The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility

The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

The so-called "McQuary limit" for signatures says this:

http://www.answers.com/topic/mcquary-limit-computer-jargon

<quote>
[from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see warlording.] 4 lines of 
at most 80 characters each, sometimes still cited on Usenet as the maximum 
acceptable size of a sig block. Before the great bandwidth explosion of the 
early 1990s, long sigs actually cost people running Usenet servers significant 
amounts of money. Nowadays social pressure against long sigs is intended to 
avoid waste of human attention rather than machine bandwidth. Accordingly, the 
McQuary limit should be considered a rule of thumb rather than a hard limit; 
it's best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and distracting. See also 
warlording. 
</quote>

Now some people have taken the rule to its letter and put signatures only 
under 4 lines. For example a typical signature (now quite old) by Hackers-IL's 
Nadav Har'El is:

<quote>
Nadav Har'El                        |         Monday, Sep 6 2004, 20 Elul 5764
nyh@math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |May you live as long as you want - and
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |never want as long as you live.
</quote>

I've been thinking that maybe such two-column and ASCII-art-bases signature is 
not very accessible to people using screen-readers and/or Braille-devices 
(e.g: people who are blind or otherwise sight-disabled.) and possibly has 
other accessibility issues. And I've seen much worse signatures in the olden 
days of Usenet.

Now, the format of my signature block is:

<block>
[Name]    [Homepage URL]
[Self-interetst resource that may be of Interest one line - now randomised ]
[Empty Line]
[Amusing quote - usually by myself or a friend - now also randomised.]
[Empty Line]
Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
</block>

I think this is the most accessible solution, and the signature is still not 
very long. I originally had the contact-me URL there as well, but figured out 
that people can always find it on my home site.

I'd like to ask the opinion of people on this list about the accessibility 
issues of this.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

P.S: according to https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/shlomif , I have written well 
over 100K lines of open-source source code to allow me to add 10 lines to my 
signature, above 4 lines, though I'm using much less than 14 lines for a 
signature at the moment.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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When a FLOSS developer says they will work on something, he or she means 
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Re: The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility

[Christopher Brannon]

Shlomi Fish <shlomif@iglu.org.il> writes:

> I've been thinking that maybe such two-column and ASCII-art-bases signature is 
> not very accessible to people using screen-readers and/or Braille-devices 

I took about 30 seconds to completely digest it.  I use speech.
  Not bad, really.
The sig at the end of your message is perfectly readable, though.

Signatures have never bothered me, either way.  If I'm going to
complain about email practices, I'd rather complain about overquoting.
I've seen people reply to messages, where the reply contains two lines
of text, with the entire thread quoted at the bottom.
Seriously, some replies have included 5 or 10 quoted messages.
It seems to have been popularized by Microsoft Outhouse,
so I've taken to calling it "outhouse-quoting".
That's not fair, though, because I've seen it done in mutt and
other email clients.  It's a combination of top-posting and a failure to
edit the quoted text.

-- Chris

--
Website: http://the-brannons.com

Re: The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Chris,

On Friday 18 Mar 2011 14:36:35 Christopher Brannon wrote:
> Shlomi Fish <shlomif@iglu.org.il> writes:
> > I've been thinking that maybe such two-column and ASCII-art-bases
> > signature is not very accessible to people using screen-readers and/or
> > Braille-devices
> 
> I took about 30 seconds to completely digest it.  I use speech.
>   Not bad, really.

Does not sound too good.

> The sig at the end of your message is perfectly readable, though.
> 

Nice, thanks.

> Signatures have never bothered me, either way.  If I'm going to
> complain about email practices, I'd rather complain about overquoting.
> I've seen people reply to messages, where the reply contains two lines
> of text, with the entire thread quoted at the bottom.

Yes.

> Seriously, some replies have included 5 or 10 quoted messages.
> It seems to have been popularized by Microsoft Outhouse,
> so I've taken to calling it "outhouse-quoting".

"Outhouse", heh. I've seen it called "Microsoft Lookout" at times, although 
there's a search engine for MS Outlook called that. See:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/24.html 

> That's not fair, though, because I've seen it done in mutt and
> other email clients.  It's a combination of top-posting and a failure to
> edit the quoted text.

Yes, right. Someone I know (who is BCCed to this message and is deaf), who 
used to bottom-post complained, that when he uses his mobile phone to read E-
mail, he needs to scroll past the quoted texts in bottom-posted E-mails and as 
a result now prefers top-posting E-mails. I think it's a UI problem of the 
mobile phone E-mail applications, which as noted in the book "The Design of 
Everyday Things" [DOET] are repeating the same usability mistakes that 
happened in previous generations of devices (e.g: Web-based user-interfaces, 
GUIs, terminal-based UIs, etc.). For example, even a premium WordPress.com 
account suffers from some usability problems (such as no way to allow for 
preview for comments) that are non-existent even in the gratis accounts of 
livejournal.com .

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[DOET] :
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0385267746

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Funny Anti-Terrorism Story - http://shlom.in/enemy

Logic sucks. Morality sucks. Reality sucks. Deal with it!

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Re: The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility

[Geoff Shang]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote:

>> I took about 30 seconds to completely digest it.  I use speech.
>>   Not bad, really.
>
> Does not sound too good.

Don't forget to factor in the time actually needed to read it.  Depending 
on the mode of output (speech or Braille), and in the case of speech, the 
speed of the speech output, this coud amount to a significant portion of 
those 30 seconds.

IN my experience, collumnised signatures don't usually cause too much 
trouble.  If I really want a specific bit of info from a signature, I'll 
be cursoring through it anyway.

ASCII art is another matter.  If say the charactors used are spoken by a 
speech synthesiser, they can get rather annoying or at least hinder 
comprehention of the text.

Geoff.