How not to assault your users

04/10/2008

As if life wasn't hard enough, some lowlife, scumbag griefers have taken to deliberate assaults on people who suffer from both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epilepsy.

Wired magazine reported last month: "Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users"

"The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs."

Hopefully these dirtbags will be found and prosecuted somehow, but in the meantime their heinous actions have raised awareness of a potential problem with websites: your nifty new website effect could cause seizures in people, and you can be held accountable for it.

So as a public service, we've released a relevant tip from Jeremy Sydik's book, Design Accessible Web Sites 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms The tip It's Not Polite to Flash The Audience is now available for free for your reading pleasure. Please take a look.

Suing your best customers, as the RIAA is so fond of, is bad enough. But physically assaulting them is even worse!