Moved!

I have retired my blogspot blog in favor of a wordpress blog on my own server: Wendy Chisholm AND we have a blog for the book, Universal Design for Web Applications (O'Reilly Media, 2008) AND I've been twittering and flickring and all sorts of stuff. The one stop shop for everything Wendy is: friendfeed.com/wendyc. So, find me and let's chat. I look forward to hearing from you.

Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW, Scripting Enabled-Seattle

Matt and I are speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City on 17 September. I look forward to seeing familiar faces!

We submitted a panel to SXSW called, “Inclusive Universe 1.0.” I would love to get back to Austin to be involved in the cutting-edge dialogs that happen there, so please support our session. Only 4 more days to vote, so do it now!

I *really* wanted to attend Scripting Enabled in London next month, but won’t be able to. So, I asked Christian if we could continue the work in November here in Seattle. He agreed, so Adobe (Thanks to Matt), will be hosting Scripting Enabled - Seattle, 1 and 2 November. We’re looking for sponsors, volunteers, and attendees, so drop me a line if you’re interested. We’re wrapping up the book in the next few weeks, but should have registration and other relevant bits of information available soon. In the meantime, book your travel and prepare to have a blast hacking!

Please donate to help Nick move to New York

I received this through the DO-IT discussion list. Please consider a donation to help help Nick cover $3000 in moving expenses.

If you've never heard of Nick Dupree, a quick search on the web will bring up some interesting facts. Nick is a 26 year-old health care activist, writer, and former student from Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He also has an undiagnosed physical disability which necessitates the use of a motorized wheelchair and a ventilator to breathe at all times, and he requires 24 hour physical assistance to live.

In 2003, he made a major impact with his campaign to change Medicaid in Alabama by staying in the community and keeping himself and others out of nursing homes, dubbed "Nick's Crusade." (You can read more about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NickDupree

Unfortunately, though his campaign was officially successful, services and supports in Alabama remain abysmal. He receives 16-hours of nursing care per day, and his elderly grandmother covers the remaining hours. The nursing care has been so unreliable, that beginning in 2005 he was unable to continue attending college classes. There is no way to reach his goals of safe independent living in AL, despite his past role as a national advocate.

With his primary caregivers facing age and serious illness, and a brother with nearly identical medical needs, there just isn't enough help to go around. It's become more and more difficult and dangerous for Nick to remain at home. As his support network weakens, he faces institutionalization (or worse) unless he can live in a state with better services.

To that end, Nick launched a broad effort to relocate, and his network of friends and associates have helped him plan and execute a transition to the state of New York. By the end of August, Nick Dupree will enter a rehabilitation hospital, where he can finally begin to receive much-needed services. He can also begin to plan a transition to independent living in New York City, where services are more readily available to people with significant physical disabilities.

This is a vitally important move, with significant costs to match. A minimum of $3000 USD must be raised to cover necessary expenses of air fares for himself and his caregivers, transportation on the ground in New York, and temporary accommodations for care givers as he gets settled in. Donations are being coordinated through the Ophoenix Public Benefit Corporation, based in San Carlos, CA, a charitable organization dedicated to assisting patients with disabling medical conditions such as Nick's.

Please help us raise money to relocate Nick from Alabama to New York. To donate by credit card or use a PayPal account you can visit: http://www.ophoenix.org/donation_NickDupree.html

Your donation will automatically be credited to Nick's fund. To donate by check, make your check payable to "Ophoenix Public Benefit Corporation", and write "For Nick Dupree" on the check. Please mail your check to:

Ophoenix Public Benefit Corporation
774 Knoll Drive
San Carlos, CA, 94070

For more information, contact the Friends of Nick Dupree: friendsofnick@gmail.com

Slides

I've posted my slides from Tuesday's presentation on slideshare (inclusive universe). However, the flash that is embedded on the slideshare page is not accessible: the buttons are not labeled and the alt-text has been stripped from the PDF. I've sent a comment via their web site. Anyone know someone who works there? I'd love to talk to someone in person.

Therefore, here's a tagged PDF version (inclusive universe). Is anyone out there screaming at their monitor/speakers/braille display? I tested the PDF with Jaws and everything except page 9 seems to come through all right (see notes below). This is definitely an experiment - my first non-html slide set - so please let me know if you have any trouble accessing the slides. I'm more than happy to provide HTML, but do want to give this one a try.

