During my first trip to the silicon valley for Mozilla I went to a goodwill store and bought a bicycle to be independent of taxis. I left it in the office for everyone to use – the mozbike{} was born:
Not many people used it, but it was cool to come back and to be able to dash off for a quick ride when I needed. Now yesterday this $99 second hand bicycle with broken breaks got stolen. I had locked it behind the Monte Carlo bar/nightclub thing on Castro Street in Mountain View and when I came back at 2am it was gone.
Now, if you are in the valley and you see the bike (it still has the goodwill stickers and $99 written on the handle bar) post a Tweet using #mozbike and cc me @codepo8 on it. If you see someone riding it – just cut in their lane as the breaks don’t work and justice shall be served that way.
I just got back to my hotel after the merriments that were the Google I/O after party in the Thirsty Bear Brewery and thought it is time for some reflection on the event.
Overall impression
Google IO was a very good conference, I heard a lot of interesting news, met people I hadn’t seen in quite a while and got to know a lot of others. It is a huge event and there was no lack of things to keep you occupied. Showcase booths of software but also an amazing amount or Robots and other hardware demos, vehicles to play with and lots of breakout space made it a great place to learn, look and talk to each other and people in Google. The HR presence was very subtle and there was no brutal hiring drive you get at other events of this nature.
Catering was good, there was always coffee and drinks but the queues at lunch were very long indeed and I skipped a few meals to spend more time with folk instead.
The main stage visuals were top-notch and the quality of the A/V equipment amazing. Talks were recorded, streamed and transcribed live. Great stuff.
The wireless, on the other hand, was abysmal. This is partly the fault of the attendees who set up their own hotspots (despite the badge telling you explicitly not to do so) and thus saturating the wireless range. That there was no dedicated speaker lounge or network was an oversight I’d love to see rectified. I do enjoy tweeting and blogging about an event but couldn’t do so.
The party on the first day had real time animations synced to the music by Sexyvisuals, lots of drinks and a truckload of cool things to look at. Hardware hacks, futuristic vehicles and a photobooth all kept people busy.
The band was Jane’s Addiction and I can safely say they were totally out of place. Perry Farrell proved once again to be a d*ck by abusing Google and the audience on stage. All in all they just did not fit. This is a geek event. Why not get a geek band? This was money wasted.
Overall the organisation was spot-on. You knew where to go, what is happening and there was not much congestion although the amount of attendees simply makes that happen. There was a glitch with my name tag showing me as a Google speaker and not external and thus not allowing me to get free stuff but it was remedied quickly enough.
Swag, swag and some more swag
Talking of free stuff – people attending IO left laden with goodies. Originally I had hoped for Google to hand out new phones (as my Nexus One suffers from the known Off Button Failure) but going away with 3 T-Shirts, a mobile hotspot for the US (which saves me right now as the GBP 7.50 per MB of roaming is not fun), a Samsung Android tablet and the option to get my Chromebook as soon as they are out I really can’t complain. That doesn’t mean I didn’t hear people complaining! In addition to these “free for all” bits you also got extras for attending some special talks like an Experia phone at the gaming talk and a new Nexus S at the talk about Native Client. As I missed both this was not for me though. Drat.
A bumpy start
The conference started bad for me. I was asked to give a talk about HTML5 video and captioning/subtitling and was very chuffed about speaking at the great big Google event. It was tough for me to say no to two other conferences that had me listed as a speaker, and I still feel sorry about breaking my promise there. The blow came then when I arrived – as my talk got cancelled. So I was just to sit back, relax and enjoy the show instead of being a actor or part of the chorus line.
The talks I attended
I spent most of my time in the Chrome channel, so here is what I’ve seen with a quick one-liner about it. Most of these will be available as videos and the slides should be out somewhere, too.
WebGL Techniques and Performance – some great tips on making WebGL snappy – included fish, so it has to be native
Chrome Web Store Publisher Forum – this sounded interesting but was not for me. If you want to publish something on the store and make money, there were some good tips though.
Super Browser 2 Turbo HD Remix: Introduction to HTML5 Game Development – some great tips on how to build games.
