The Designing for Disability

A recent blog post by Neil Witt on The VC’s New VLE inspired me to provide a new introduction to a talk I gave at the “Designing for Disability” seminar held on  Friday 5^th December 2008 at the British Museum.

I was an invited speaker at this event was organised by the Museums Association and the Jodi Awards. The title of my talk, the final talk of the day, was “Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility“.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Let me tell you the tale, I began, of the benevolent emperor. He was kind and wished to do his best for his subjects.  So when he was told of a secret formulae produced by a wizard from a far-off land which would ensure that all of the subjects of his empire would be able to access all of his edicts, he wanted to know more. He was told that the secret formulae would ensure that the blind, the handicapped and the crippled of his land (this story, I should add, took place long ago, when,sadly, such politically incorrect words were the norm) were would all be able to read his edicts. “This sounds truly wonderful” the emperor announced (thinking that it would also be good if they could also read about the new taxes he intended to implement - for even in fairy tales, there is a need for financial prudence and long term sustainability).

And so the emperor announced that henceforth all official pronouncements, all new laws, all new taxes must comply with the WAI way (as the magic new approach became known. And so the lord chief justice issued the proclamation and the Knights of the Accessible Table rode through the kingdom to ensure that the magic was being used everywhere.  “Anyone for fails to comply with the magic will be banished“, it was announced.

Life was good, in the land. And when one of the knights who was made blind in a battle complained that he could read the edicts but couldn’t understand them, he was ignored. And when rumours appeared that there were places in the far-flung regions of the empire where the magic wasn’t being used, but people could still read the emperor’s edicts, this was dismissed.

“But it’s true!” said a little boy.  “There’s a new magic, that’s even better. It’s not the WAI way magic, it’s called ‘Inclusive design“.

And in my talk I described the story which the little boy told.

And this story is true, dear friends. For I was that little boy - and so, too, were David Sloan, Liddy Nevile, Jane Seale, EA Draffan, Helen Petrie, Caro Howell, Lawrie Phipps, Andy Heath, Hamilton Fraser, Elaine Swift and many others. For that little boy was a member of the Knights Who Gathered Evidence. And here is the tale I told, which is available on Google Video.

The Evidence From The Day

This tale introduced the talk I gave, in which I summarised the various peer0reviewed papers I’ve contributed to since 2004. I described the limitation of the WAI model and the WCAG guidelines, the evidence from a number of Web accessibility surveys which demonstrates that conforming with the guidelines does not necessarily provide accessible Web services and Web services which do not conform to the guidelines have been found to be very accessible.   I went on to describe some of the challenges to be faced in understanding what accessibility means in the context of learning and cultural appreciation.

I was particularly pleased that the holistic approach to Web accessibility which I described seemed to apply so closely to the various case studies which were described during the day.This included:

• Andy Minnion’s talk on “New Media for Access and Participation by People with Learning Disabilities“. He concluded that universal access with a single interface and minor changes of style and appearance do not meet the needs of this group. Content itself needs to be adapted and technical compliance, while important for other groups, is not in itserlf and accessibility solution.
• Linda Ellis’s talk on the use of  British Sign Language video guides to improve access for deaf visitors to Bantock House and Park. She argued that content aimed specifically for Deaf visitors was needed and that, as BSL is a language in its own right, information provided in BSL is needed, since Deaf visitors may find it difficult to understand information provided in English.
• Andrew Payne, The National Archives, on a project to maximise access to the Prisoner 4099 archives. Andrew mentioned how “Flash can be accessible, but you need to be careful”. Based on experiences such as this Andrew concluded by suggest that we “Don’t believe the box tickers”.

I very much agree with Andrew - don’t believe the box tickers. And don’t believe anyone who suggests there’s a simple solution to difficult and complex challenges - whether they be wicked elves or government policy makers!

Posted in Accessibility, Events      

I introduced Pinky and Perky in a recent blog post and I used them when I presented my paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference. And recently I used the dancing and singing pigs from the days of my youth when I gave the final invited plenary talk on “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0” at the “Nordlib 2.0 - Get Inspired by Web 2.0 for Libraries” conference held in Stockholm.

