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You know what I think should cause everyone to give at least some thought to accessibility?

Your thirties.

I remember one day, when I was 30. I threw the sheets off the bed, and shot my legs out to launch myself from the bed. I took two steps forward, saw a blinding light… and found myself lying on the floor, unable to move for several minutes. It was my first back spasm, and knocked me out of commission for a couple weeks.

Suddenly, things I took for granted, like getting up and looking in the fridge, were things I had to consider. I didn’t want to go anywhere, because it hurt to breathe, much less move. But in that time, I had to fly cross-country to tend to my grandmother in her final days, and that meant managing my pain while my back was screaming in an airplane seat, and then being wrenched as I carried all my luggage. It was the first time that my mobility was reduced, the first time I preferred elevators to taking the stairs two at a time, and the first time I had to depend on other people to help me do what I considered to be basic tasks.

It seems that since then, every six months I get a reminder that my body is not necessarily my friend. Most recently, I strained a ligament in my foot while exercising. Let me tell you, foot injuries suck. When your foot hurts, you keep hoping it doesn’t get worse. And when it doesn’t, you’re scared to do anything that might aggravate it again. So I had a very strange weekend that involved walking with a cane to keep weight off my foot.

It’s simple to look at people with a visible disability and say, I’m glad that’s not me. But you know what? Sooner or later, it will be.

Your vision will likely be the first thing to go. You may strain to read small type, at first. Then, maybe you’ll try bifocals. After that, as the effects of presbyopia set in, you’ll come to rely on your glasses to read. Your vision may start to yellow a bit, as well.

But wait! There’s more!

Hearing loss is a common side effect of the aging process. You may also encounter problems with arthritis (by the way: you’re not resting your wrists on the wrist rest while you’re typing, are you? Are you?), or any of a host of other fine or gross motor dysfunctions that will advance over time. And you may find that your cognitive abilities aren’t as sharp as they once were. (Hopefully before those around you start talking about it.)

I started doing web development when I was 20. At the time, it was barely conceivable to us that people of a certain age would be using the web. We didn’t even know if the web itself was going to last. But here it is, still chugging after a dozen and a half years, and not looking a day over 10.

And nowadays, I look around at the people I’ve worked with, and some of them are really old. Like, in their fifties! Some have even retired — the kind of retired where they’re collecting Social Security and posting pictures of their grandkids to Flickr. Get it? They’re using Flickr. And YouTube. And Gmail, and Twitter, and especially eBay. They also tend to have money to spend, and companies tend to like people like that.

And yet, I still hear people dismissing accessibility for older people on the web. That’s not going to fly any longer. Younger people are coming up on the web, that’s true. But those of us already there are only getting older, and we’re not going to stop liking the web anytime soon.

Keep this in mind when you’re about to downplay whether older users will want to use your site. The right thing to ask is:

Will you want to use this site when you’re older?

Or maybe, do you want some 20-year-old smartass deciding you won’t?

Welcome, dear UIE Web Applications Summit participants, to my presentation links:

• Gez Lemon: Making Ajax work with screen readers
• James Edwards: Ajax and screenreaders: When can it work?
• Dushan Hanuska: Hijax
  
• Bruce Lawson: Ajax, Hijax and accessibility
• Jeremy Keith: Progressive Enhancement with Hijax
• Juicy Studio: Improving Ajax applications for JAWS users
• W3C: Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
• Firefox 2 Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)
• Mozilla accessibility slides (December 2006)
• Accessibility features in Firefox
• Mozilla accessibility projects
• Dojo Accessibility Strategy

“I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment. We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.”

Jonathan Ive, chief designer at Apple, in an article in Time magazine, 9 Jan 2007

Nikesh Arora, who is Google’s VP for European operations, was quoted last week musing about the future of the iPod, saying, “In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced?”