HTML5 Today with Google Chrome Frame – a good introduction on how to rid the web of the scourge of old IE - now also available for people who are not admin on their windows machine.
Web Fonts are changing the Web. Learn why. – showcase of Google web fonts and the tools to easily use them. Some cool new features there. I thought the demo of creating a logo with a font was pointless though – why would I ever have to highlight and paste a logo?
Mobile Web Development: From Zero to Hero – the UK Google boys showed some good tricks how to use HTML5 on handhelds
HTML5 & What’s Next – a glimpse into the next steps of making the browser a real app platform. Surprisingly a lot of CSS talk there (mixins, variables…) but also some very cool client side MVC ideas
Creating Accessible Interactive Web Apps using HTML5 – well intentioned talk with great presentation but awful content. I will write a lot more about this one soon.
Ignite I/O – always a great format and very cool talks this time.
Announcements I enjoyed
Over all IO had some amazingly cool announcements. Many got the Americans excited (movie streaming on Android and Google Music) but failed to make me happy as they are only available here. Others, however, got me very happy:
Chrome store going international has been a promise that took far too long to fulfil
Google entering the open hardware arena with an own Arduino project that works with Android. Some very cool demos were shown about that and it is great for hackdays.
Android getting spatial detection for cameras to allow for real 3D interfaces using the user’s field of vision
Chrome frame for non-admin users means a lot more people can say good-bye to IE6
Google fonts API getting extended to allow for faster web fonts
The new interactive WebGL song/movie 3 Dreams of Black pushing the envelope much cleaner and further than Wilderness Downtown (strange though that it is http://ro.me and not http://ch.ro.me)
Chromebooks coming out which are the grown up version of the CR48 pilot. I am not that excited for mom and dad end users but I see them as a great opportunity to get rid of old and outdated infrastructures in companies. Of course we need to get Office onto them somehow.
A lot of cool file API and sound APIs for Chrome which hopefully should be coming in other browsers, too.
Chromebooks coming with a built-in screen reader – you hear that Microsoft? Go ship NVDA with Windows!
Things I want to happen now
Well, for starters I can’t wait to get my hands on the Chrome book. I will also hunt down the HTML5 demos shown to get them fixed for other browsers and added to Mozilla Demo Lab and I will have a few talks with YouTube about captioning videos. And of course to have a good follow-up with all the people I met.
Die letzten paar Tage war ich im sonnigen Mainz um die JAX Konferenz zu besuchen und den Java Menschen mal etwas von HTML5 und JavaScript zu erzaehlen.
Meine Notizen und links fuer die einzelnen Vortraege muss ich noch zusammenschreiben, aber hier sind schonmal die Slides und die Audio Aufnahmen zum anhoeren:
It is impossible to write a blog post about HTML5 and embed slides in Flash in the same without suffering lots of wisecracking comments that don’t have anything to do with the content. To avoid this, I wrote Slideshare HTML and blogged in detail about how it works.
Well, I hacked and scraped and sooner or later this will always bite you in the bum. As it did when the Slideshare developers changed the URLs of the images of the mobile version which of course broke my embedding tool and got me a lot of emails asking me why oh why I have forsaken people.
Bitching on the developer mailing list of Slideshare helped and now the oEmbed API returns not only the number of slides and urls and all the other goodies but also the right image suffix to use.
So, in short words – it is fixed and as I am now using the API rather than building a ScrAPI it should work smoother.
Hi there, I am Chris. I’ve been doing a lot of web development in my career and also cared a lot about accessibility.
Worries about accessibility
I am a bit worried about accessibility as a community and as an idea in web development.
My main worry is that there still is a massive disconnect between bleeding edge web development and the accessibility world.
The big web re-boot
Right now we are in the middle of reinventing the web. There are so many very cool things happening I would need two hours to tell you all about them.
Accessibility the show-stopper?
Accessibility, however is always considered a bit of a downer. When you start talking about accessibility, then you most likely hear something about “graceful degradation” or even the dead horse that is the “extra version for disabled users”.
