The NoPity Shirts Design Philosophy

Here are some of my comments and thoughts about the philosophy and ethos that is behind the way that I design the gear available at NoPity Shirts, and the website itself. I hope this page helps you to understand my thinking a little better ...

Disability-Friendly Merchandise Is Essential

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Can you make a regular T-shirt more or less disability-friendly? In my opinion and experience: Yes!

The shirts and other apparel available at NoPity Shirts all have the same slogans on the back and on the front. Yes, this means that some of the jokes that depend on the back/front of the T-Shirt for their merit are lost, but if you are using a wheelchair, a trolley, or a stretcher to get around, then these shirts are pretty useless anyway because one side of you is always covered up.

As a person who's bedridden and forced to permanently lie on my back, I am tired of finding clothes where I love the slogan, but discovered that it was only available on the back of the shirt, where nobody could ever see it except when they were dressing me!

This lead to me thinking of other circumstances, most commonly a wheelchair user, where people's backs are partially or fully obscured. Then I started to think of yet more situations where somebody's front could be obscured, for example a trolley user who is lying on their stomach all day, or somebody using a standing frame. This lead to a firm policy at NoPity Shirts that all shirts would be identical on both sides, thereby removing a disabling trend in apparel design.

A Disability Friendly Shop Is Essential

The first thing about a shop for people with disabilities, is that it must be as disability-friendly as is humanly possible. Our design is based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - the ones written by the guys who are in charge of the web, as far as anybody could be said to be "in charge" of the web, anyway!

Web Content Accessibility features that we use at NoPity Shirts include:

Using fully standards-compliant and accessible HTML, and using fully standards-compliant CSS to separate form from content. Ignoring the jargon, that means that these pages - as far as possible - should work right on any browser and on any operating system (Windows, Mac, etc.) and with any size screen. So whether you're using Internet Explorer on your standard Windows XP system, or you're using FireFox on your Linux system, or something else entirely, it should still work.

These same features mean you can change the look of the site by using your own cascading style sheets, if you need to. You can also easily change the text size because we have used relative, not absolute, text sizes in all code.

For all the pictures of shirts and for most other graphics at NoPity Shirts, we use ALT tags, LONGDESC tags, and [D]-links. These tags and links contain different descriptions of the shirt or graphic. Usually, this means that for navigational images (like the green arrows at the bottom of many pages), the description is of what will happen if you follow the link. For decorative images like the shirts, the description simply describes the image. This is for the convenience of those who are blind or have vision impairments, and anybody else who is prevented from viewing and taking in the pictures of our shirts fully for whatever reason - be it a disability, a lack of appropriate technology, or something else.

We have Access Keys defined and in use on each page, and the first thing on every page is a visible 'Jump To Content' link. These should help those who navigate around using the keyboard, as well as anybody who needs an easy way to skip straight to the content of each page and to jump between specific pages within this site.

To help those with language or cognitive problems, we have tried to define acronyms and abbreviations where possible using ACRONYM and ABBR tags.

Lastly, we keep a standard layout between all pages on the NoPity Shirts website, as far as is possible and sensible to do so. For example, all shirt pages follow the same layout, having a picture of the shirt at the top, then the shirt description, and s on. Most of the other pages continue a similar layout by using many elements which are used on the shirt pages. This makes the site easier to navigate as well as giving it a unified look-and-feel so if you exit the site, it's immediately obvious that you have.

If you have any suggestions as to how I could make the shops more accessible to everybody, and especially to people with a disability, please do not hesitate to email me or leave a public comment which I'll read.

No Cows Are Sacred

Some of these shirts are meant to be read in a rather ironic tone, eg "Keep watching ... I might do a trick!" and the one about "Who defined normal?". Please laugh along with me, rather than being offended that another crip would design shirts like this! I believe that nothing is so sacred it can't be joked about (yes, I have a very black sense of humour at times!) and that all possible jokes should be written down somewhere ... in this case, that often means I write it on a shirt.

NoPity Shirts tries to feed people's senses of humour by providing really funny disability shirts that break down the "us" and "them" stereotyping ... We really believe that if you can laugh along with somebody - even if it's just about a corny T-Shirt slogan - then you can start to be their equal, and their friend.

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