In Stockholm I used the video clip to illustrate how the dangers of an over-managed approach to popular culture wasn’t introduced in the Web era - Pinky and Perky were banned from the BBC in 1996: there was a general election about to be held and I assume the BBC were concerned about “pinko lefty” sentiments which they might try to influence young and impressionable minds (after all, where do you think the term pinko came from :-). This reference is available 47 minutes into the presentation (see Google Video or the Zentation link- where its synched to the slide on “Inappropriate Content“).

On the day before the conference I visited the Nordiska Museum where I saw a cigarette case (I think it was - I couldn’t read the Swedish description) which featured a topless model - from the 17^th or 18^th century. Again I felt that this provided a useful example I could use at the conference to illustrate my point that use of new technologies for ‘pornography’ is nothing new.

Now these two examples meant something to me and where likely to be new to the audience, thus avoiding reuse of cliched presentational devices. In the talk in Stockholm I also updated my slides a hour or so before delivering the talk, using a tweet and subsequent blog post from Karen Blakeman in which she commented that PageFlakes had added advertisments on its Web site overnight, without prior notice. “How would you respond if that happened to a Web 2.0 service you used in your organisation?” I asked the audience.

Non of these example made use of learning resources from a learning object repository. And for the objects I used (a YouTube video of Pinky and Perky, a photograph I had taken in a local museum and an interesting discussion point I’d came across a few hours previously) it would make little sense for me to deposit for reuse by others. Their value, I feel, comes from their relevance to me and my style of presentation, their (regional) links with the place I’m talking at and their timeliness. In fact I also made use of a Barack Obama image and the “Yes we can” slogan which again will time out very quickly.

Do we need repositories for learning objects, I might ask. Or are such repositories for the chore presentations (yet another talk on the same old subject to a large group of undergraduates), which won’t be used by speakers who want to provide fresh and relevant talks? On the other hand, perhaps this is mere indulgencies on the part of the speaker. After all, will a group of Nordic librarians ‘get’ Pinky and Perky?  Mm, maybe I should have used the Swedish chef from the Muppets? or Abba, perhaps, if I want to go for the more popular British stereotypes of Swedish culture?

Posted in Events, Web2.0   Tagged: nordlib2008   

Earlier this year the JISC launched a debate of Libraries of the Future. UKOLN recently contributed to this debate by sponsoring the Mashed Library event which was facilitated by Owen Stephens, Imperial College.  My contribution has been in exploring best practices for exploiting the potential of Library 2.0. I presented a paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference on “Libraries in the 2.0 Age and Beyond” held at the National Library of Singapore and gave an updated version of the talk at the Nordlib 2.0 conference on “Nordlib 2.0 - Get Inspired by Web 2.0 for Libraries” held at Aula Magna, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden on 21^st November 2008.

It was a privilege to be asked to give the final talk at the conference, and to have a full hour to describe my thoughts on how libraries should go about “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0“.

The conference blog provides more information about the conference and the talks which were given. The talks were streamed live and the videos are currently being edited and will be uploaded shortly. In addition I used a Flip camera to record my own talk and this is available on Google Video (and Blip.tv) and embedded below.

In addition I have used Zentation to synch the video with the PowerPoint slides, as illustrated below. The slides are also available on Slideshare.

Realising The Potential of Web 2.0 59:32 Talk on Realising The Potential of Web 2.0

I hope these different versions of the talk are useful. But if I was to provide only one version of the talk what, I wonder, should it be. The PowerPoint file on the UKOLN Web site, the HTML equivalent, the Slideshare manifestation (with the ability to be embedded elsewhere), the original .AVI file (warning, large file), the Google Video or Blip.TV video of the talk or the synched version of the talk and the slides on Zentation? And is the provision of a variety of versions a sensible precaution at a time when the sustainability of Web 2.0 may be questionable or confusing to the end user?

Posted in Events, Web2.0   Tagged: nordlib2008   

It was last year on 5^th December 2007 when I reported that I had been awarded the Information World Review’s Information Professional of the Year. With this year’s winner due to be announced at the Online Information 2008 conference in the next few days I thought it would be timely to summarise what I’ve been up to during my year as holder of the award (and also to update the portrait on the blog).

