Scripting Enabled is a conference and hack day in London, England in September 2008.

In this video Antonia Hyde explains how learning disabilities affect the experience of users of online systems and shows several video examples available on her YouTube profile. It was very interesting to see Antonia get very excited about the opportunity of speaking at Scripting Enabled and the amount of research and interview work delivered in the short amount of time before the event was impressive. Again, thanks must go to BBC backstage for filming, Opera for transcribing and Yahoo Developer Network for hosting the video.

Transcripts courtesy of the Opera Developer Network and Antonia Hyde (video in video transcriptions)

Christian Heilmann: Now, those of you who know XFN, which is the XHTML Friends Network microformat thing, know there’s one thing called a muse that I can mark someone up as my muse and link to them. So, far it’s been Steve Faulkner but I must say that Antonia has obviously earned that respect with what we’ve done here and what she’s going to talk about.

So, Antonia was one of the people that talked at the Accessibility 2.0 she was on before me, and her presentation inspired me to do the Easy YouTube, which inspired me to go to the Mashed event and show it on stage which then inspired Channel 4 to give me money to do this. So, it was a lot of inspiration going on.

She’s not nervous at all. She’s been doing this for years. So, over to Antonia and I seriously, seriously hope you will enjoy this because she has a lot of good things to say. So, Antonia Hyde from United Response.

Antonia: OK. Brilliant. I’m going to talk to you about online content for people with learning disabilities. I’ve called it Opening Doors because this is something that we really need to do for this particular group.

So, here’s a piece of audio, just to tell you why Opening Doors for People with Learning Disabilities is important. It’s actually somebody saying that we really need to make everything accessible for all people with learning disabilities online. So, I just wanted to say thank you very much to Christian and for asking me to speak today. And I’m not representing all people with learning disabilities of course. But, I really hope that this will help you all to understand some of the issues. And hopefully, the people that I’ve worked with to create this presentation: it will seem like they’re in the room.

So, I work for United Response. It’s a national charity supporting 1500 people with a wide range of disabilities, but mostly people with learning disabilities. It was set up over 30 years ago. It currently operates across England and in Wales and it supports people to live in the community and delivers what we call “person-centred support.” So, it’s not one particular service. It’s basically looking at the individual and seeing what they need in order to live in the community.

A lot of people recently have been asking me at various conferences what a learning disability is. And um, I might be setting myself up for a fall in trying to explain this, but I’m going to try anyway. There’s around one million people with learning disabilities in England, but this isn’t an exact figure. There is no particular statistic. There are a lot of people with learning disabilities who function very well in society and people really won’t know that they have a learning disability. They could be extremely mild.

It’s a wide range of conditions. So, it could be something like Down’s Syndrome or people who are born brain damaged. So, some people are affected moderately and some people severely. So, “people are born with impairments that restrict or reduce the ability to learn as quickly or readily as others.”

Some people have a secondary impairment. So, that could be a physical disability or a sensory impairment. Or it could be a communication disability, like autism. Autism actually isn’t a learning disability. Health conditions also come along with a lot of learning disabilities, so things like heart conditions. There’s no typical person. There’s no quick fix. This is not a “fix the code that will work for everyone” issue.

So, learning disability versus learning difficulty. Here’s the thing: a lot of people with learning disabilities refer to themselves as having a learning difficulty. That’s something they like to own. But, the received sense of a learning difficulty would be something like dyslexia. So, sometimes, they’re used interchangeably and you might want to qualify, but at the same time we don’t want to be labelling people by their disability.

So, people with learning disabilities have different communication preferences to us perhaps, or to some of us. Some people might want things in pictures and in words, other people might want to communicate just with pictures. Someone with a mild to moderate learning disability may live independently in the community and hold down a job. Someone with a severe learning disability could do those things but they would need some support to do that. Someone with a profound learning disability might find it very challenging to do those things without high levels of support. And they wouldn’t necessarily use language to communicate. So, lots of people I work with don’t use language. They might use, you know, their facial expressions for example.

So, I wanted to show you a video, hopefully, of some people I’ve worked with recently, just to sort of give a bit of context.

[video starts]

Shirley: Ok Michael, what we having today?

Voiceover: Michael doesn’t speak. He uses a Dynavox machine with pictures and audio, which he presses to tell people what he wants.

Michael (Dynavox): Brush my teeth…Have a shave…Do my hair…

Voiceover: Or what he thinks of Manchester United..

Michael (Dynavox): What a load of rubbish!

Voiceover:…so he can enjoy life, and have control.

Voiceover: Lizzie lives in her own flat. She has support from people when she needs it. She sings in a band and spends lots of time online looking for music downloads and anything else to do with music. She’d really like to have her own computer.

Kevin: I do this all the time!

