The image above is from a bit of research titled You Should Follow Me On Twitter by Dustin Curtis where he experimented with different was of phrasing the link on his site to his Twitter account. What’s interesting is the most successful phrase breaks accessibility guidelines yet seems to fit closely with how people both communicate and understand instructions.

I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of accessibility guidelines here. What I’m wondering about is the clash between an Internet full of structured, accessible and findable information and the conversational environment that produces that information.

Conversation is generally not structured and doesn’t make a lot of sense in logical terms. Our brains filter out the “ums” and garbled sentences and fill in the gaps. And beyond the style of conversation we have typos, illiterate text speak and so on. Should we discard this?

No answers yet, just a concern that while standards and accessibility are important for those who want to be found and heard, only monitoring that which fits those structures misses a whole swathe of conversation.

Or to put it another way, tools should fit the content rather than content being forced to fit the tools.