Steve Lee :: Blog

Funeeee

AbilityNet list some more blogs, many by presenters.

My report for Mozilla is also available. 

Becta have put out an invitation to tender to a School Open Source Project.

"Becta wishes to ensure that schools are aware of and can access the
wide variety of open source software in the marketplace.  To achieve
this it recognises that they must be supported in its awareness,
adoption, deployment, use and ongoing development.  In order to aid
this we are commissioning a project to:

1.  Support a sustainable and significant community of schools who use
and develop open source products by April 2010; and

2. Provide schools specific content development on open source
implementations. "

(the html edit for quoting is crashing)

This follows a similar project by JISC in FE and HE and needless to say the schoolforge.org.uk comunity are getting excited and are discussing how to make the most of this.

Marco Zehe, Accessibility QA Mozilla, makes a case for accepting AJAX in WEB 2.0 and using WAI ARIA as the mechanism to make it accessible.

John Resig provides a nice little introduction to ARIA and what you can do with it right now.

David Humphrey pointed out this great blow-by-blow account of developing with Mozilla's XULRunner by Richard Crowley of Flickr. It includes a good rational for using XULRunner.

Usability expert Jakob Neilson has an written interesting piece on web access for those is their middle years, and also touches on the needs of senior citizens.

Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.

He concludes:

I do have two actionable conclusions for you:

• When doing user testing, make sure to include test participants across the entire age range you're targeting.
• Don't believe everything your 25-year old Web designers tell you about "what's easy" — especially if your target audience is 50-year-old corporate managers.

 

A couple of years back I became excited about the social and life improving possibilities that Web 2.0, or the Read-Write web offers people with disabilities. When writing a summary of how this development of the web could be used for e-learning with Miles Berry for schoolforge.org.uk, it became clear that the dynamic nature of technologies such as AJAX and dynamic scripted widgets was creating an accessibility challenge. (the report subsequently appeared in Terry Freedman's 'Coming of Age' book). If basic static web document accessibility was being ignored by the majority of site authors what would happen with the new technical challenges offered by these features.

At that time I was not aware of work on W3C WAI-ARIA standard to allow Assitive Technologies to understand these dynamic ways of manipulating web documents, or the work to include it in Firefox 1.5 (released later that year), so I wrote a concerned article in Ability Magazine (UK), hoping to spread awareness. Things have improved a lot since then with ARIA being supported by many Open Source a11y projects including Firefox, NVDA, ORCA, Dojo and Google reader along with support being added to IE 8 Beta 1, Opera and Jaws amongst others. But there is still a great need to spread the word to educate developers and editors about the tools and techniques that ensure the new dynamic pages and widgets that underlie web application and social software are usable by all.

That's a long and rather self indulgent lead-up to introducing the Accessibility 2.0 conference organised by Ability Net to provide a forum for disseminating information about web 2.0 accessibility. Frank Hecker kindly approved Mozilla Foundation sponsorship and I was glad to attend as a Mozilla representative and also flying the flag for Open Source accessibility in general.

Kath Moonan did a fantastic job of organising the first UK web a11y conference which had about 200 attendees. She was patient with my late request to be allowed to 'sell my wares' and in the end the Firefox 3.0 a11y features flier that Frank and Marco wrote for CSUN and some swag made it into the goody bags. I also blagged a few minutes to describe Mozilla's a11y work with Firefox and Open Source accessibility work in general.

Kath had given me the go-ahead to speak on the understanding that I kept it very brief, but as the day drew to a close I thought I had been forgotten, despite the couple of reminder requests I made.  Then, as the very last part of proceedings (before the 'thank yous' and Kath's amusing 'Oscar' speech), Julie Howell, chair of the panel, gave me my chance. Someone had asked the panel about Open Source screen readers to make affordable the testing of their initial forays into making their site accessible as well as using using Ajax.  The Panel members only mentioned Thunder (which is free rather than Open Source), so I fairly jumped up and down waving my hand, desperate to speak. I finally got a chance to introduce NVDA and Orca and suggested he joined the community for ideas on how to test with a screen reader in addition to getting real user testing that the panel rightly recommended as the best approach. I also explained how ARIA can be explored now for free using these screen readers along with Firefox and how Dojo and Google Reader could be used. Finally I described Mozilla's role as 'defenders of the Open Web' and funders of open a11y. Finally I requested they they joined the community and  plugged accessfirefox.org as a source of information on end user a11y features of Firefox. So all-in-all I feel I got the key messages across if in a bit of a rush and a sweat after several re-writes of what I intended to say.

Afterwards Steve Faulkner introduced himself and we spoke briefly about his work and membership of the W3C PFWG who created ARIA, as well as Charles Chen and David Bolter's ARIA work. I also chatted to a web developer, Robin, who is a Firefox nightly user, along with Ubuntu.

The excellent speakers work in a variety of web accessibility fields and presented a selection of themes in the friendly atmosphere. I was pleased that at least 3 mentioned Firefox and Mozilla technologies including  XUL/XBL as well as ARIA. Orca also got a mention. Jeremy Keith mentioned the 'Burning Fox of Fire' in his keynote while both Steve Faulkner, Christian Heilmann gave Firefox a nod. Steve also mentioned Firebug, the excellent Firefox web debugging add on, with features useful for Ajax. Ian Forrester mentioned both Songbird and Joost and described the Joost stack including Mozilla's XBL and XUL as giving excellent accessibility (these make up XULRunner, the Mozilla platform, on which Songbird and Joost are/where built).