Stan: Come on… I’ve got to make my own coffee?

Voiceover: Kevin has a hearing impairment. He lives in supported living in an ordinary house in an ordinary street. Stan is his support worker. He gives Kevin support in his life whenever he needs it.

Stan: I hardly knew this kind of work existed.

Kevin: Stan! Look!

Stan: Yes mate…

Kevin: DDR2 chip!

Stan: I know.

Kevin: I’ve got it in my laptop!

Stan: Oh aye.

Kevin: Wow, fantastic!

Stan: Brilliant…

Kevin: And it’s meant to be two yeah?

Stan: Yep.

Kevin: Two or three?

Stan: Exactly the same.

Kevin: Wait, I’ll go in my room on the computer…

Stan: We’ll go in a minute.

Kevin: Wow!

Stan: Just, just wait a touch.

Kevin: Oh, whatever….

Voiceover: Kevin is brilliant with computers.

Kevin: My name is Kevin Guthrie. I have my own house keys. I have my own room. I buy my own food. I do things when I want.

[video ends]

Antonia: So, that’s to give you an idea of some of the people I work with. For those of you who can see this graphic, I just want to apologise. I did it very quickly this morning. So, I’m sorry it doesn’t look so good! It’s a no entry sign for those of you who can’t see it. So, barriers: that’s what we’re talking about today, some of the closed doors. And obviously, there’s so much that we’ve got in common with the presentations we’re giving. Logging in and out is such a big issue for a lot of people with learning disabilities. Where to go, remembering things, and actually where it is in the first place. Captcha: I don’t think I need to expand too much. Navigation and information architecture as Kath has just said is increasingly becoming a really big issue. And I will probably talk about this later on.

Antonia: Navigation/Information Architecture is a really big deal. If you’re not making things clear, people don’t know where to go, which means they’re not accessing whatever it is that you’ve made. Also, things are not consistent, things are not broken down into bite-size chunks. I’ll come on to all of this in a bit more detail later.

Content. Increasingly, people are forgetting to say what the website is about or perhaps what the API does and what you can do there. So, I mean, literally, how much more of a barrier can one have? Obviously, all the things we’ve been talking about this morning: You can’t get on to it.

Control. So, using things, really. That’s how I like to talk to people I work with about it. So, that could be anything from players, which we’ll talk about later, to search. And of course, generating content themselves and contributing and interaction. Again, it’s as we’ve said, some of the social networking sites are still extremely inaccessible for people with learning disabilities.

So, I just want to talk a bit about how people use the web. A lot of people with learning disabilities do go online with somebody else there. This could be their support worker, it could be their friend, it doesn’t matter. But, a lot of people still need support to actually go online. There are lots of reasons for this, I think. Since I’ve been really looking into this in detail, it goes right back to education. It goes back to hardware and all sorts of the things that we’ve talking about and I want to explore that at a later date - how we can perhaps change that. Often people do things hand on hand. So, the support worker would literally have their hand on the other person’s hand and help them to move the mouse or whatever they were using to access websites. So, it needs to be clear for everyone, the support workers too!

There’s some great innovation around Assistive Technology (AT) for people with learning disabilities. The Rix Centre are doing some really interesting work where people are using pictures to action what they go and see online. So, please, do go and have a look. I was going to show a Channel 4 news piece, but I didn’t get permission in time. So, please do go and find it.

So, more and more people are coming online. And people are getting control of their own budgets and they’re living independently. So, we need to make sure we get this right.

Another video. I thought I’d show you what people… what some people say about the barriers they’re facing. (Watch the video on YouTube)

[video starts]

Antonia: Hi Ann.

Ann: Hello.

Antonia: Ok, so you use websites, don’t you?

Ann: Yes.

Antonia: Ok, so what do you go on to websites to find out about?

Ann: Groups… TV stars… Anything.

Antonia: What do you like to find out about?

Ann: Trisha…Jerry Springer…Ready Steady Cook…Coronation Street…

Antonia: So you like your TV?

Ann: Yes.

Antonia: And you like music as well don’t you? Ok… You like going online don’t you? What do you find difficult about some of the websites that you go to Can you think of anything?

Ann: Some of them are too small. And some of them are big. That’s big… good. The small ones I don’t use.

Antonia: When you say small, do you mean small writing?

Ann: Yes.

Antonia: What makes websites easier to use?

Ann: To read.

Antonia: What things could people do on their websites that would make it easier for you?

Ann: Less pic… more pictures and less writing.

Antonia: Is there anything else people could do?

Ann: There’s all sorts of things you can do on the computer.

Antonia: Can you think of a website that you go on to that you really enjoy? That you really like and you find it easy to use?

Ann: Sometimes I use Google. Google, on the computer.

Antonia: How do you find it to use? Easy?