It’s been a very busy year for engaging with my user communities: I’ve given 32 presentations to date (with one more presentation to come) together with 2 online presentations. As can be seen from the accompanying map, talks have been given in Montreal (a half day blog workshop and a professional forum on openness at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference), Taiwan (an invited presentation on “Library 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges” at the NDAP 2008 conference), Singapore (an invited paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference) and Stockholm (an invited presentation on “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0” at the Nordlib 2.0 conference), as well as many talks throughout the UK.

This year has also seen an increased amount of direct engagement with the cultural heritage sector.  I’ve run a number of day-long workshops for MLA regional agencies, as well as additional events in Scotland and Wales. These have all gone done very well - one of the Sharing Made Simple workshops for example, was rated (on 1 score of 1 to 6) 5.91 for the facilitator’s knowledge of the subject, 5.82 for engagement with the participants and had an overall rating of 5.82.

The workshops have also provided an opportunity to gain a much better insight into the ways in which Web 2.0 can be used within the cultural heritage sector and also the barriers to its effective use. This information has being stored in a wiki (as opposed to the traditional approach of licking such potentially valuable information into the walled garden of flip charts!). A task on the new year will be to synthesise this information and to make the findings more widely available.

Reflections of my work activities have also been included in two books which I contributed to this year: “Web Accessibility: Practical Advice for the Library and Information Professional” by Jenny Craven (ed.) and “Information Literacy meets Library 2.0” by Peter Godwin and Jo Parker (eds).

This year has also seen me gaining more experiences in the support of Amplified Conferences and use of networked technologies to provide distance support, with a couple of examples of participation in online conferences.

In the past 12 months I have also published 190 blog posts on the UK Web Focus blog, with additional contributions made to the JISC PoWR blog.

It has been an enjoyable 12 months in my role as Information Professional of the Year, made particularly rewarding for seeing how the benefits of Web 2.0 are now becoming more widely accepted.  As one person commented on one of the workshop I facilitated earlier this year “Brian in particular displayed a real knowledge and enthusiasm for the topic, which was infectious“. I’m looking forward to continue to inflect others with my experise and enthusiams for many year’s to come :-)

Posted in General      

An email message sent on 8^th October 2008 to the Scotslink JISCMail list announced that “The Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) and CILIP in Scotland (CILIPS) have just introduced Twitter to their suite of Web 2.0 services“.

When I mentioned this recently a colleague made the comment “if you Twitter in a library, does someone Twitter Shhhh! back? ;-)” But librarian stereotypes apart, I think this illustrates how information professions are now beginning to make greater use of Web 2.0 services such as Twitter, in this case to enhance communications with CILIP members and library professionals in Scotland.

As I mentioned recently UKOLN has launched a series of IntroByte briefing documents which aim to provide an introduction to various topics of relevance to the cultural heritage sector.  We have started work on the production of a number of briefing paper which will covers the potential of micro-blogging services such as Twitter, as well as video micro-blogging services such as Seesmic for use in the library and the wider cultural heritage sectors.

We would welcome examples of organisations which are using such tools in the cultural heritage sector which we can include in the documents.  So if your library, museum or archive is an early adopter of such technologies please get in touch with me, either directly (email to B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk) or by leaving a comment to this post.

Posted in Twitter      

My colleague Paul Walk recently commented on developments to the COPAC services in a post entitled COPAC gets RESTful.  Paul linked to a blog post on the COPAC developer’s blog which described how the COPAC service now provides Persistent identifiers for Copac records.

I was impressed with the COPAC blog when I came across a post which asked the question To Google or not to Google. This post raised the issue of the tensions between the user benefits of providing links to Google Books from the COPAC service and the privacy concerns expressed by “a vociferous few who questioned why Copac would give Google ‘personal data’ about them as users“.

I feel that raising these issues in an open fashion is to be applauded. And it is far better that this is done on a blog, rather than being trapped in the confines of a COPAC mailing list, which would probably only be read by hardcore COPAC users.