Here's the text for slide 9:

This page intentionally left blank to illustrate the view of gmail to someone who is blind or not viewing the screen for some reason. At this point in my presentation, I did a quick demo of mobile speak on an htc shadow reading gmail...trying to further emphasize the importance of challenging your assumptions about your users.

today's stew

It's interesting that comments on my previous stew focused on types of toilets (although, I am happy to have learned about the toto 2000). I'm not sure if that means the idea of monetary incentives for accessible web design should be flushed...

This morning as I prepared for my commute to work (the walk to the basement of our house), I was thinking about the comments on Scoble's Will videoblogs be outlawed because of California’s accessibility laws? One of the concerns is limits on personal expression.

Having recently wrestled with making a slideset accessible, I can understand the pain and frustration. I don't have the hours to spend futzing with broken software. I need to get those slides accessible, publish them, and move on. As a working mother, I only have 24 hours per week to do my work - and that goes by far too quickly.

With the civil rights movement, the government literally held doors open to ensure integration in schools and on buses. For accessibility, it almost seems as if we are holding the doors open but forgetting to fix the ramps and railings that lead to them. Those renovations hold a cost that the civil rights movement did not have to contend with. Civil rights is overcoming attitudes; human rights/disability rights not only has to change attitudes but must lower physical barriers as well. That cost - in time or money - is a barrier. How do we remove that barrier? Is it up to the government? The community?

Getting back to personal expression, our laws say nothing about making private homes accessible. In a similar vein, personal web sites are not covered by law. Again, looking at civil rights, if you don't want to let a white person into your home, you don't have to but if you own a business, you must open your doors.

On the web, the line between personal site and public service blurs. I would argue that Scoble's site is not a personal site, he offers a public service - the information he disseminates is astounding (not only in quality but in quantity! :). But, who should pay for the captions of his videos? One of the values of what he is doing is the real-time interaction - streaming video from his phone.

When making information accessible, you can run into a lot of broken tools along the way - as I did yesterday (and let me pause here to apologize for using my blog as a venting receptacle. My purpose is to help make the world more accessible - bitching and moaning is not a constructive way to enter the dialog...I task myself with sending constructive feedback to folks working on OpenOffice and Acrobat and making sure the problems did not stem from my own ignorance). Unfortunately, the reality is that many tools are broken (or not as easy to use as they could be) and making information accessible is not always cheap and easy.

How do we make it cheap and easy? And this need for "cheap and easy" goes both ways. Not only do the barriers to information need to be lowered for people with disabilities - the typical screen reading or magnification software costs more than a desktop computer - the barriers to creating accessible information need to be lowered. So, who should assume the costs?

Eating my own dog food

Yesterday, I presented as part of a social media event and had an awesome time. The other speakers were stimulating and fun.

For the first time, instead of creating my slides in XHTML/javascript (I like Eric Meyer's S5), I used Open Office Impress. I figured, "why not." We're using Open Office for the book and it works pretty well. Plus, I noticed I could export my presentation in tagged PDF. I assumed I would happily and easily generate a tagged PDF and that would be that. So, on I trudged, delivering the file without testing it.

Today, I wanted to publish my slides on my website and on slideshare. So, I opened Acrobat to take a look at the accessibility of the PDF. I knew that the images would not have text equivalents so I was prepared to add those. I was not prepared for the following 4 hours of frustration...which is resulting not in an accessible PDF but in this blog post.

First off, Open Office Impress did not generate a tagged PDF despite me checking the checkbox. boo!

Secondly, when I generated XHTML instead of PDF, I lost all of the formatting and images. boo!

Thirdly, Acrobat only saves about 45 characters worth of each of the descriptions of the images despite giving me a text box that will allow me to enter at least 256 characters (I'm guessing because that's the limit in the HTML 4.01 spec). boo!

I learned a valuable lesson today: all future decks will start and end in XHTML.

cheap and easy?

At barcampSeattle, Bryan, Dylan, Matt, I, and several others started a dialog about helping people adopt accessible design practices. The summary of our discussion was, "make it cheap and easy." Last week, inspired by a comment from tantek, the dialog continued on twitter. We compared accessible design to green/environmentally-friendly design....and doughnuts. :)

I've been working on a mental stew with the following ingredients:

• "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" about one family's year-long localvore experiement - eating foods raised by themselves or neighbors and minimizing the cost of fuel used to produce and consume the foods they eat.
• "Vegetable Gardening West of the Cascades" about the benefits of gardening in the Seattle area and how we could eat fresh veggies from our gardens year-round...assuming climate change doesn't shift our winter temperatures too many degrees.
• We're preparing to paint the outside of our house and I've been researching the greenest option - paint or stain. Which lasts longer? What are the effects on the environment? Where are the materials produced and how much fuel will it take to ship to our painter? The costs and products are not quite there yet, which is frustrating for me as a consumer.
• My son is toilet training which means many more flushes of our toilets. We received the water bill yesterday and are consuming noticebly more gallons of water *per day.* What if we only had so much water in a cistern or a well and couldn't just pull more from the city? When will I be able to view our water supply like I do our bank account? When we overdraw, it has to come from somewhere.
• I'm co-writing a book on Universal Design of web applications and I've been tearing apart, challenging, and reconstructing my knowledge about accessibility, disability studies, culture, and web technologies.

