issue because only people who are working on the server know the URL. Google doesn’t know about it, Joe Plumber doesn’t know about it and you anonymous person doesn’t know about it. However the server admin thought that Google would index it right away, and was confused about it because another development environment was already being indexed by Google (another story for another time). After I reassured him that: 1. Google wouldn’t index unless it knew about it, 2. We can make sure that Google won’t index it, and 3. I couldn’t work unless anonymous access was turned on. After going back and forth a little, he decided that he wouldn’t turn it on unless he got approval from him supervisor (out for the day) or from my supervisor (also out for the day).

What it comes down to it a lack of knowledge on his part and a lack of respect for my position. I’m pretty much an expert in SEO and things related to search engines. I can tell you I knew next to nothing about Windows servers and IIS, which is why I trust the people who hold those positions to do their jobs and hope that they also realize what I do and trust me to do my job to the best of my ability.

My start page for Firefox happens to be iGoogle. Because it holds my gmail, rss feeds and some other fun things. Now I don’t keep myself logged in over the weekend because that’s silly. So what do you think my reaction was when I came across this before logging in?

I followed the link to the help page and Lo! Firefox 3 is NOT supported by iGoogle but Chrome is? hrrmmm Firefox 3 has been out for a bit longer then Chrome. I guess Chrome is Google’s browser but come on. No one really uses it.