And this is my response to the comment made on this blog recently in which a software developer argued that “the fact that I choose not to talk about work on the internet should have no bearing on my ability to create scalable, secure, and accessible services“.  I feel that the iT profession should be talking more openly with the user community and with other IT developers. 

My thanks to the COPAC team for demonstrating how this should be done.  Let’s hope that other national services in the JISC community follow COPAC’s lead.

Posted in Web2.0      

My recent talk on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference held in Singapore on 16-17th October (which was possibly the first Library 2.0 conference in Asia) brought back memories of the first time I spoke at a conference - the INET 94/JENC5 conference held in June 1994 in Prague in which I presented a paper entitled “Becoming an information provider on the WWW“.

I can recall how nervous I felt when I submitted my first paper to an international conference and wondered how I would cope with having to go onto a big stage (I later discovered that the auditorium held 1,000 people). While I was waiting to hear if the paper had been accepted I went on holiday to Victoria Falls. And wile I was there I decided to take a trip white-water rafting. After all, I convinced myself, if I can do this, I can do anything, including giving a paper at an international conference. So I did the trip - and even afterwards booked to go bunjee-jumping off the Victoria Falls Bridge (I was told it was the world’s highest commercial bunjee jump). However the jump were cancelled on the day due to bad weather, so I had to console myself with the fact that I had been white-water rafting down the mighty Zambesi. I went on to present my paper at the conference, and have subsequently spoken at international conferences held in France, Portugal, Hungary, USA, Canada, Japan, Taiwan and, most recently, Singapore. And all thanks to overcoming my nerves by going white-water rafting! (Although knowing bit about the Web probably helped too :-).

These thoughts came back to me after I’d given my talk at the Bridging Worlds conference. As I mentioned the talk was entitled “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” and in order to demonstrate an approach I take in balancing risks and benefits I described how the slides for the talk were available online with a Creative Commons licence. I also explained that I was happy for my talk to be recorded or broadcast or for the talk to be blogged live - and described that I was using a Flip video camera to record my talk, and would subsequently make this available on Google Video. I explained the reasons I was doing this. I was aware of possible risks - I might make mistakes in my talk which would be preserved for other to see, for example. However I also explained the benefits of doing this - I was speaking at the conference as I had a message I wanted to communicate, and I wanted to maximise the impact of the message and the audience - and I felt that this could be helped by the ‘amplification’ of my talk using a variety of networked technologies.

And it seems that this explanation was appreciated, with Ivan Chew (ramblinglib on Twitter) and a fellow speaker at the conference commenting:

“Brilliant: your explanation of how you weighed the risks Vs benefits of allowing others to vid/ blog/ record your talk“

Ivan went on to further summarise my talk in a subseqent blog post.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that many speakers do take risks when they give presentations - and that this comes with the territory. And participating in amplified conferences can then be seen as a natural extension of the risk-taking and not being fashionable or being rude.

Posted in Events, Web2.0   Tagged: bw2008   

Back in September I presented a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” at the ADDW08 conference in which I described my criticisms of the WAI approach to Web accessibility and argued the need to explore alternative approaches. Shadi Abou-Zhara, who works for W3C WAI was in the audience and after I gave my talk he said that he didn’t disagree with many of the points I had made in my talk, but didn’t see what relevance they had to the WAI approach to Web accessibility. Shadi had made a similar point after I presented a paper on “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” at the W4A 2007 conference.

But if Shadi has no fundamental disagreements with the holistic approach to Web accessibility that myself, David Sloan, Lawrie Phipps and other have been developing over the years how does this relate to the ongoing work of Shadi, his colleagues in W3C WAI and those involved in WAI working group activities over the years?

Reflecting on the comments Shadi made and the discussions I had at the ADDW 2008 conference with David MacDonald, an invited expert to the WCAG 2.0 group it seems to my that there is a mismatch between the work being carried out by WAI and the expectations of users of the WAI guidelines.

In response to a question about the relationships between usability and accessibility it seems that WAI’s interest is in usability only as far as it affects users with disabilities significantly more than most users. And I think this view which focusses purely on the needs of users with disabilities results in an approach which is blind to real world complexities and to the actual take-up and effectiveness of their solutions.

