maybe it's because I'm a geek...

...but I love this keynote given at the Accessibility 2.0 conference held in London in April 2008 by Jeremy Keith.

It's got things in it like architectural shearing layers:

• the site
• the structure,
• the skin (which is the exterior surface),
• the services (like wiring and pipes),
• the space plan and
• the stuff (like chairs, tables, carpets and pictures).

What the great-grandson of Champollion is doing:

It was only thanks to the Rosetta Stone (also on display in this very city) and the valiant efforts of Champollion that we can read and understand hieroglyphics today.

By the way — and this is a complete tangent — do you know what the great-grandson of Chamopollion does for a living? I only know this because my wife is a translator: he writes software for translators. Well, I say software …he’s actually created a plugin for Word. So his legacy might not be quite as enduring as his ancestor’s.

The connection between Whitworth's standards for screws and Babbage's difference engine:

The true father of standards is a British man, a member of The Royal Society which was based, yes, right here in this city. His name was Joseph Whitworth and he was an engineer. A developer in other words. He standardized screw threads. Before Whitworth, screws were made on a case-by-case basis, each one different from the next. That didn’t scale well for the ambitious project that Whitworth was working on. He was the chief engineer on Charles Babbage’s difference engine which, although it can’t boast a direct lineage to this computer, bears an uncanny resemblance in its internal design. I love the idea that there’s a connection between the screws that were created for the difference engine and the standards that we use to build the Web.

It's also a really great article about the (near) future of web accessibility, and goes into some detail about future-proofing, another hobby-horse of mine that no-one else seems interested in; he also makes a connection between accessibility and future-proofing:

We can either spend our time and effort locking data up into closed formats with restrictive licensing. Or we can make a concerted effort to act in the spirit of the Web: standards, simplicity, sharing… these are the qualities of openness that will help us preserve our culture. If we want to be remembered for a culture of accessibility, we must make a commitment to open data.

He also likes science fiction - hurrah!

freakin' awesome usability rap

Usability explained in a mellow rap from The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper).

equal access to love

Equal Communications Access and what it means.

To me, it means that Deaf people should not be shut away in a world where no-one communicates with them. Communication is the vehicle of love and companionship - why should they be excluded from the fellowship of other people? The web has made a tremendous difference in terms of communication; one can find things out really quickly; it would be a pity if this accessibility to all was lost as we move towards more video and audio on the web.

And let's not forget the blind in all this as well. They need audio provision as much as Deaf people need captioning.

video captioning

Apparently you can add captions to your videos using CamStudio. I've got a copy that I downloaded, and the option is there, although I am not sure how to use that option yet. I have to make some screencasts for work, and I want to add captions to them. I've written the scripts, so all I have to do is copy and paste them into the video captioning tool.

Allegedly you can use SMIL with AVI files as well as with RAM. I've used SMIL before, it's great, but I don't know if it works with WMV or SWF.

braille campaign

The campaign aims for children to have the right to learn braille. Many children with significant sight loss are losing out because teachers think they do not need to learn braille. We want our children to become fully literate and employable and believe braille is the only way for a child with very limited vision. There is even talk of not teaching braille to children who are totally blind and just relying on speech operated technology. Please sign this petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SaveBraille/ or for more information go to: http://braillecampaign.blogspot.com

equal access

Communications access now!

Why should Deaf people be forced to undergo surgery, excluded from most videos on the web, and generally regarded as disabled?

Accessibility of communications (such as video captioning) benefits everyone (e.g. I can't get sound on YouTube for some reason) including people with dyslexia and Deaf people.

It's not that hard to add captioning to your videos, and there's a service called Project ReadOn where you can get captioning done for free.

If you want to take part in this campaign, take a photo or video of yourself with either a sign saying "I am deaf and I deserve equal communication access" or "I'm hearing but I support equal communication access for the deaf" and send it to equalcommaccess@yahoo.com

does he take sugar?

My friend Ocean blogged about a music video which includes ASL (American Sign Language) - oh how nice, you might think, except that not all the lyrics were translated into ASL - so it was clearly just there for decoration, not for communication. This is just another form of cultural appropriation. The video is now up on YouTube, so Ocean posted a comment there as well, and was immediately jumped on by a load of New Agey fluff-bunnies, saying that she was just bitching and should be grateful that the video included ASL, and how could she criticise it when it was about peace and love?

Ocean's posts:

• What do you think - is this putting ASL on a pedestal?
• The Sign and the Music
• Bridging the Cultural Gap

Here are the lyrics of the song as I imagine they would appear to someone who was only reading the signing and not hearing the lyrics…

I am not a signer or a Deaf person and the sound had disappeared on my PC when I looked at the video, so all I got was some mouth and hand movements…

I always get annoyed when I see TV programmes where foreign languages have been mistranslated by the person doing the captioning, so I can understand the annoyance of Deaf people here.

For example, I once heard a voice-over of a German couple who were relating how they had found the Ice Man (the remains of a Bronze-Age man found frozen in the Alps). The woman said that she said to her husband “Das ist ein Mensch” (that is a person); this was translated as “That is a corpse” which is just plain wrong, and I felt was disrespectful to the woman’s utterance. This might seem “small stuff” but it’s a sign of a general disrespect (either towards Germans or towards language in general). I submit that this desire to "help" the Deaf community without consulting them is a sign of a generally patronising attitude (even if it only seems like “small stuff”). It’s like the whole “Does he take sugar?” attitude.

Read this poem if you don’t know what the “Does he take sugar?” attitude is.

I also think the video is schmaltzy, sentimental, manipulative and exploitative of small children. Just because it's about praying for peace and love does not make it sacrosanct and immune from criticism. Wake up New-Age fluff-bunnies and stop treating Deaf people and culture as a commodity.