It’s a question I’ve been asking for a while now. The first time was in 2003, when I started my crusade for the personal server. I repeated myself shortly thereafter as I called out the analytical no-op that is John C. Dvorak. The situation has changed a little since that time with the video iPod, though the storage available on iPods has only doubled, from 40GB to 80GB. But the potential is there, and sooner or later, it will be realized. In fact, it needs to be realized in order to satisfy the growth needs of both the consumer electronics and entertainment industries.

On its face, the idea of an iPod that contains all recorded music is actually pretty feasible in the next decade or so. Figuring about 20,000 major releases a year, at 60 minutes a release, at 192kbps encoding, that’s only about 1.8 terabytes. I can say “only” to a number like that because I remember when an array of that size was a half million dollars, and then $50,000, and now I can buy a 2TB array at Fry’s for about $1000. A futurist can safely assume that anything available today for a grand will eventually be embedded in someone’s cerebral cortex at birth, so we’ll go with it.

Anyway, let’s say that’s all there is to it for now. In fact, let’s say that we have 100TB of disk to play with, and that’ll hold all of the major releases ever recorded. Is that what we really need? Well, probably not, for a lot of reasons. Firstly, unless it’s truly convenient to slap everything ever recorded onto a single storage device, where “convenient” means “more cost-effective than filtering it all at a central source,” then you can achieve most of what you want in, say, five years. Assuming a collaborative filtering approach à la Last.fm, we’re already past the tipping point: storage is growing at a rate faster than users can fill it, and that empty disk is an opportunity to sell people what they might like.

The next piece of the puzzle, then, is the payment strategy. How do you grant access to any or all of this music, when it is in the wild? Once the bits themselves are decentralized, the commerce end of things needs to be decentralized, as well, or the entire system provides no value to users. If I am in Darkest Africa and I want to listen to the Fugees, and know that The Score is on my device, but I have no way to unlock it, that’s a problem. The only strategy that to me makes any sense is a subscription model, but even that has implicit hooks into a central certifying authority to prevent freeloading.

A bigger question is this: what role does the network play? Let’s say Apple offers a 10TB iPod that contains all of the media an average human would want. What happens next Tuesday, when it’s out of date? How do they sync up with the latest releases? We’ve been working on syncing technology for years, and we’re still not that smart about it. We’re going to need something to keep everyone with one of these devices up to date (and paid up), and the network we have isn’t really the best strategy for that.

Maybe true broadcast technology would help — say, investing in a one-way radio data infrastructure that keeps everyone informed. SPOT, on steroids. Or maybe most of the work can be done virally, by peers syncing with one another ad hoc, and without interaction. Or have media pushed to clients as they shop or dine or play. Ad-hoc sharing is a really powerful idea, as the Zune people know, though the mechanisms currently in place to restrict that sharing have reduced its value overall.

There’s a lot more to think about here. Enough to make a career of it, in fact. Where do indie labels and artists fit in? How do they add new releases to the system, and how can they hope to be compensated? What is the role of YouTube, et al., in systems like this? What if you’re an American in France, or a Frenchman in America, or just culturally calibrated enough to want both? When do the walls between nations come down, so that we can experience all the media the world has to offer?

The answer is that we’re not prepared to build a framework to support pervasive media concepts like this until a few more things shake loose. The 80% case here can be achieved in the next couple of years, if not for legal affairs and the conservatism of the rightsholders in this area. But there are big technical problems to solve, and it’s going to take a lot of coordinated thinking to analyze the infrastructural, social, legal, financial, psychological and design factors necessary to build a viable ecosystem.

We’ll get there. But it’s going to take a lot more than big portable storage devices to do it.

I’ve had a problem with how my browser memorizes passwords for a while now, and I’m certainly not alone. Since the holy grail of identity management appears to be a long ways away, I think it’s time to address it.
When I enter a username and password, Firefox helpfully offers to remember it. This is good, and helpful, if you know your username and password. My problem is that I have hundreds of accounts scattered all over the place, and I can never be sure that the username and/or password I am entering is correct. If it’s not, and I tell Firefox to remember it, then I am guaranteed to be starting with the wrong credentials on subsequent visits. Only I won’t know it until I try signing in. That’s a less than stellar user experience.

