MikePadgett.com

This is my first proper evening on Linux. Last night I had the impulse at about 23:30 to install Linux Mint and I’m only now starting to use it.

After Partition Magic almost destroyed my Windows partition, I had to run a chkdisk to recover it, but all is well and I find I can leave Windows in peace and head back to Mint!

Indeed, there’s much to do here. My sound card doesn’t work, my networking seems a bit flaky and the typography in Gnome is awful. I looked at KDE briefly earlier on, but I’ll stick with Gnome for now.

I’m not completely new to Linux. J has been a fan since it was invented and she’s been playing around with various distros for several years. When we moved to Brussels, we came armed with a laptop running Mint and I got quite accustomed to its lo-fi charms. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Microsoft’s Office Sharepoint Server 2007 clears up some problems with cosmetic improvements, but delivers enough new ones out-of-the-box to remain beyond the reach of assistive technology users. Significant development will be necessary to ensure a basic level of accessibility.
Article continues after the jump…

First, there was panic over students using the World Wide Web to cheat on their essays.

Then it was revealed that CIA employees had been doctoring Wikipedia articles on the subject of such public menaces as President Ahmadinejad and Oprah Winfrey.

The Internet and Hard Fact have always enjoyed a difficult relationship. Sometimes the truths were held to be self-evident to all but the most gullible users (remember the Nigerian 419 Scam?); others were open to interpretation (cf. the Taser incidents at the Universities of Florida and Los Angeles respectively).

For millions around the world, Wikipedia is the cutting edge of information delivery. At the time of writing, the website claims to deliver in the region of 8.2 million articles in 253 languages [source] - it’s a veritable fountain of knowledge, much to the bitter chagrin of commercial encyclopaedia publishers.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia and access to content is free. Whereas access to the 120,000+ online articles provided by a leading commercial encyclopaedia is normally about £5.00 per month. Put it that way and a couple of key points emerge:

• You’re more likely to expect (and forgive) if a bit of inaccuracy creeps into 8.2 million freely available articles in 253 languages
• A commercial encyclopaedia couldn’t compete, even with “a staff of 19 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors” [Encyclopaedia Britannica, source]. more likely to be biased

We don’t really have any numbers on Wikipedia vandalism. One or two concerned parties have taken to documenting outrages, often with the righteous indignation of a juror.

Meantime, those of us on the fringe of the debate might be inclined to see the funny side. Am I the only puerile fool barely able to stifle a giggle at Bill Gates’ portrait defaced with a silly moustache? Or the assertion that George Washington “had a shit on a stick and then told people that it was OK to have unprotected sex …”? Or this non-sequitor I found this evening?

A very public row broke out recently over a report concerning the results of a survey published by Socitm entitled Better Connected 2007, which surveyed the level of accessibility of 544 local authority websites.

The brouhaha centred upon the methods employed by Socitm to generate metrics amounting to a thumbs up or down.

The ink on the publication had barely dried when the influential PSF weighed in conspicuously with vocal criticism of “continued peddling of what can at best called ill-informed pontificating and at worst out and out drivel.”

Better Connected is one such example, and the Insight team behind it add insult to injury by clipping town halls for £395 a pop as they vacuum up cash like the most opportunistic of privateers while cowering behind and milking their quasi-official .gov.uk status for every penny they can. [1]

The methodology consisted of a programme of automated testing, followed by human testing conducted by the RNIB, an organisation which has been seen to take a leading role in the promotion of accessibility best practice in recent years.

Acrimony surrounds the report’s implication that sites that did not meet the W3C’s WCAG were deemed to have “failed”, contributing to a generally gloomy bigger picture in which the site of only one local authority was rated ‘excellent’, 64 others reached Level A Conformance (compared to 62 in 2006) and the rest presumably trailed even basic standards.

The overwhelming issue highlighted by PSF and others [2] is that reliance upon WCAG, automated testing and narrow criteria does not make for an accurate assessment of accessibility, generating instead sensational headlines and more spin based on a “dodgy methodology which fails (and therefore implies inacesssibility of) perfectly good websites … This is doing more harm than good” [3].

Are false impressions being created? Certainly a great deal of energy has been spent mooting just that, but away from the glowering flames, there’s also the year-on-year grinding negativity of Better Connected to worry about.

The RNIB’s Donna Smillie suggests that there’s something inherently wrong about seeing accessibility as a boolean [4], yet there can be little doubt that many do make that mistake.