<stream-of-consciousness>
As a consumer, I *want* to do the green thing. I want to buy efficient toilets and use the least toxic paint. I am driven by making the world a better place, not only for myself, but for my son. What holds me back are costs and fears. The fears are: How long will the water-based paints last? Will they protect my house as well as paints with pest/herbicides? In Seattle, where there is so much water on wood, this is a big question. The costs are: Water-based paints costs almost twice per gallon than latex paints. Stains need to be reapplied more often. Then, there's what I prefer. I like the way paint looks.

I am trying to understand the point of view of designers and developers who have not whole-heartedly adopted web standards and accessibility. I think they have similar struggles with fears and costs. I believe that most people want to do the right thing but they aren't sure they know how, don't have the time to find out, and fear the costs.

If I were to put in more efficient toilets, the city of Seattle would give me a rebate. I assume the reasoning by The City of Seattle goes something like: We're all in this together, so if more people save water there will be more water for all of us. I guess I get my own tax dollars back when I contribute to the greater good.

While I think there are plenty of reasons to make your sites accessible, perhaps monetary incentives would help. I don't know where we'd get the funding, but imagine if you added appropriate alt-text to all of the images on your site, you could get a rebate. What do you think? Would it work? If we could raise the money, is there a better way to spend it (like buying technology for people with disabilities)? do you have other ideas to make accessible design "cheap and easy?" Is that the right target? Other thoughts?
</stream-of-consciousness>

flickr experiment

Testing for text
Originally uploaded by anneke boudreau

The book...in process. This is a screen shot taken with my phone then emailed to flickr. I wanted to see what they would do with the text.

First, I edited the title of the photo on my phone from random text (imgnnn) to "Testing" then I created an email with "Testing for text" as the subject and "Will this text show as description?" in the body. Flickr used the email subject as the title of the photo and the body as description. Cool!

On the flickr page for this photo, the actual alt is null. How do you folks feel about that? Since the title is a good equivalent, does the image itself need an equivalent in the alt attribute? I certainly want an alt present on the image element - even if it is null - to indicate that it has been considered. I could repeat the title as the alt value, but that would be redundant. Too bad there isn't a way to associate the heading with the image to indicate they create a single semantic unit, but then again, this whole page is metadata for this image...in a sense the whole page is a single semantic unit.

If you all had this debate while I've been "away," please point me to the archives. Thanks!

Event: Perspectives on Social Media

I'm speaking at an event at zaaz next week that ought to be a lot of fun. Here's the line-up:

"Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond" - Brian Fling, Flingmedia http://www.flingmedia.com/

"Money, Media, and Your Mom's Peach Cobbler - Social Media Marketing Done Right" - Justin Marshall, ZAAZ www.zaaz.com"

Single Athletic Female seeking Single Slender Male - The marriage of social media and metadata"-Samantha Starmer, REI http://www.rei.com/

"Slow Community" - Nancy White, Full Circle Associates http://www.fullcirc.com/

"Inclusive Universe 1.0 - Integrating Universal Design into Social Apps" - Wendy Chisholm

More information at: You're Invited: Social Media Event at ZAAZ Seattle July 8th.

Favorite Harriet McBryde Johnson quotes

My copy of "too late to die young" has several bent pages with underlined passages. Here are a couple of my favorites.

"We need to confront the life-killing stereotype that says we're all about suffering. We need to bear witness to our pleasures."

About a trip to Cuba, "It's the old socialist formula, 'From each according to ability, to each according to need,' played out one to one. It's hard to pin down, but I get the feeling that being a crip is no big deal here. People talk to me. On a family trip to Mexico, people were afraid to look at me; they sometimes made the sign of the cross, my mother helpfully explained, to protect themselves against the evil eye. In Paris, cabs wouldn't stop. Even in Charleston, where I am so much at home, people tend to address my able-bodied companions. In Havana, I'm a person."