The problem compounds itself on sites where the form sends you to another page in the site’s hierarchy. Then, you may store the correct username and password combination on that other page, and Firefox will remember them both. And as a result, you’ll go to log in on a site’s front page, then fail, but then be sent to that second page, which will let you in. I had to do that for years with Vonage, having forgotten that the original username and password I provided were useless.

It seems a better way to store new usernames and passwords would be to ask whether to store them after the transaction has been completed. So once you submit the form, and you know whether your credentials have been accepted, you can inform the browser to continue. If not, you can go back and try again. But in any case, you will not be saving bad credentials that will continue to come back and bite you each time you forget whether you used this password or that, or whether you’re bob or bobsmith or bobs or bobsmith@gmail.com or b0b_l0l_360 at any given site you have visited.

Am I alone in this, or does this seem like a useful feature request?

“Caveats: I have two iPods, a Mini and a Shuffle. I have no current relationship with Apple, except I was once VP of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.”

Don Norman, in a response to a post on the 10 most-hated iPod flaws, 30 November 2005

I ordered an iPod nano 4GB from my credit card’s reward program at the end of October. It was scheduled to ship on November 7th, then November 20th. So today, I called customer service.

The representative apologized for the delay, and said that the dates slid because Apple had recalled the inventory they had been promising customers, due to the scratching issues. She went on to say that they should be receiving new product from Apple today and tomorrow.

While this is just one person’s story, and they could just be blowing smoke to keep a customer happy, it seems entirely possible — even likely — that if Apple wanted to fix the nano display’s propensity toward scratching, they’d do it before the Christmas season. I will try to compare the nano I should receive in early December with my business partner’s device to see if I can detect any difference, but I suspect that if they have in fact recalled and upgraded the plastic on the nano devices, they’ll announce it before I ever get to that experiment.

I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, where several a number go around putting their names on everything that is nailed down. I’ve been seeing their work whenever I leave the house, and it’s causing me to think more about exactly what graffiti is, and how to articulate my personal problems with it.

I don’t quite get vandalism, myself. It’s one thing to post handbills, or even to create something thought-provoking that may turn some heads. There’s something about the first time you see “It’s the LAW” turned into “It’s the CLAW”. (Those of you who live in Seattle know what I’m talking about.) But then there’s something about seeing it done the hundredth time that suggests enough is enough, and two particular entities have reached that point with me.

Recently, in this part of the hill, we’ve seen dozens of taggings by MCM. (No, it’s not me, though those are my initials.) This is just a garden-variety tagger, which I consider to be the lowest form of vandal. MCM has hit seemingly every other building for a two-block radius, along with the occasional unfortunate automobile hood. MCM is distasteful to me because there’s no work involved. No art. It’s just a lazy way to destroy something.

Then there’s coldk. coldk isn’t just a tagger: he’s a multimedia criminal. His vandalism ranges from the insane (the back of a sign on I-5) to the irreparable (etched in the center of each window at Broadway Video). He must have gotten bored with drawing ghosts, because most of what I see here is a form of damage that you can’t just paint over: it’s scored into air conditioners and spray-painted onto cloth awnings.

Artistically, MCM has nothing on coldk. But what coldk does is more than just temporary defacement: it’s outright property damage. While I hope that they catch MCM and stick him (presumably it’s a he) with lots of community service scrubbing down our fair city, I have a feeling the cops are much more interested in shutting down coldk.

I hadn’t put my finger on exactly what it is about graffiti that holds that strange attraction for me. I don’t like noise, auditory or visual, in my everyday life. I also don’t condone property damage. Still, there are the occasions where I see something that’s particularly thoughtful or well-done piece of vandalism, and while I am loath to praise it, it will stick with me. Surely many of us have had been discomfited at being attracted to something that just seems wrong. But I do recognize art when I see it, wherever it may be. I may not want to see it on the side of my building, but as long as it’s just one incident (art) and not a mishmash of tagging (noise), something about it pleases me.