Though the context of Smillie’s statements is intended to support Better Connected, doesn’t the report - and the study as a whole - encourage a pass/fail view of things, attempting as it does to generalise into a digestible format what is a wide-ranging and often laborious area of practice treated in varied meticulous ways by hundreds of different organisations?

This is after all a quantitative study, not a qualitative one.

About eight years ago when I was still a student, I visited New York and Washington DC. Washington is home to many of the United States’ government agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose headquarters I toured like a good little tourist.

As well as the historical and scientific elements and the obligatory firearms display, at the end of one corridor there was an inocuous-looking wall display. It turned out to be a kind of leaderboard for the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted.

Yes, it’s a lengthy preamble, but I was eventually going to come around to a couple of United Kingdom equivalents [1],[2], [3].

The Crimestoppers site is relatively new. According to a BBC news article, it received 350,000 hits in its first day live. Even the fervently archantitech amongst the mandarins in Whitehall must have noted that.

However, it seems that our nation’s leaders have a bit further to go before they truly appreciate the scope of the Internet. It seems today that the Home Office, ever confident of the infinite wisdom of its management cadres, has announced that sex offenders may be forced to register their email addresses and chatroom handles.

Presumably this glorious concept will allow those who run websites to sort the fiddlers from the tiddlers, so to speak.

The internet child safety expert of children’s charity NCH applauds the idea. Well, perhaps the expert needs to be retrained, because whilst a Most Wanted mugshot is fairly hard to fake, an internet identity is not.

Flash is ten years old, as the BBC reports, and for any Internet technology still around after a decade that’s a considerable achievement.

When I started out in web design, it was almost the only medium I worked in, reflecting the tastes of the time. That was before the Flash backlash, led by the arch-headline-grabber himself Jakob Nielsen’s vociferous take on the matter.

Since then, the paths of Flash and I have diverged considerably. I rarely work with it nowadays.

Inappropriate Flash harms user experience

I haven’t seen developers breaking new ground lately, in the way every week used to bring extensions of Flash’s seemingly limitless capabilities in two dimensions.

Just at the time when Flash was in the corner licking its wounds, good old HTML enjoyed a renaissance with the adoption of web standards and increased accessibility. Today, JavaScript has taken markup into orbit and in a curious irony, it has also saved Flash from a further beating from the Eolas patent mess.

A few major successes have been brought to us by Flash in recent times. Yahoo has finally done the obvious and released a Flash mapping interface and YouTube’s video relies totally upon Flash’s video capabilities, of course.

Indeed, it’s the video stuff that ensures Adobe’s trusty plug-in is still relevant today, since the tech corporate’s vision of an all-purpose application delivery medium still looks years away, with a muted response to Flex and Microsoft’s competing Avalon (now imaginatively retitled WPF) technology tied to the long-delayed Vista.

“It’s a bit chaotic. There’s lots of noise, lots of activity. That’s great; there’s a huge amount of innovation” said Adobe’s Kevin Lynch [1] when asked about the future of Flash. Not a straight (or strong) answer.

In times past, Macromedia always managed to brave the storms, so perhaps Adobe can keep the tide in its favour.

Update: show now goes out Sat 16th Dec

I have recorded an hour-long show for the great freeform radio station WFMU. The broadcast is scheduled for Saturday 16th December at 14:00 here in the United Kingdom (09:00 locally).

WFMU is a non-commercial radio station entirely funded by listeners. It broadcasts as WFMU at 91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ, relays as WXHD 90.1 FM and via the Internet at wfmu.org.

I’ve been an avid WFMU listener for about five years. It has been named best radio station in the United States four years running by Rolling Stone magazine and best in New York City by Village Voice and New York Press. Publicity for the station has originated from sources as diverse as the BBC and Simpsons creator Matt Groening.

My show will include some of my favourite tracks and the odd snippets recorded in mine own dulcet tones, so I hope you’ll tune in!

Full details of available WFMU Internet streams

What AJAX isn’t, in this context

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a significant leap forward in computing technologies and on one side of the coin, for the first time the Internet looks capable of delivering on the promise it showed a decade ago.

The flipside is that, during this time, the detritus of the computing has also increased exponentially, with over 95% of emails classified as junk [1] and ever more vocal reports of shady behaviour on the part of software vendors [2,3].

Enter AJAX

Riding the crest of this digital wave, the web technology “warp drive” that brought us Basecamp, del.icio.us and GoogleMaps - defined and described ad nauseam as “Web 2.0″[4] - represents both sides of the coin.

The positives are well-documented, the negatives less so. I decided to zoom in on one particular aspect: the conflict between AJAX [5] and Accessibility. This is not an especially new area of concern, but recently I wanted to check what progress there had been.