Ann: Little bit easy and a little bit hard.

Antonia: Is there anything difficult about some of the websites that you go on to? What do you find difficult?

Ann: Sometimes small…more writing less pictures.

Antonia: You want more writing and less pictures?

Ann: No like more pictures, less writing.

Antonia: That’s what you want? So you think that a lot of websites have writing that’s too small for you?

Ann: It’s got to be big and bold.

Antonia: And what is it about using pictures that helps you, that makes it easier?

Ann: To see.

Antonia: Ok. Does it help you to understand what the website is talking about?

Ann: Yes.

Antonia: So if we all had more pictures and made them bigger that would help you?

Ann: Mmm.

Antonia: So if we wanted to change how we made websites to make it easier for people with learning disabilities, what would you ask us to do?

Ann: Change.

Antonia: And what would you ask us to change?

Ann: Make it bigger. The pictures, no… the writing.

Antonia: Ok, thank you.

Lizzie: My name is Lizzie…and I like performing.

Antonia: What kind of performing do you do?

Lizzie: I sing.

Antonia: Do you sing in a band?

Lizzie: Yeah. I go to YouTube to see what’s happening with me…I go to Heart n Soul website so see what’s happening with them. I um go on to the music to see what downloads I can get for my pod and stuff like that.

Antonia: So do you find it difficult to use websites?

Lizzie: Yeah.

Antonia: Can you tell us why?

Lizzie: Because there’s no pictures or no there’s no pictures or the person… there’s no pictures or the computer doesn’t speak to you how to access this, like something that says ‘Oh welcome to Google, um put your name in this box here’… something like that.

Antonia: There’s a difference between websites that are made for people with learning disabilities and websites that are what we call mainstream…

Lizzie: Yeah, but the thing is mainstream should be… ok…The mainstream websites, yeah, should include people with learning disabilities. Should include it. Because, though we got disabilities, we still want to keep up with the times, we still want to know what’s going on. In the internet world. And if everyone could consider or think about when you’re doing a web page or a web site people with disabilities as well then… then we won’t feel like we’re singled out ’cause we are really. We feel like that, that we’re singled out from the normal people with… ok from the mainstream to the not mainstream.

[video ends]

Antonia: So, hopefully, that gives you a bit of an idea of what two people have to say about being online. So, some key points are: people feel excluded when it comes to accessing websites and applications. And they offered up two possible solutions: bigger pictures and less writing.

Now, from a designer’s perspective or from any sort of design, yeah, from a designer’s perspective, that’s not always very easy to do. But, there are ways that we can do things that make things seem like the pictures are bigger and the writing is less or bigger.

Many people with learning disabilities like to receive information as pictures or pictures and text. And they like to receive information broken down into smaller chunks. So, I really want you all to kind of try and bear that in mind.

Here’s an example. For those of you who can’t see the screen, in the top left, there is… It looks like a grid with different pictures where people can select different aspects of their life that they want to tell other people about. So, you would click on the one that said ‘people’. That would take you to another grid, which would then show you all the different people in your life. So, you can see how the information is ordered and laid out. And this is something that a lot of people are using, this kind of tool which is PowerPoint, incidentally, to express preferences, to express choice, and to tell people things about themselves.

What might happen is that when you drill down, having used the grid as your starting point, you might get to pages, which would normally contain a lot of text that have been broken down into easy read basically. It’s easy to read, we call it. So, basically, it’s pages with pictures, which is the yellow thing that those of you who can see the screen can see now. This is taken from our website. So, I’m trying to create every page from United Response’s website as pages with pictures. And the reason why I’m doing this is because people wanted me to.

So, if we move on to APIs, how can we take some of this into some of the things that all of you wonderful people are building? Here’s the YouTube player, as you can see. And there are some problems with players generally for people with learning disabilities I thought I would highlight. Quite often, there’s no clear separation between the controls and the screen, what you’re viewing and what you can do. The controls are often not big enough for people with learning disabilities, not clear enough, there are no labels, the graphics are too small and there’s no option to repeat. And a lot of people like to have information and then hear it again or see it again, so conceptually it helps people.

Many people need to take time. As I said before, a lot of people with learning disabilities have mobility issues and they don’t want to use Assistive Technology. It’s OK for them to take time to get to whatever it is that they want to do. All of these problems really means that access is denied if people don’t know that these things, such as controls, are actually there.

So, players: a possible solution. Easy YouTube. It’s magic! So, you can see here, obviously Kath has already talked about it and it’s fantastic that you know, it is benefiting a lot of people. And when Christian told me about this, I really… I’m not sure that I squealed, sorry! But, it was really amazing. I couldn’t quite believe that he had done this.