The other Firefox related detail was that Josetta Garcia was running the O'Reilly bookstall and the 'Programming Firefox' book was there at 35% discount. This book is getting a bit long in the tooth now but there only a few such books (I can think of 3). This got me thinking that it would be good to have an book on Open Source accessibility with Firefox and that I might consider writing one. I also like the idea of a collaborative effort, like 'Open Sources'.

Slides, audio and transcripts of the presentations should be available soon so I'll give a brief summary of what each speaker covered. My photos completely fail to impress but thankfully there are others on Flickr, many by Christian (codepo8).

Robin Christopherson: of Ability Net kicked off the proceedings as MC. Robin has been with Ability Net since they formed through the merger of 2 other organisations.

Jeremy Keith: gave a hight level talk on why data should be kept open, starting in the year 1066 and pushing for HTML and other simple, open, accessible formats. He later said to me that he had laid in on really thick, but I think that is needed sometimes. He also spoke of how developers need to use PUT and POST correctly, something I whole heartedly agree with, being fed up with URL GETs resetting my account without so much as a button.

Steve Faulkener: gave the most technical talk and as expected covered many of the Open Source projects and ARIA. He showed his ARIA examples as well as other accessible dynamic 'applications'. He used Twitter's 'number of characters left' countdown as an example of what is bad and what could be done better with ARIA. He had a nice slide saying 'ARIA is easy'.

Christian Heilmann: gave a really entertaining talk calling for good accessibility to be a first class part of design and not left to the 'accessibility pixies' to sort out and then be left when updates occur (a sadly common occurrence). He showed some amusing bad design examples from the physical world and made the first alt text joke I have heard (involving the alt attribute for a photo of couple of attractive blue tits on bird feeder. I'll leave it to you to work out, or wait for the slides).
 
AntoniaHyde: described work with the oft left out people with learning disabilities. She gave a presentation in the style of one by/for those with learning difficulties and showed discussion with users trying to get to grips with confusing and fast changing sites. It was clear that many find the social aspects of these new sites very useful. The simple grid and SVG symbol layout of Jonathan Chetwynd's peepo.com was suggested as something to consider as a simple navigation style (I mention the open community developed symbol project I am working on and hope Antonia will get involved).

Jonathan Hassell: gave a great talk about the BBC's work work on inclusion, personalisation and beyond. He mentioned the new BBC site's dynamic yet accessible look and how close collaboration is required in web developement. His main thread was with User Generated Content and how ensuring it remains accessible is a responsibility split between users and system/admins. He also demonstrated their Sonic Science multimedia science education game for blind youngsters that use sounds and the stereo field to provide feedback in addition to speech.

Stephen Elsden: demonstrated Leonard Cheshire Disability's new social portal for people with disabilities, DIP-online.org. He described many of the decisions they had made, including choosing the Open Source Wordpress as the most suitable CMS platform (apparently they still had to do a lot of a11y work and I couldn't resist asking if that was fed back to the WordPress community). They tweaked the tag clouds and kept the look and operation very simple, almost bare.

Ian Forrester: gave a rapid tour of BBC Backstage (very interesting re purposing of BBC content) and things to watch on the web, both good and bad. Unfortunately he ran out of time but will be invited next year to do justice to his entertaining talk. Mozilla technology got a good mention, especially XUL as an open accessible alternative to Silverlight and AIR.

Julie Howell: gave a short talk before leading the panel discussion. One excellent development is that PAS 78, the high level advice for ensuring sites are made accessible (authored by Julie) will become a full standard. She called us to focus accessibility evangelism efforts on the marketing departments who now hold the power over websites. Julie asked the panel a number of questions before opening it to the floor. One point I found interesting is the overlap between learning difficulties and old age accessibility requirements. Someone also said that if you make a site accessible to PWLD then anyone will find it easy to use. I'm afraid I was a little distracted at this point, wondering if I was, or was not, going to get to say anything about Open Source a11y.

We finished off with thanks to Kath and the event organisers who worked with her, and then headed of to the pub. I was unable to attend the after show drinks as I had to get a train, but will ensure I do next year as there were many discussions I would like to have had.

So, Accessibility 2.0 was a very worthwhile conference, and highly recommended. A great big 'thumbs up' to Ability Net for organising this, especially Kath for all her hard work. We can only hope it becomes annual, or perhaps given the rate of change on the web, semiannual.

Fascinated, the vixen stared intently at the image of a bright orange fox curled around a blue circle. This urbanised female fox was sitting on my parents garden path having a good scratch when she suddenly spotted the Firefox tee shirt I was wearing at the kitchen door. She stood fixated for a few seconds as I stood frozen and then returned to scratching.

OK so she was more likely to have been intent on keeping an eye on me rather than experiencing any recognition. And yeah sure, a Firefox is a red panda though John Hicks' has features more reminiscent of a Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes). Still it's a nice image and made me smile.

This particular vixen lives under the shed in the garden at the end of my parent's. She digs up the gardens when hunting for worms and other morsels and her cubs play happily on the neighbour's lawn. At last, I watched her jump deftly over a 6ft fence with ease when she finally finished her grooming, leaving me with an amusing memory.