I arrived back in London yesterday morning and spent the day sorting presents and unpacking. After 35 hours without sleep I fell into bed with the assumption that I could get back into the London rhythm right away. I was wrong, insofar I am tired now at 7pm and I am thoroughly annoyed with public transport in this oh so cheap capital after a single day.

Do you hear me London Underground? I am not getting the feeling that I get enough service for my £85 a month, but instead that you want people to sweat, feel uncomfortable and possibly become victims of pickpockets. This is also why you announce every three seconds that people should look after their belongings. Just like the met police who proved amazingly effective in not giving a sh*t about my stolen laptop you could end these announcements with “because you don’t have a choice and we don’t really want to offer any help”.

Anyways, San Francisco was a blast and I was very sad to leave after only five days as I was lucky enough to bump into some very helpful people who showed me where the good stuff happens. The great weather and the fact that people buy you drinks if you have an even remotely English sounding accent and the good food also played a part.

I flew with Virgin Atlantic, and there is simply no better airline to take to the US. Granted, I was booked on premium economy, but even in normal economy the entertainment system allows you to choose and start and stop your movies! I didn’t get any sleep, as the service was too good (“another sandwich, or drink?”).

On my first day back from the office I met Michael McElligott who dragged me to see a comedy show at Cobb’s by a troupe called Kasper Hauser who staged a mock stakeholder meeting of their Sky Maul company (a parody of the SkyMail catalogues). It was very entertaining and at times ad-hoc. I was a bit unlucky as I forgot my passport and got a stamp stating that I am under 21, which meant no drinks for me or anyone giving me a drink being expelled from the venue. Sadly enough this also didn’t make me forbidden fruit for the rich ladies in there, which would have been my backup plan. All in all it was a good show though, but as the following interview could have been longer or more engaging I only give it 4 out of 5.

I then attended the Accessibility Dinner and talked shop there with the likes of John Foliot, colleagues from Yahoo and some people from the Mozilla foundation, Google, Adobe and others. Quite a nice dinner and we had a good yarn about accessibility as a whole.

The next days were a bit slower, as I had work to do (after all this is what I was sent over for there). I just spent some time using the free wireless in Border’s on Union Square and drinking a few pints at the Union Square Sports bar after rummaging through a lot of DVDs and CDs at Rasputin Records.

Saturday Night, before I left I got invited to the Laughing Squid 11 party. Not knowing anything about it I didn’t know what to expect and was totally blown away by it. It is a mixture of gigs, kinky cabaret and geek meeting with activity booths outside where you were able to paint with fire, put legos on a car, drive a steam powered car, a Segway or bollock around in a photobooth. The people present that I knew already before I got there were Ben Metcalfe, Tantek and Jeffrey Veen. The people I got to know are too many to mention as Tantek dragged me around after he saw the T-Shirt I was wearing.
I only got to see the performances by freakotronic which was a very bizarre disco/electro mix with lots of gogo-dancing and the burlesque Twilight Vixen Review with Anita Cocktail as the singer. The twilight vixens were gorgeous and Anita very outspoken with quite a good voice. Catch them when you can!

It was a total blast, I loved every minute of the party and got dropped off at the hotel by the lovely Virginia Wang. I’ll try to come to SF soon again to meet all the people I didn’t mention here but pestered on friendster and flickr.

Thanks to everyone who made me so welcome and content with life :-)

• My Videos of The Twilight Vixen Revue feat.Anita Cocktail and Freakotronic on blip.tv
• My flickr photos of the event

One thing I keep getting asked ever since I published my JavaScript book is to compare the book, my scripts or even myself to other publications and people. This is not only people asking me whether it is worthwhile to buy the book or if they are the right audience for it, it happens in all kind of situations. Here is why I consider this a waste of your and my time. (more…)

I am back in the U.S. for a week staying in San Francisco and working in Santa Clara. So much more warmer here than London. I’ll be at the Accessibility Dinner on Thursday and generally trying to get to know as many people as possible while I am here.

So if there is a bit of slack in posting here, sorry about that.

If some of you have wondered what happened to the outspoken accessibility guru Joe Clark in the last few months, he has been busy. What Joe is trying to do is raise money to finish his open and closed project, which is a research project on the things Joe has been very much keen on advertising the last few years:

The Open & Closed Project is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.
We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world and publish them. (You’ll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).
We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.

Now, all of this costs money, and Joe assumes he’ll need 7 million Canadian Dollars to get this thing going for a year. To make matters even worse, he cannot really find the time to bug possible capital givers to get to these 7mill. That is why he set up a micropatronage page at http://joeclark.org/micro/ and wants you, and me and everybody to help him get together 7,777 Canadian Dollars to get a whole month off to search for wealthier supporters in earnest.

So, if you can spare some money, go and donate a small amount to get him on the way.

I just created a presentation for a Tech Talk later on with the topic “Accessibility and You, a non-tech approach to web accessibility” and during the collection of material I realized that a lot of real world inventions were based on the needs of disabled people and are now benefitting everybody.

• Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell invented the loudspeaker and subsequently the telephone to help Edison overcome his hearing problems, now we all use loudspeakers (sometimes to turn us into someone who is hard-of-hearing)
• Subtitling and captioning of movies and TV programmes helps deaf users, but also those who are not firm in a foreign language and still want to see the movies as they were intended (I learned a lot by watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus with subtitles)
• Talking VCRs and universally accessible doors make it a lot easier for both people with disabilities and those without to use them.
• The University of Manchester is working on some software to make mobile web surfing a lot easier by automatically stripping unnecessary content from web sites. The algorithms and logic of the software is based on research with blind users and screen readers.
• IBM is working on an alert service for deaf people to get informed when there is a public announcement on stations and airports. When there is an announcement their mobile phones get a message or vibrate, which is something that any visitor could profit from (how many times did you have a delayed flight, went for a coffee and had to neck it because you felt uneasy about not seeing the notice board?)
• The curb cut, those dips in sidewalks created for people using wheelchairs makes it easier for people with prams, cyclists and others, too.
• OCR scanning was invented to allow a blind person to hear a text that was previously printed and became a massive success in data entry processes.

These are just some examples, and I’ll be happy to add more (comment please) were a disability became the spark that started a new invention.

However, when you look at any web design list or forum these days, all you hear is “I need to add skip links” or “I need to make this accessible” or “how can I make this work with screen readers?”. Where is the spark there? How come not many people see accessibility as a chance to improve a current product or use it as a test phase to give the product a trial by fire before considering it worthy of publication?

During a summit last month in Germany Markus Erle talked about accessibility testing as an incubator to make products more stable, mature and ready for the real world and not as a means to create a habitat for handicapped users.

This inclusive approach is not new, in fact Wendy Chisholm’s article Innovative Design Inspired by Accessibility on Digital Web covered it already in 2005, but I don’t see it being followed or getting as much time in the limelight as the old “so what do we have to do to accommodate disabled users”?

Thanks to Tomas Caspers and Mike Davies