Accessibility tech is falling behind
This is to a degree understandable. The technologies we praise in the accessibility world are not up to speed with what is happening right now. Take for example the wonderful concept of caption and figcaption in HTML5. We finally have a way to connect an image with a caption – something every book layout for example needs. In order to make it accessible though we need to add ARIA roles and give each caption a unique ID. This is not maintainable.
ARIA is amazing but frozen in time in interfaces we build in the 90ies. ARIA is a stop-gap solution, true, but if we don’t make it easier to use, people will just not care.
You need to be accessible – it is the law!
Another issue is that accessibility is considered something that needs to be done to a product to make it legal to release – not to make it better or interesting.
Accessible products are better products – tell the world!
And this is where we need to stand up and shout and make a change.
Those crazy kids and their ideas – it’ll never work!
In general I get the feeling that the accessibility community as a whole is not as open to tech evolution as the rest of the web communities. Every new thing is considered a massive step for all of us to take and if it doesn’t work 100% it is discarded as “not ready for use yet” very quickly. After all it is much harder for a person with a disability to upgrade their environment, right?
Painting a wrong image of accessibiliy
This grumpy old men image of the accessibility community doesn’t help us with winning the hearts and minds of the developer community.
Accessibility is everywhere!
If you take a look at the real world, we have a lot of accessibility enhancements (we fought for over the years) that do not only help people with disabilities but make it easier for everybody.
Lowering the kerb for people who want to like accessibility
Kerbs on roads have lower parts to allow for wheelchairs to get onto the sidewalk. This is also very useful for people with pushchairs or cyclists like me who like to celebrate their higher mobility in comparison to cars.
Digitising the world for conversion
OCR scanning allows us to turn printed matter which is deteriorating into formats that can be converted and archived much easier. It was invented for a blind person.
This can apply to anything – a text that is properly structured for assistive technology to understand is also easier to style and to index for a search engine or crawler. It can also – to a degree – be translated on the fly.
Being loud and proud and communicating across borders
The speaker and subsequently the phone was invented for someone who was hard of hearing. Now it allows us to get ourselves heard and to speak people world-wide. I work in London and work with people in 7 countries and 6 time zones. I love that freedom.
Don’t just tell me, show me!
Closed captioning on TVs was originally meant to be for the hard of hearing. If you look at where it is used mostly right now you’ll find that it allows people to follow a TV show without disturbing others. You find TVs with captioning turned on in gyms and in sports bars.
Right now, the web doesn’t work that way
On the web, however we still see accessibility as something that needs to be tacked on. Something that needs extra work and follows rules the normal developer doesn’t understand.
Bad interfaces with broken promises
This leads to us building interfaces that look flashy and promise us some functionality but don’t work. Like the buttons in the lift in Heathrow Airport un London. They are raised, they are big and they are easy to read – and they do exactly nothing.
Accessibilty enhancements as a pacifier
This is a very common thing in lifts though – there is the concept of a pacifier button. This is for example the button that closes the door – which normally does not make the door close faster. What it does though is give people the idea that they are in control and calms them down. After all being in a very small closed space can be scary.
On the web a lot of developers add these kind of enhancements to their web sites to feel that they have done “something” for accessibility. Font resizing widgets for example.
Truth is – accessibility is hot right now
If you stop thinking about building things for the disability community and you consider what it means to build these interfaces you will find that we are already in the middle of a renaissance of accessibility needs.
Mobile devices are hot and cool and they also spell the end of really bad interfaces we used in the past:
Properly structured documents are easy to redesign for different screen sizes.
Larger buttons are needed for touch interfaces.
Hover interaction doesn’t work on mobile devices
Lightboxes are very confusing on small screen devices
Science fiction shows us what could be done
In Sci-Fi movies in the past we dreamt of interfaces that are human. Instead of moving a mouse and typing in cryptic commands computing is ubiquitous. Star Trek had voice recognition. Iron man is a great example of what you could have as amazing interfaces.
Actually none of this is really fiction any longer.
Emerging technologies are human and more accessible
If you haven’t realised it yet – computers are becoming more human accessible.
Speech recognition help us communicate with devices whilst we are on the go.
