About This Site

Art

The art on the home page and on all the page headings is a combination of actual Geography Department photos and graphic displays of information. For instance, the photos on the home page are a collage of three class photos: clockwise from top, Hugo Loaiciga, sampling water; Keith Clarke, demonstrating computer cartography; and Oliver Chadwick, with a graduate student digging in the soil. The background map is one of Waldo Tobler's unusual projections, in which one can measure the distance and direction from Santa Barbara. (See Professor Tobler's slide presentation on unusual map projections, which is posted on-line. The page with this map is located at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/tobler/Projections/sld050.htm.)

The Academics index page art has a photo from the June 2001 graduation celebration, where a student receives an award from Mrs. Dangermond, while Keith Clarke looks on. The graphic is one of Sara Fabrikant's population maps of California. The Courses page has a photo of a soils lab class, with instructor (a graduate student) Andy Ballentine at the right. The graphic is one of Leal Mertes' Mississippi River maps. The Research page has a photo of the research vessel in the Antarctic upon which Ray Smith led studies of sea ice. The graph is from measurements of ocean water taken by Tommy Dickey's Ocean Physics Lab in the Bahamas. The People page contains a photo from the Spring 2000 graduation celebration. Past staff member Tracy Ruge and then-Department-Chair Mike Goodchild are in the foreground. The graphic is a formula used by Keith Clarke. The Events page has a photo of the Fall 1999 Department barbeque at Goleta Beach and, to the right, a strongly distorted map of the Santa Barbara Channel by Libe Washburn. The Photo page has an airphoto of part of the UCSB campus and a United States 2000 Presidential election cartogram created by a Geography undergraduate, Steve Demers. The More page has a photo of a November 2000 Colloquium, with Waldo Tobler and Keith Clarke as the speakers, and a map of talking signs near the San Francisco train station created by graduate student Jim Marston.

The art was developed by in-house Geography staff artist, Susan Baumgart.

Site Builders

Although the site was designed and organized by staff artist Susan Baumgart, and the development was overseen by her, others gave invaluable assistance. Twenty faculty, staff, and graduate students provided helpful feedback in the design stage. Staff member - and skilled webmaster - Eric Ederer was essential in hashing out the design and trouble-shooting code. After the design was complete and templates were made, Eric built approximately a tenth of the pages. Undergraduate interns Laura Dell'Olio and Ian Bortins built over half the pages.

Design Considerations for Accessibility

This site was designed not only to provide information for the wide variety of people that might be interested (such as existing and potential students, faculty, staff, and researchers), but to have that information accessible to people with slow modems and to the visually impaired who use audible reading machines. Thus, pages must load within a reasonable amount of time. Text cues for navigation must be available so the blind reading machines will announce them. And the number of links per page must be limited: prolific links are confusing, even more so if one can't see them, but has to listen to them being read.

The Home page is the most art-intense page of the whole site. Through some modems, it may download too slowly. While it is downloading, a link to a text-only Table of Contents is visible at the top of the page. This link is not visible if the page loads instaneously, as on a T1 connection. Visible or not, the link is the very first thing that the blind reading machines will announce, so that the visually impaired can immediately go to a navigation system they can easily use.

There are many other considerations for creating pages that the blind can access. For instance, text describes what is within the site, rather than just having visual links, which the machines can't decipher. Information is not given in columns, in the manner of newspapers, because the reading machines track across columns and turn intended sentences into gibberish. Such principles were incorporated into the Geography Department site. And although meeting these objectives limited some design possibilities, including animation, the webmaster believes it made for an even clearer and easier to navigate site for those with perfect vision and fast connections.

If any of this material is not accessible to you, please contact our department at (805) 893-2003 or webmaster@geog.ucsb.edu and we will provide alternatives.

Contact About Site

If you have questions or comments about this site, please contact the webmaster.