The developers of WAI accessibility guidelines seem to have a narrowly defined scope for their work. This seems to cover the development of technical guidelines which will enhance accessibility for users with various types of disabilities. In is not in scope for people at WAI to address the resource implications of conforming with their guidelines, the complexities of implementing the guidelines or to consider alternatives ways in which accessibility challenges can be addressed.

If these issues are out-of-scope for WAI, then there’s a need for the issues to be addressed by the user community.  And this will include addressing these difficult issues. It is the user community to decide when the WAI guidelines may be the best way of providing accessible services, when other solutions may be relevant and to ensure that cost-effective and sustainable solutions are provided.

The WAI guidelines have an important role to play in helping to enhance the accessibility of networked services - but the user organisations have to make the more challenging decisions of deciding when to make use of WAI guidelines and when other solutions may be relevant.

Posted in Accessibility      

I succumbed! Well, I partly succumbed, buying myself an iPod Touch, rather than an iPhone (which is illustrated, but the user interface for the two devices is similar).  But I have to admit that I am impressed.

Yes the user interface is cool - or if you don’t like the ‘c***’ word the interface is intuitive and easy-to-use. But what I really like are the applications which exploit the device’s WiFi capabilities.  It’s good to access applications such as Twitter and Facebook from a mobile device - even if I have to download the data while I’m connected to a WiFi network; unlike iPhone users I can’t access networked services over a mobile phone network - but then again I’m not paying £40/month to O²!

I’m particularly excited when I speculate about the digital environment we’ll be living in in a few years time. Imagine what it will be like when most people have a device like this as a replacement for the current generation of mobile phones. And combine the richness and ease-of-use of such devices with, it is to be hoped, a more pervasive and affordable networked environment.  We with then have the personal information access point (Google, probably!), communications tool (such as Twitter) and location-aware tool (such as BrightKite) together with links with a desktop environment (I’m using the Netnewswire application on both my iPod Touch and my desktop PC). The digital world will be very different, I feel.

Of course the device will have its critics. Unlike the Google Android the device, the iPod Touch/iPhone’s operating system is proprietary; Google have made the operating system for Android available as open source.

And applications can only be (legitimately) installed from Apple’s walled garden - the iTunes Store.

But I think the world has moved on from the time when we seemed to prioritize certain aspects of the development environment over satisfying the user - we’re no longer dogmatic about open source and open standards, I feel; rather we seek to exploit open source and open standards if doing so can provide a satisfactory user experience. I think it’s good that we have moved to a more pragmatic approach rather than the dogmatic views we had in the past.

Yes, I like my new personal learning environment, personal research environment and personal social environment. Everyone should have one, I feel.

Posted in Web2.0      

The recent UKOLN workshop on “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations” was based on a half-day blog workshop which has been run for the library sector (on two occassions) and the museums sector at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. The workshop has recently been updated to include a session on the potential of social networks, micro blogs and video blogs. 

I described the potential of Twitter - and, indeed, made use of Twitter during the workshop in order to “ask a friend” for suggestions on how to respond to a question I’d received at the workshop: “Do you have any evidence that blogs provide a ROI for museums e.g increased visitor nos.?“.  I’m pleased to say that I received a number of speedy responses on Twitter (with more in-depth responses from Mike Ellis on Skype).  Phil Bradley suggested that I “smile at them and just say ‘yes, I was asked the same thing about the internet itself 10 years ago“ and Mike Ellis told me to “remember that one (actually, two, I believe) of the DCMS measures are virtual, i.e. not just physical that “counts“.

This example proved a useful way of demonstrating to the workshop participants how Skype can be used to support a community of peopkewith shared interests, and is less intrusive than email. I also mentioned how Twitter can be a useful tool for listening to what people may be saying about you and your organisation - and this use seemed to be of particular interest to the marketing managers at the workshop.  So I was particularly pleased when I noticed that my TweetDeck client’s search window for recent tweets containing “UKOLN” listed a tweet from Steve Ellwood which said:

admiring UKOLN briefing docs on Web2.0/blogging etc. http://is.gd/7kcY - as usual worth a look for explaining “What’s it all for?”

Case proven?

Posted in Twitter