Not sure where this one is from, but it is quoted in the Inclusion Daily Express story,
"The presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life."

"the float"

At lunch last Friday, I learned about "the float." Today, I found this article, What PayPal does with your money that says, "The money-transfer service earns interest on funds in its custody" and describes how other folks are kind of miffed at paypal. Cool. I'm not alone.

Actually, now that it's been explained to me, I'm not miffed anymore. Now, I'm just puzzled. Why couldn't the customer service folks tell me about the float?

service rep: "Listen, chick, you get this service for free. In order keep it free, we need to accrue some interest. You signed an agreement that said your money could be combined with others and blah blah blah."

Done and done.

another dumb user - me

I am schooled in the ways of human factors. I know that if your user feels dumb, there is probably something wrong with your system. I know that you should give your user a way to back out of a mistake. I know that most of the "user errors" that cause harm could have been prevented by better design.

I feel dumb.

Here's my situation: Yesterday, I tried to transfer money from my checking account to my paypal account. It didn't show up. I poked around and finally noticed the "details" link on the transaction and learned it was going to take 3-5 business days to transfer the money. That wasn't what I had in mind. I searched for a way to cancel the transaction. No dice.

I called my bank. "Nothing we can do."

I called paypal. "It takes 3-5 business days. Nothing we can do."
me: "Why does it take 3-5 business days?"
service rep: "It takes 3-5 business days. Nothing we can do."
me: "May I talk to your supervisor?"
service rep: "Sure. But she'll tell you the same thing."
me: "Ok. I'd like to hear it from someone else."
service rep's supervisor: "3-5 business days. Nothing we can do. It's a process. If you want to complain you can print this form and mail it in."
me: "You are an online service and you want me to print and mail something?"
service rep's supervisor: "You could email service@paypal.com"
me: "Right. That sounds really helpful. Thanks."

I was kind of huffy at this point and sent out a couple tweets. Then, here's where I feel really dumb: On the "Add funds by electronic transfer" page in paypal, just above the drop-down and text entry field is this line, "It takes 3-5 business days to electronically transfer funds from your bank account to your PayPal account."

Ok. You told me. But, I missed it. I'm dumb. And that mistake will cost me 6-10 days without access to my money while it sits in limbo to transfer from my bank to paypal then more limbo when I transfer it back to my bank account.

I get it. Dumb. But, how is it that when I buy my groceries down the road the transaction shows up in my online checking account before I'm home? How is it that when I pay my bills online, the payment is taken out of my account the day that I say I want it taken out of my account and it doesn't take 3-5 business days for the company I'm paying to receive the payment? How is it that if I make an error in paying someone, I can call my bank and say, "don't let that one go through?"

Ideally, I'd like a way to stop a process and don't understand why paypal can't stop a process that they initiate. (Could someone explain that one to me?)

At a minimum, could they give me some sort of alert message after I click, "submit" that says, "Are you sure? Are you really really sure? Go back and read the terms, dummy."

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project

Would you like your site reviewed for web accessibility?

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness. Our goal is to raise $25,000 for that purpose.

I'm volunteering my time. How about you?

Spread the word.

jollification

Dictionary.com Word of the Day - jollification: merrymaking; revelry.

Thank you

Here are a few brief glimpses of memories; they don't do justice to the awesomeness that is John Slatin.

I went to dinner with Anna and John then we went to Body Choir. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was blown away. At first, I felt a little awkward, but I started moving to the music then realized that I was connecting with people without words. Through movement, eye contact, I was interacting with people in ways I never had before. In the car afterwards, I had many questions and we had a wonderful discussion about intimacy - something I've always struggled with. That was a pinnacle discussion for me - one that caused me to question how I think. I'm still growing as a result of that discussion and still have further to grow. As I've read Leukemia Letters over the last 2 years and about all the people surrounding Anna and John, I see that the wisdom and the openness we talked about that night is the strength behind the love and the connections.

June 2005: We were in Brussels for a WCAG WG face-to-face meeting that was to start the following day. John and I were sitting on a bench in a park, Dillon at our feet. I had told family and a couple friends that I was two months pregnant and decided to share the news with John. I had slept every afternoon for the two weeks leading up to the trip and was anxious about how I would manage 8-12 hour days in meetings. "I can't leave the meetings every afternoon. What will I do?" He replied, "If you need to leave, then do it. If people ask, then tell them." I could always count on John for calm and clarity. I could talk with him about things that I couldn't with other people. I didn't know it at the time - but we were both tired. John would return home from that trip and begin the first of many hospital stays.