And so, I spoke about the problems of rich media and players in quite a lot of depth at Accessibility 2.0, that Abilitynet put on. And Christian took the YouTube API and created Easy YouTube. And you can find it, for those of you who haven’t seen it, at… These slides will go online later, but if you don’t know, it’s at http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube. He’s also provided the documentation about how he did it, because there’s no way I’m going to try and explain that to you because I don’t know!

So, I will talk to you about what happened next. Here was the original, we think is the original, which we talked about and Christian put up on his blog and loads of people gave comments, both on and offline as to things that we might be able to do. And Christian and I worked quite closely together to think about some other things that we might want to put before we went to testing. So, there were things that were maybe based on my experience, I’ve worked with people with learning disabilities for eight years. So, there are quite a few things I’ve picked up along the way that I thought might help. But, I didn’t know whether they were technically, actually, you know, able to be done.

So, it was really about collaboration. And this is the one that we tested. Just very quickly, some of the really amazing things about Easy YouTube, will come out a bit later. But, I just want you to consider that what we did in terms of the design and the layout of the player was we have actually put things into component parts. It’s very clear. If colour is something to look at in this particular instance and I’m sorry for those of you who can’t see the colour. But, the YouTube address bar is green. The search box is blue. So, for people with learning disabilities, who can see, this is a massive thing. It’s really brilliant, you know, people can really differentiate that information from that information.

So, it was tested by a wide range of people, not just people with learning disabilities. You know, friends, colleagues, everybody went and tested it. We, as I say, we had great feedback. I tested it with a range of people with learning disabilities, from people who are really web savvy and player savvy to people who just aren’t, just to see, you know, what was the language doing, how easy was it for them to use?

And what I did was a mix of testing. I don’t do what Abilitynet does I don’t do straight user testing. A mix of testing and observational research, I suppose. So… and quite a lot of teaching, quite a few people just didn’t know anything about anything to do with players, so it was really enlightening and interesting. And it was very interesting to see how quickly some people learned because it was easy. And that’s the point I meant to make earlier, is that a lot of people with learning disabilities I work with, learn, they can learn. It’s just that we just that we need to do things differently.

“When is YouTube going to look like this?” was a comment from someone I tested with, which I just loved. Anyway, so I put it up there. Some of the things people liked: more control generally over what they were doing, when they were doing it. The volume controls, the volume indicator and the buttons to rewind, to play, to pause, to stop. The address bar option is very popular even if support was needed to do that.

People could change the video size easily. This is a big deal as well. People like to, you know, have control over how large or small something can be of course. The volume indicator and controls and then being able to just turn the volume off. I don’t know how many of you been on to players where you’ve sort of, it’s so loud and you’re fiddling around trying to work out how to turn the volume off. People thought that was a great feature.

The control buttons were the right size for people with mobility issues, that they weren’t sort of having to do trial and error to get themselves on to the button. They were easy to understand. The symbols were great. And for those people who could see the colour coding, it was excellent. The play button is green for go and the stop button is red for stop. And a lot of people understood that. And search function was easy to use.

So, things we were asked to change. We were asked to look into making it a bit… having more pictures really. So, the video sizes: at the moment, that’s the option to see the video small, medium and large. People asked for that to be explicit. So, I mean, this is just, this is work in progress. But, actually, just doing a small square, a medium square and a large square reinforces small, medium and large. And this is a key thing really. It’s actually graphics supported by text and text supported by graphics rather than expecting people to understand a word or a graphic. So, you know, these two in harmony is a really big issue.

The search results: people really wanted to see a thumbnail of the video they were going to select so that they knew that they were going to go to the right thing. Again, I think people have just been burnt by clicking links that take them off to something that they just didn’t want to go to or they don’t understand. So, Christian tells me all these things are easy to do, by the way. I don’t know. But, to have a picture of the videos is really good.

To be able to go to the next page if there is one, just a little arrow at the bottom of that page to say that there is one, there’s more, you can keep going. I’ve added that in and we’ll have to test that again. I’ve moved the YouTube address bar down to the bottom here in response to quite a lot of feedback. But, this is something I wanted to play with a little bit more because a URI or URL is associated with being at the top of the screen. And having, putting the address at the bottom of the screen I think will confuse a lot of people I work with, certainly. So, that’s something I’m going to try and bring out a little bit more in more testing.

So, I’m going to show you a video. Lizzie, who you met earlier and you would’ve met in the audio at the very beginning. She has something to say about it.

[video starts]

Antonia: Hi Lizzie.

Lizzie: Hi.

Antonia: Can you tell me what you see on the screen?

Lizzie: I see Google UK on the screen.

Antonia: OK. Can you search for YouTube?

Lizzie: Yeah. Sure.

Antonia audio describes: Lizzie is typing in YouTube into Google.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: Are you ok spelling it?

Lizzie: No How do you spell YouTube?

