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Sara Cammeresi

Reworking our charter —

I am going to refrain from responding to Mr Brown's recent comment for multiple reasons, the following included.

Discussions of history have never fully satisfied me because the depth of my knowledge of the subject is less than that of many other people who I know. For this reason, I am going to refrain from posting on this topic in the future. I doubt anyone came here to read about history, but if you like the subject, I recommend you consult the blogs of people more versed in it such as Mr Dalton, Mr Den Beste, or The Noumenon. (I have just this evening met with The Noumenon in person and beseeched and entreated him to return to the blogosphere.)

To put it positively, I am going to refocus my attention on matters of which I have considerably more knowledge, and the first of these posts will be forthcoming presently.

posted by Sid at 08.43 / 655     [ Comments: 1 ]

Accessibility as a selfish goal —

From March, I have been employed at the University of Illinois's Department of Rehabilitation and Educational Services, and one of the projects on which I have worked, and on which I will resume working once I finish a web development thing, is a wizard for PowerPoint and Word which converts documents into accessible web versions. When people talk about accessibility in the context of computers, they mostly mean usable from the standpoint of people who are blind or low-vision, but they also consider people with motor impairments. There are a number of goals driving this project, but the main idea is that once you get a document into HTML, any user can access it using the technology, including assistive technologies, which makes the most sense for him.

One could easily make accessibility of computer systems an altruistic goal, but I think it is a selfish goal for which to aim because it benefits more than just people with disabilities. In terms of web content, accessibility means separating the information contained in a web page from how that information is presented. If you want to help out blind users, a blind user viewing a web page can't see images, so you provide alt text which describes the image. He also can't see colour, so you shouldn't rely solely on colour to convey information. He wants tables to contain tabular information and blockquote tags to contains quotes, not to be used for layout, and so on. (See my film development page for an example of an accessible table.) But this kind of web page design benefits more than just blind users; as technology becomes more prevalent in our lives, a normal person might find himself in a situation where he is effectively disabled and thus must depend more on semantic markup like paragraph and list tags and less on the style of particular bits of text to gain information.

Take, for example, my Hiptop. On my Hiptop, when I browse the web, I usually have images turned off to reduce clutter on the small screen, and due to the device's black-and-white screen, I don't see colour. Observe that this, in many aspects, turns me into a blind user; if some aspect of a web page has to be seen in red to make sense, I won't get that information.

Let's disable me even more. Imagine a future wearable computer that I can fit into my pocket that has a wireless Internet connection, speech synthesis software, an earphone for output, and a four- or six-button wired remote control for input. With this device, I can read web pages while jogging, driving, walking through the mall, and on my train ride into work. Or rather, I can read web pages if they are accessible to people who are blind since even though my eyes may work fine, I can't see the web pages using this device, and it will additionally help if the pages are accessible to people with motor impairments since if I already know the link on which I want to click, I'd like to be able to skip over groups of links at a time to reduce the amount of button pressing I have to do).

This kind of web page design requires focussing on information rather than fancy layout, which excites me because I've always been a fan of information over layout, as you can no doubt tell from the relatively plain format of my blog and of my web page. As time goes on, I find myself going more and more in this direction, caring more about information and less about things being gratuitously flashy. (As a data point, my first web page in 1996 used frames...shudder.) If the way in which you create web content is information-centric, making your web pages accessible is simply a matter of providing more information to the user by way of proper HTML, not dumbing down your web pages in any way. This additional information has the potential to be useful, and I believe that it will be useful with future technologies, for people without any disabilities at all. It's not about accessibility as such, it's about presenting information in a way such that it is viewable in multiple ways. (I hesitate to add that there are some ways in which you can seek more accessibility at the cost of compromising presentation, but technology has the capability to work around those issues, and I refuse to dumb down my pages, placing that onus on technology.)

When I first entered the employ of the Rehab Centre this spring, I knew that people who were blind and so on used computers, but I was relatively uninformed about the specifics of how that worked, and it turns out that technology makes it possible for them to use computers in most of the ways normal people do. Seeing a blind person use a computer with a screen reader installed, reading text to him so rapidly that I literally cannot understand a single word has reinforced my view that information should come first in web pages (more generally, that form must follow function) not because disabled people have a right to read my blog in the format of their choosing, but because I see the potential benefit of information-based design of systems for use by people whose faculties are fully functioning.

For more information on accessibility guidelines for web designers, click the WAI button at the bottom of this page.

posted by Sid at 08.49 / 659     [ Comments: 2 ]

Global warming, how do we love thee —

The BBC report today that greater than 2,500 people in England and Wales died in the past week due to health conditions brought on by the cold and damp, i.e. because they couldn't afford to heat their homes. This is a good time to thank scientific progress and carbon dioxide emissions for global warming, since without a warmer environment, even more British pensioners would have bitten it.

This comes just two months on from an elderly couple in Salterton Road, Tooting being found dead in their home, in a decomposed state, partially due to the fact their gas service had been cut off due to nonpayment. Whiners shortly stepped up to the plate, and complained that British Gas should have informed the social services, to which the company rejoined that they were forbidden from doing so under the Data Protection Act 1998. The Health Minister further retorted:

The suspicion that somebody is vulnerable and perhaps could do with a visit from social services does not seem to me to be a protectable piece of information under the Act. My instinct is they could have told social services they were worried [the Minister said].

That's very nice and good, Mr Minister, but instincts don't carry very far in courts of law. On a cursory reading of the Act, I find it very plausible that today's courts would construe this proposed conveyance of information and just about anything else as undue distress. In other news, an inquest discovered some £1,400 in the elderly couple's home. (The unpaid bill was some £140.)

posted by Sid at 09.24 / 684     [ Comments: 0 ]

Holidays —

I shall be on holiday 24-28 December, although I may blog remotely. First, a motor ride to Indianapolis, then an aeroplane ride to Houston, the latter of which I am sure I will thoroughly enjoy. Happy Christmas to all.

posted by Sid at 12.15 / 802     [ Comments: 0 ]