AJAX vs. Accessibility: why is there a conflict?

The key front-end advantage of the AJAX programming technique is that data can be served to the client without a page refresh. Small amounts of data are requested and managed by using a powerful scripting language. This language is JavaScript, and the AJAX technique finally shows how powerful it really is.

But therein lies the problem. Assistive technologies such as text-only browsers and screenreader software step over JavaScript altogether. As Joe Clark rightly points out [6], the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints include that:

“if you use applets and scripts: Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page.” [7]

So how do we use a web application like Google Maps if our assistive technology steps over or mauls the very JavaScript that brings us the functionality needed to navigate the interface and serve maps dynamically? And just what would an alternative accessible page for a map of your hometown contain? Could it be something like David Hawgood’s map of Kent [8]?

Here’s another example: if we choose to validate a form with AJAX, so it’s possible to check for data entry errors in real time as the user fills out the form [9], then isn’t an assistive technology user at risk of entering invalid data?

One step forward, two steps back?

If, like me, you consult on web accessibility issues, then AJAX is a major concern: procurers see the power of an AJAX-ified application but none of the fallout.

People seemed to be all too willing to put aside the years of building awareness, interpreting and implementing standards and complying with the law just as soon as the jaw-dropping cleverness of this powerful (and discriminatory?) approach to web development became clear.

AJAX became a saleable “feature” of web applications, moulded into a point of difference that could be touted by salespeople who very likely had no idea what software had to do with the Achaean strongman.

The sad truth on this angle is that, as Clark succinctly points out, accessibility is also just a product feature.

For procurers whose personal experience of assistive technology amounts to little more than the wearing of spectacles, and whose personal knowledge of the law is as blurry as not wearing those spectacles, accessibility just ain’t sexy.

The response: silence!

One answer to all this might be: change the assistive technology software, not the development techniques. Another might be to simplify the complexity of the offering (often wrongly interpreted as “dumbing down”). In the best tradition of human interaction, the best response is probably to meet somewhere in the middle.

The product of research conducted by James Edwards et al on screenreader reactions to AJAX is predictable: the reactions are unpredictable. [10]

The key finding, for screenreaders at least, seems to be that the whole process of updating content inline, which is what AJAX facilitates, is not picked up at all. This acts out as “I select a button or a link and nothing happens“. Not good.

If AJAX is used almost totally to improve user interaction, Edwards makes a typically valid point: “[i]nteractions are just details, and perhaps what we’ve really been doing is projecting our own desires and preferences onto users for whom they’re not really relevant”.

Rolling with the punches

Imagine a boxing match attended by politicians. If you asked a cross-section of the attendees about the result of the bout, all that you’d learn is that the red corner and the blue corner both won.

Similarly, both of these are true: accessibility best practice is totally on the ropes and AJAX is seeing stars.

On the one hand, progress is both inevitable and inexorable, but on the other, we have come too far towards a best practice for accessibility to lose out now.

Seconds away, round two?

Some things just wouldn’t work offline, would they?

Wikipedia would be no different to the Encyclopedia Britannica (actually without the key differentiator of connectivity, Wikipedia would have little going for it, if Britannica is to be believed).

Or why not imagine a Faceparty where you’re the only guest? MySpace where yours is the only profile, yours the only lonely mug pasted up, you the only one dressed in Sir Philip Green, gormless and doped on fast food.

If we didn’t have the Internet, we’d be stuck with television repeats of You’ve Been Framed or Tarrant on TV instead of glorious, cut-out-the-anchorman Google Video or YouTube (is that really Steve Ballmer?)

Should we breathe a sigh relief and admit that we can’t live without the Internet, just as we could never go back to a world without mobile phones, then? On the one hand, the Internet is more banal than telly, perfect for the 21st century attention span. On the other it still threatens, like a glimpse of sunshine in a dirty grey sky, to be a great leveller.

BP post Groom: never the same?

Talking of TV, people often laugh when I tell them I don’t own one. Once more for the kiddies, it’s because J and I really don’t need the advertising and we don’t do small talk at work. However, I must admit that I still have a fond recall for old shows and for the zenith of Internet-only ideas, this one’s a beauty: nichy, gauche but ultimately fascinating.

The gold medal goes to JumpTheShark.com, a repository of the moments when great TV shows started to go downhill. Everything from The A-Team (when the guys were no longer on the run) to Zorro (when they swapped the trusty black steed for a white one).

Absolutely riveting. For five minutes.