Tu Ngan Ka writes in Thanh Nien:

In 2006, Donny set up a [slideshow] where people can enjoy beautiful images of Vietnam and a lovely song called “Bonjour Vietnam” written by French songwriter Marc Lavoine and performed by Pham Quynh Anh, a Vietnamese Belgian.

Donny completed a course in digital arts and multimedia design in 2001 at La Salle University in Philadelphia in the US. He is now working at Vassar College in New York.

Designing websites allows him to work and improve his creativity.

Passionate about designing websites and fond of folk songs about Vietnamese villages, he set up visualgui.com in the hope of sharing his knowledge of website design as well as reviews of Vietnamese songs written in Vietnam and abroad.

“Bonjour Vietnam” is just one of the slideshows that Donny has compiled.

He’s amazed how popular his sites are amongst young people.

“Perhaps, we have a shared idea and deep love for Vietnam,” he said. “It is a process of sharing.”

Why it is so hard to look at the work of art itself and for once not injecting in your personal opinion? Focus on the aesthetic experience instead of practical experience. While many Americans find “A Few Gift For My Homeland” inspiring, some of my own Vietnamese folks find it disgracing. They claim it brings back horrible memories and gives a bad impression for Ngoc Lan as a performer. I just don’t get it. Why can’t people just listen to the voice, watch the motion, enjoy the music, and leave their opinions behind?

The same reaction with Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, why can’t viewers just look at the aesthetic quality and not to worried how it was created? Same thing goes with Eminem. People attacked his lyrics because he offended homosexuality and the way he talks about his mother. Why can’t we leave all that behind and just enjoy his flowing skills and the dope beats? Don’t worry about the artist intention and just concentrate on the aesthetic experience of the work.

I am just hoping that viewers enjoy “A Few Gifts For My Homeland” as a work of art and not to get offended by it. Anyway, if you would like to learn more about aesthetic experience, here is an interesting essay! Now, if you are too excited about aesthetic experience and really want to learn it, I highly recommend Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by Monroe C. Beardsley.

After reading Maximum Accessibility, Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone by John Slatin and Sharron Rush, I immediately feel a need to redesign/recode this site to be usable by people with disabilities. John Slatin shows readers how it feels to browse the web with a screen reader (JAWS) and the experience is extremely frustrating. If you think waiting for a Flash intro to load is bad, browsing with JAWS is even worse if the sites do not designed for accessibility. Even buying a book from Amazon is a horrible experience. One of the projects John pointed out; the Hirshhorn museum (designed by Second Story) is beautifully designed with a page on accessibility, which describes all the disability accommodations at the museum but the website itself is inaccessible.

Maximum Accessibility is effective in a way that after reading it, readers will always remember to consider people with disabilities on their next web project. I highly recommend this book for the theories presented but the tips and techniques are not too strong. If you are looking for a straight technical book on accessibility, you might want Joe Clark’s Building Accessibility Websites. With the combination of both books, you will be able to learn and understand both theory and technical which is invaluable.