Touch interfaces are much simpler to grasp (literally) for humans and are becoming a de-facto standard.
Device orientation is already used in games – why not in other interfaces?
Take the example of Glenda Watson Hyatt – a lady bound to a wheel chair who could only communicate with a massively expensive piece of hardware and replaced it with a much cheaper iPad with more flexible software.
The Wii blew the whole concept of gaming out of the water. Instead of pressing a random sequence of buttons and arrows you played tennis to, well, play tennis. This lowers the barrier of entry immensely. The Wii is in use in homes for the elderly to make them move instead of vegetating in front of the TV. Awesome!
The Kinnect goes even further with this. Instead of having to play with any controller it recognises your shape and reacts to your movements. This could be used for accessibility interfaces.
It is true, none of this is free and open, but here is where geeks come in – what isn’t open will be made open.
Hidden functionality for those in the know
I lied though when I said that the close door buttons don’t work. In the US they do have a special functionality. If you go into a lift and press the close door button and then the floor you want to go to whilst keeping the button pressed the lift will go directly to that floor and not stop in between – regardless of people requesting it on other floors. This is for firemen and the police to get there quickly.
On the web this kind of inside knowledge means in most of the cases using an API. Clever companies don’t just build interfaces – they also offer the data of their systems to allow people to build interfaces.
Opening up YouTube
One example of a use of an API that I did in the past is Easy YouTube. This is an interface catered for people with learning disabilities. YouTube now has big friendly buttons and not a lot on the screen. Incidentally and without knowing I also made YouTube available for blind users.
Here are a few of the results this had – a video of a blind user who said she hated the web being happy as punch to be able to control a video and a singer with a learning disability being able to watch music videos for the first time.
Geek pride can be yours
Enabling these people made me very proud indeed. And it only happened because someone with tech knowledge like me got a detailed list of requirements by someone who had a problem with current technology. Antonia Hyde had asked at a conference to build a video player like Easy YouTube and I started building it right away.
Setting technology free
The main issue of YouTube was that it is Flash based and only gives me limited access. Now with open technologies we don’t have that problem.
Native video and audio
Native HTML5 video is by default keyboard accessible and can be styled in any way. You can read out the current time and react to it. This allows you for example to sync HTML content around the video with what is happening in the video. Yes, you might have guessed it – that makes for very simple captioning interfaces.
Native rich interaction and styles
Using technologies like Canvas and SVG you can create beautiful visualisations of data in the current document. Native to the browser, accessible for translation and reading by assistive technology and beautiful.
Input and output
Voice recognition is not far away – same as face recognition. We have cameras and microphones in our computers, why not use them?
Stop thinking in limits
The main thing we need to do to marry the crazy cool innovation we have now in development with accessibility concerns is to stop thinking in limits and use disability needs as an opportunity to build better products. For this, above all, we need to embrace the web.
The web is the platform
Imagine no need to buy Windows and upgrade your JAWS. Imagine not having to worry about security patches. Imagine computers booting up in seconds rather than minutes with dozens of security questions and barriers.
We can have that! Systems like Jolicloud and Chrome OS totally do away with the need for an operating system layer – you boot into the web. If you are offline you can still use the machine to write and store but all your work is on the web.
Let’s not leave this as the playground for a selected few – let’s make this the accessible layer of the web.
People are here to help
Instead of complaining that the people on the web do not care about accessibility let’s use them to make the web more open to everyone. Take Universal Subtitles for example. This is a small JavaScript you can put into any web site that adds a subtitling interface to any video in the page – people can write subtitles for a part of the video and can also translate it.
We need more of these tools – let’s make accessibility a concern for all, not a thing to make a lot of money with by offering bespoke services.
Stop preaching to the choir
Stop staying in your comfort zone of accessibility mailing lists and conferences. Go out and infiltrate the main conference circuit and discussions about cool new technology. Tell the world about our needs and demand them to consider them.
Stand proud and tall – we can be a butterfly!
Accessibility doesn’t have to be the ugly duckling of development and IT solutions. It could be the beautiful butterfly leading us to a much more human interface future. Go for it.