Antonia: YOUTUBE

Lizzie: How do you spell Mary J. Blige please?

Antonia audio describes: She’s in YouTube now.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: MARY…

Antonia audio describes: Lizzie is dyslexic. It takes her quite a long time to type things.

[video continues to play]

Lizzie: RY.. hold on. Yeah?

Antonia: Space.

Lizzie: Just put the J for J innit?

Antonia: Lizzie, can you have a look at the page? Is there anything that helps you there?

Antonia audio describes: YouTube is giving her a prompt for Mary J. Blige. Sorry about the audio description. I hope it’s helpful.

[video continues to play]

Lizzie: Wait there… Yeah, I think so. There, the top one.

Antonia: OK. Why don’t you go for that? Is that useful?

Antonia audio describes: So, she’s on the YouTube page with Mary J. Blige videos.

[video continues to play]

Lizzie: Yeah….. Yes! No! I don’t know

Antonia: Do you want to choose one?

Lizzie: Yeah.

Antonia audio describes: She’s trying to find out how to select the video at the moment. She’s found it.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: OK. So, can you make the size of the screen bigger?

Lizzie: I’ve forgotten how you do that.

Antonia: Is there anything on the website that shows you how to make the size of the screen bigger?

Lizzie: Not really…

Antonia: How easy do you find that to do?

Lizzie: Fairly easy. It’s not too hard but spellings and things….If I had it written down on a piece of paper or in pictures then I’d be able to do it.

Antonia: OK. So, what do you think of the actual page that you’re on? Obviously what you were looking at just now was the player wasn’t it, where the video is played. What do you think of the actual web page that you’re on?

Lizzie: It’s good because you can, when you’re on YouTube, you can get at information really quickly.

Antonia: And do you find all the stuff on that page easy to understand if you look at it?

Lizzie: Not really, no. Because it’s… with me, it will have to be in picture form with me.

Antonia: Can you go to the top of the screen where the website address is? Right at the top?

Lizzie: Yep.

Antonia: And click with the left hand…that’s it…can you right click? Where your cursor is, can you go down to the tab? That bit, press that.

Antonia audio describes: She’s just tabbed into the Easy YouTube player.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: Now…

Lizzie: Now!

Antonia: Do you like that?

Lizzie: Yeah!

Antonia: Can you go to the YouTube address box? Can you see where that is?

Lizzie: Yeah.

Antonia: It’s where you were just now, down a bit…

Lizzie: Here?

Antonia: No where you were just now.

Lizzie, Oh there.

Antonia: Down a bit…

Lizzie: Here?

Antonia: In the green box. There’s a big green box isn’t there?

Lizzie: Oh, in the middle?

Antonia: Yep. OK. If you left click there and then right click to paste. Right click the mouse. And then go to paste. That one. And then you click on “load”.

Lizzie: Hold on… Load. Ah! That’s good!

Antonia: Can you tell me how you’d play that video?

Lizzie: By the play button there.

Antonia: OK.

Lizzie: And you can… the screen is either small, medium or large. I like it large. So, I can see…what I’m doing.

Antonia: OK. Can you go and tell me how you’d control the volume?

Lizzie: Yeah.

Antonia: Can you show me?

[music plays]

Lizzie: That’s volume up.

Antonia audio describes: Lizzie really just knew where to go. She really did.

[video continues to play]

Lizzie: That’s no volume.

[music stops]

Antonia: OK. How do you know how much volume you’re…?

Lizzie: By the volume here.

Antonia: Is that helpful?

Lizzie: Yes.

Antonia: How would you turn the volume off completely?

Lizzie: Like that.

Antonia: What’s the button next to that, do you think?

Lizzie: That’s no volume at all.

Antonia: Brilliant. So, can you show me how you would pause the video?

Lizzie: Sure.

Antonia audio describes: So, it doesn’t take her too long to find the pause button.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: And how would you get the video back to the beginning?

Lizzie: Ok…Rewind!

Antonia audio describes: She goes straight to the rewind button.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: How would you search for a video actually from here rather than from YouTube.

Lizzie: Just type in the name! Really!

Antonia: And where would you type it on that page?

Lizzie: Up there! I can show you…watch!

Antonia audio describes: I have left this because I just want you to see what happens. So… go with it! So, she’s typing the name of what she’s looking for into the URL box, not the search box, confident that she’s doing the right thing. And it hasn’t worked.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: Is there anywhere else on the page that you think you could use to search?

Lizzie: Yep, here.

Antonia audio describes: And she goes straight to the search box.

[video continues to play]

Antonia: Are you putting yourself in?

Lizzie: Yep.

Antonia: Brilliant! How was that to do? To do the search?

Lizzie: Very easy.

Antonia audio describes: So, she’s pulled up a video of herself and her band.