I do have to say that the most interesting work I’ve seen on the Hill is the Bald Guy. It’s everywhere: on street signs, street lights, pasted to walls. The thing I like about it is that it’s pervasive, but artistic — and temporary by design.

As I read this, I have discovered graffiti.org, where this very debate of art vs. crime is laid out. I’m also reminded of the Broken Window Theory, which suggests that civic pride and lawfulness recede when vandalism is allowed to remain. This could well be summed up as one of a whole big bag of social mores that doesn’t have, and may never have, a simple answer.

A Wired article on the Future of Hearing exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has gotten the attention of my newly-married friend, Keith Robinson. My good friend Shana has been to the museum and reported back with similar ideas: why not use these advanced technologies, originally designed for deaf and hard of hearing people, to benefit people with normal hearing in noisy situations?

This is, of course, what the field of accessibility does: pushing the leading edge of technology to the point that its benefits are felt by everyone. It’s been this way for years. Today, we have people with near-perfect vision getting eagle-eye vision with surgery. ATMs and coin-sorting machines talk to us. Optical character recognition is passé by now, and discrete voice recognition is a common feature on phone systems. Women with toddlers in strollers use curb cuts and handicap toilets with impunity.

So it will be with hearing. The Walkman, and later the iPod and Bluetooth headsets, made it socially acceptable to have something stuck in your ears all day long. From an interpersonal perspective, that’s the hard part. If all that is now cool, then all manner of hearing enhancements are possible. It offers hearing that changes by situation. I’ve used my noise-canceling headphones to have a pleasant conversation with a stranger on a plane before. Why not put on an earphone that will let me converse with someone more clearly at a loud party? Or use multiple technologies originally designed for accessibility purposes to take that one step further, and have that device translate a foreign-language speaker’s words in real time?

The next logical step with these new auditory technologies is to reduce the overall cost to those who most need it, so that a hard of hearing person doesn’t have to choose between the primitive $500 hearing aids that are covered by insurance and amplify everything in the spectrum equally, or the $3000 ones that are small, use digital signal processing to bring out the right sounds for the situation, and are, you know, useful.

This new-found social acceptance also helps to destigmatize people with a need for hearing aids. The Wired article states that fewer than one in four Britons who need a hearing aid actually wear one. By making hearing technology fashionable, these people can not only demand something more aesthetically pleasing, but can demand more from their vendors at a lower cost as an advantage of economies of scale. One can already buy hearing aids that double as Bluetooth headsets for their mobile phone.

But millions of people have discovered the true joy of the iPod: being able to isolate oneself in stores, parks and on the subway. Changing headphone colors from black to white changed everyone’s perception of the average music listener in public. They’ve gone from passive, interruptible nobodys to active listeners who have put the world on pause. This is the inverse of situational hearing: it’s situational deafness. Whatever the social implications of that deafness may be, it is clearly something that makes my life easier when I’m out in public, amidst the noise and haste.

It’s been a little over a year since I launched the last redesign of this blog, Dragon (codename Magnum). July 25, 2004, to be precise. So I’ve been looking for the time to work on the redesign, and in between hunting for business-forming documents that don’t exist online and other startup chores, I managed to find it.

This is Swoopy. Its principal goals were:

• Push more of the main content toward the top
• Restore my logo (known as bestkungfu guy) and signature color (red) to places of prominence
• Clean up the code
• Add non-squarish design elements
• Prove I can get away with pink as a design element

It’s not done, of course. It never is. I still have a few things to add, and a few templates to mix back in. But I like it so far. The way the lines appear visually will fall differently depending on how wide your display is, and that’s by design. In fact, I think that’s my favorite part. It’s a wild card.

If you see something weird, drop me a line and assume that either it’s not implemented yet, or I’m stupid. Fixing the archive links is already on the agenda.