I wish I could be in Austin this weekend. I want to be part of the energy of the amazing people that surround John and Anna. You both have been influential with your wisdom and your love, your energy and your calm. Thank you. I love you.

irony

Back in the day, Java was supposed to be our "write once, run anywhere" solution. Today, all those beans live on the server handling service calls from other "write once, run anywhere" RIAs. All that promise of fame and glory and they end up hiding in the background. Poor beans. They just weren't flashy enough. heh.

Go with the flow

Throughout my programming career, I have learned (and forgotten) Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java...not to mention all of the various application-specific scripting languages that I can't even remember the names of...but, throughout all that learning and forgetting, one thing remains constant: flow diagrams. Seeing them again this morning is like rediscovering that cozy old blanket from college.

Super Silence

Pepsi ad to give Super Bowl viewers a moment of silence

The pregame advertisement features a joke that originates from the deaf community and will play out on screen over 60 seconds of total silence, a veritable eternity when it comes to the noisiness of Super Bowl ads.

The joke goes like this: Two guys are driving to their friend Bob's house to watch the Super Bowl. Once they get to Bob's street, neither knows which house is his. They sit in the car, arguing, until one of them has an idea. He starts laying on the horn, and one by one, the houses light up and dogs start barking.

One house stays dark: It's Bob's.

Pepsi worked with National Association of the Deaf on this commercial and will sponsor captioning of the Super Bowl. The commercial came about because of an employee's interest that stemmed from attending a church where the services are held in ASL - he is not deaf. Many people volunteered their services to make the commercial happen and it includes two Pepsi employees who are deaf.

It's super exciting to see awareness raised in a humorous way in such a large venue! I really hope it makes people stop, listen, and think.

You can watch the commercial online (but don't press the "play" button, select the commercial - to the right). While I applaud their effort to raise awareness about accessibility and am very excited about their work, their web site is not accessible. Too bad.

Hey, Pepsi! Please add labels to each of the buttons in the Flash app. Thanks!

Haptic Tattoo

I love tattoos. I love inclusion. I love futuristic ideas.

The haptic tattoo is all three.

Inspired by BBC's Technologies on the rise in 2008

Each time I see predictions for new technologies, I wonder how long it will be until they are accessible. Perhaps 2008 will be better than previous years - let's take a look at the technologies listed in the BBC's Technologies on the rise in 2008 and make some accessibility predictions for the upcoming year.

THE WEB TO GO

"Google announced its Gears application whilst Adobe launched Air and Microsoft released Silverlight." I haven't looked at Gears and Air, but there is hope that they will be accessible (good folks work at both companies) but SilverLight is an accessibility disappointment. Let's hope version 2 straightens things out.

Accessibility prediction: Accessibility will be incorporated into each technology but the majority of developers won't use accessibility features. Development tools won't check for accessibility issues so developers won't know or think to address them.

What can you do? Put ATAG and WCAG into developers' hands.

ULTRA MOBILE PCs

"...towards the end of 2007 a series of new products started to hit shelves. The most talked about was the Asus EEE, a sub-£200 laptop about the size of a hardback book."

The EEE runs Linux - while I've not played with LSR or GNOME accessibility, at least there is an open source movement.

"Apple is even rumoured to be launching ultra-thin Macbooks using flash in 2008." - assuming that the universal access features of leopard are all that apple claims they are, the future of the ultra mobile pc looks bright.

Accessibility prediction: Ultra mobile pcs will be an inexpensive platform for the replacement to mobile assistive technologies and augmentative communication devices that currently cost hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars.

IPTV

More homes have broadband connections and speeds are increasing, "As a result, more and more internet protocol television services are being launched." I hope currently captioned programs will continue to be, but one look at YouTube -with its thousands of hours of uncaptioned video - and I shake in my boots. Although, there is hope: CNET is captioning all of its programs.

Accessibility prediction: Thousands more hours of uncaptioned video and few described videos.

What can you do? Learn about captioning services and tools and incorporate captioning into your workflow. Refer to WCAG 2.0 Related Resources for Captions and WCAG 2.0 Related Resources for Audio Description.

WIMAX

No issues that I'm aware of.

Accessibility prediction: None that I can think of. Any ideas? Matt says, "location-based services" and pointed me to Andrew WiMAX Location Information Server. Sweet! Wonder what the Geeze has to say about that.

MOBILE VOIP

Accessibility prediction: As long as the interface is accessible, should be awesome. I assume people with hearing loss or who are deaf will continue to chat and text. Any issues here that I'm not aware of?

What are your predictions for 2008?