[video continues to play]

[music starts]

Antonia: Is that your band?

Lizzie: Yep. We’re called Heart N Soul. This is a promo video of one of my songs. It’s called “I like the base”.

Antonia comments: Good marketing, eh?!

[video continues to play]

Antonia: How is it to look at that using that player?

Lizzie: Um.. very very good. ‘Cause I can use it. I have no trouble using this.

Antonia: OK. So, Lizzie, how do you find that page?

Lizzie: This will be very easy for me to access. Because it’s very accessible. Like this.

Antonia: Can you tell me which player you prefer: the first one or this one?

Lizzie: This one.

Antonia: Can you tell me why?

Lizzie: Because it’s much easier to use. Much easier to use.

[video ends]

Antonia: So, I hope that was interesting. So, key points really about the Easy YouTube player: feedback and collaboration. It’s not just about working with people with learning disabilities. Everyone who posted comments, everyone who talked to either of us or anyone else involved in it, you know, that it was a collaborative thing. And we’re still testing and changing it. The work is ongoing. I would like to do some more testing with people with mobility issues who have learning disabilities as well to see how they fare. And I’m also working on enhancing the design. I’m midway through something new, especially to address this search problem, you know, of knowing which one was the search box and which one was the URI box.

So, what could happen next? One thing that Lizzie said off camera, which I wish I caught was ‘the thing that would make me use that, is if YouTube had on their page, “go and look at that on the other player”‘. That of course, would be the most fantastic thing - to have that ability. You’re on a site, but you want to see something slightly differently, just go over there.

But really, how can we get this player out there? What I would really, really like is for this to inform a universal accessible player for everyone. I’ve been trying to find a player for maybe a year and a half now. I’ve been using my limited technical skills to try and change things. The thing that I talked about at Accessibility 2.0 was that, you know, I’m not putting up things on to our website using players that I know aren’t accessible to people.

So, Lizzie’s comment about being included. How can we take some of these things into the mainstream? What can we take from specialist APIs like that and some of the websites that I build for people with learning disabilities into the mainstream? There’s a tension between the two. You know, APIs often have adverts and lots of moving pictures. We’ve discussed this again this morning. Mashups can be real problems. But, how can we try and solve some of these issues? We don’t want to be creating disability specific ghettos where you can only see things specific to your ability or disability. I think that’s quite dangerous.

So, specialist versus mainstream. My day job is about balancing the two. So, what I would do is maybe build a website or pages for people specifically with learning disabilities so that I know they can access them. But, I also try and take the learning from that on to the corporate website so they can also hopefully access the corporate website. And it’s difficult. It’s tough. But, it’s most certainly not impossible!

And my strengths are: design solutions, content and multimedia (when the audio’s OK). But, I need to work with professionals with other skills. I can’t affect… I could never have done that Easy YouTube player, you know. That’s the reason why I’m really interested and I’m going to come tomorrow. I’m really interested in this kind of collaboration because I was just noodling around on my own, wondering if someone one day might do something.

We can make the mainstream a more accessible place for everyone by giving people more clues. I quite often think of websites and APIs as giving people clues to access things.

I think we should think differently and I’ve been thinking about online language. This is from the YouTube page. But, it occurred to me when I was writing this presentation. Here’s the option to maximise “favourites” and to minimise “similar”. OK, so they’ve got arrows which should tell you something. The arrow goes to the right for “favourites”, which should tell you that you can maximise that. And then, the arrow goes down for “similar”, which should tell you, if click on that, you should be able to minimise it. And the words, you know, they do tell you what it’s about roughly.

But you could just make it different by changing that to being “open your favourites” or “close similar videos.” I mean, obviously there would be a state change depending on what’s happening and where you are at with that. But, I don’t think by adding those words just to make those arrows a little bit more meaningful, I don’t think any of us is going to worry about that, are we? Is that going to be a problem for any of us, the difference between that? “Favourites” and “similar” to “open your favourites” and “close similar videos”?

So, there’s a desire at the moment to include people with learning disabilities in the accessibility debate, which is fantastic. And I’m getting involved in lots of things and I hope that other people working in the field will do, too. There’s a lot of work to be done. There are loads of great functions in the stuff that we’re building, but lack of clarity blocks access to those things. And without access, people aren’t included, empowered or enabled. And this is from circles of support on Facebook which people really use - to web content. So, how can we change it?

[audio starts]

Lizzie: The mainstream websites, yeah, should include people with learning disabilities, should include them, because… because though we got disabilities, we still want to keep up with the times.

[audio ends]

Antonia: So, I’m sure some amazing things will come out of these two days. It’s such a brilliant idea. Please try and consider people with learning disabilities. Thank you and if this interests you, get in touch. My details are on the screen. Antonia dot Hyde at unitedresponse dot org dot uk .

Christian: Splendid. Thank you very much.

This is the first video of the talks at Scripting Enabled in London last September. Thanks must go to BBC backstage for filming, the Yahoo Developer Network for hosting and the Opera Developer Network for the transcriptions. Take it away, Denise:

Transcription courtesy of the Opera Developer Network

Christian Heilmann: Give a big hand for Denise. She’s, well, not nervous and all. Here we go. Everyone, thank you for coming.

Denise Stephens: Hello and yeah, I’m pretty nervous so please bear with me. This is my first ever public speaking. And right, OK. Let’s get started. "Enabled by Design meets Script Enabled." I think this is a very simple equation, quite nicely sums up, well, what Scripting Enabled is all about and that’s technology plus good design equals scripting is enabled. Hi, my name’s Denise and that’s me there over the crutches.

So I guess you’re wondering how I ended up needing crutches in the first place. Was it a) due to a skiing injury? Was it ) due to falling off a table while I was dancing on it? Is it c) because I have Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis? Or d) is it all of the above?

Yeah, well it’s C. I have Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis or MS as it’s also known. MS is a neurological condition that’s unpredictable, variable and different in every case. So what sorts of barriers does this cause?

As well as the more visible mobility problems that I experience one of my main symptoms is extreme fatigue. This can affect me in many different ways. It can cause extreme tiredness and make it hard to concentrate and can exacerbate some of the other symptoms that I’m about to describe.

Sometimes my eyes go a bit funny and I’m only one of many who has a visual impairment. Just like to point out this picture is in honour of the fact that it’s talk like a pirate day and I wasn’t feeling brave enough to do my whole presentation in pirate speak so I’ll just do my token thing by saying "ARRRh!"

This can also include blurred vision, double vision and color distortion. This is where colors to appear to be altered, for example, red’s can appear to be pink. But it’s not always my eyesight that’s affected.

Sometimes I feel like I’m wearing Mickey Mouse gloves and at other times, I can feel, I can experience, numbness or altered sensation in my hands. Just like Mr. Jane here, sometimes I’m a little bit shaky and this can make coordination and fine control movements extremely difficult. As well as being extremely frustrating and annoying, this means that typing, selecting from drop-down menus and clicking on icons can be a bit of a nightmare.

And sometimes my hearing isn’t as good as it should be. It appears a bit muffled. And sometimes I suffer from vertigo. A common misconception is that vertigo is a fear of heights and this isn’t actually true. Vertigo is a balance disorder that can cause dizziness and make you feel like you’re spinning or swaying even when you’re standing still. I have to say it’s not a particularly pleasant experience. I definitely wouldn’t recommend it.

So all of these things can make life completely unpredictable but one thing is for certain, every day will be different from the next. And my needs will change from day to day. Everyone has different needs and abilities, so how do you meet everyone’s requirements at the same time?

Well, this isn’t strictly possible, but one of the approach is universal design. Universal Design takes inputs from all users by taking as many needs as possible into consideration in the design process.

However, sadly, this doesn’t mean designing products that can be used by everybody. Sadly there is not a single product that can fulfill all user needs at once. Here’s an example of how Oxo uses universal design to make people’s lives easier. This here is a potato peeler from the Oxo Good Grips range. Its design is ergonomic, it’s got a wide handle and with a non-slip pressure absorbing grip. This sort of increased design means it is accessible to a much wider audience.

So why not apply this approach to online systems? Well that’s exactly why you’re here today. So by now, I should think you’re wondering, what is Enabled by Design and why am I so interested in Scripting Enabled? Enabled by Design is developing an online community that would support anyone that can make adjustments to their lives.

This can be through as a result of disability, injury or personal identified needs. We want to practice what we preach. And it’s extremely important our website will reflect this. And that’s why we’re so excited about Scripting Enabled. Just like to say, thanks for listening and ask if anyone’s got any questions? There’s my contact details, if anyone needs them.

Christian: OK, we managed to finish in the first presentation, five minutes before it was supposed to start, so we’re off to a good start!

…but that’s basically what I wanted to do. I don’t want anybody just show boating, going up on stage like "hey, look at what I have done". It’s more important that you can ask questions and if you want, what’s on your mind. So to fire it off a bit, we will have this young gentleman over there, run around with a microphone if you have any questions, but Denise if you can just quickly give us a run through what Enabled by Design, what the site and the community would be like or is like at the moment?

Denise: OK. Basically the idea for Enabled by Design is to make assistive equipped more accessible to people but also to make it more aesthetically pleasing and to actually meet individual’s needs. And so really, we want our website to reflect that ethos. I suppose, one of the main things is that we want a whole experience to be enjoyable and fun because quite often I find the whole disability experience can be quite a serious one and kind of lacks the fun in it and enthusiasm that other design sites might have. And we’re in the process of building up our community and we’re hoping to improve their screens to get people involved and users of the assistive equipment and designers, as well as healthcare professionals and get them working together and trying to figure out on how these relationships would work. How they would work together.

Then picking up the right state for us to build our website. We want our website to be as accessible as possible. Basically that’s why I really wanted to come today, to find out about web accessibility and hopefully take some things home to transfer onto our website.

Christian: In your pitch, you showed an online video as an example to actually show people with different disabilities each of the videos with all systems there’s one of the things that they show, and I was one of the judges of the competition, one thing that I really, really loved was that there was a problem: somebody, I think said he had problems with the cutting of carrots. I would love to cook but I really have problems with my eyes because my hands are really shaky and I can’t really do that. So somebody else found this really cool product that basically is not really that amazing (my mum had one of those four years ago) basically a carrot and you just put a knife on top of it and you chop your carrot that way. So you got this bit button to press rather than just using the knife. But other people have totally forgotten about that product.

So somebody in the crowd could described this in the answers of the comment question. But they just uploaded the video of someone using it in the kitchen, that’s showing, hey, this is how you order it and this is the URL, you can order it from.

And it’s such a wonderful, inspiring story that something that is inaccessible as online video actually can help people just explain something quickly that five pages of textbook wouldn’t have done. So that’s an interesting approach and I would love for more designers to talk about Enabled by Design as well. Especially for product designers, because what you said was also like, just because I need some living aids, that shouldn’t look like a cheap hospital.

Denise: Thank you.

Christian: You got the same with assistive technology as with assistive software, it is so often it’s so unwieldy to install. I think, like for testing purposes, I’ve tried to install JAWS 4 and it asked me for a floppy disk. When I get MacBook Pro in Parallels, floppy disk is not really an option. So are there any questions for Denise?

Woman 1: Well done Denise, I think you did very well for a first time speaker. I’m wondering, what problems that your community have enlightened you about your present website? What’s the feedback been like?

Denise: Well, I have to admit, we’re in our very first stages. We’ve only just recently re-launched our website. It should be, actually it will be on Monday, so it’s quite early on. But we’re very, very interested in getting people to use our website, test it out and see what sort of problems they come into problems with. We’re really keen about listening to our community, finding out what difficulties they’re having and trying to find ways around this. So as I say, at the moment our interim site is there, it’s kind of a in its starting stages. We just want people to just basically share ideas and talk about their experiences and start building up that relationship and so it’s a work in progress, as it were.

Christian: Could you talk about the camp that Enabled by Design was built on, what that was like?

Denise: OK. Well, we kind of came through the Social Innovation Camp route. We took part in the first ever Social Innovation Camp. They had a call for ideas which was basically how can you use web technology and the social web to meet social needs. I’d had my idea for Enabled by Design but it didn’t have that name at that time. About, I suppose in 2005, as a result of my own experiences and I was to diagnosed with Relapsing, Remitting Multiple Sclerosis and underwent a series of disabling relapses. After this happened, I went to hospital and eventually went home but was assessed by an occupational therapist to try and look at different ways of keeping my independence.

And also I was having mobility problems, difficulty manipulating objects in my hands and my eyesight wasn’t particularly good either. So it was great looking at the assistive equipment, finding ways of being independent and trying to do as many things as possible for myself. Because I already felt like I had given up quite a lot. I had to give up my career. So I really didn’t want want to give up anything else. I just want to keep my independence as much as possible.

So all of this equipment was fantastic and I couldn’t fault it in terms of it did what it said on the tin. But, at the same time, I was quite frustrated by the fact my home ended up looking like a hospital and all of the equipment I was given, it was quite dated, clinical and as I say, it’s not a good if your home looks like Victoria Hospital. So I was keen on making a change and I’m trying to kind of disrupt things and a little bit I suppose.

So then, I have this idea but I really didn’t know what to do with it. So eventually, my friends [Name] . Sorry. These are New York kids and he met [Name?], on the way back from Social Innovation Camp and they had a chat about what she was trying to achieve. And so he came back and told me about it, and he said, “Right, this might be a good time for you to actually put your idea out there and see what people think.”

And so, yeah, that’s basically it…the rest is history. I put my application in and I think from 80 to 90 submissions, I think they picked to about six to attend the weekends and it was a fantastic weekend. There was a lot of energy and it was kind of a peep at the sharp edge of social needs, hackers, designers all coming together to work on these six different projects.

And I suppose when I first started at Social Innovation Camp, I didn’t actually know what to expect. I got worried in case I didn’t end up with the actual team I wanted or that they would be interested in my idea or where it was going to go.

But basically, we worked on the idea for the Saturday and the Sunday and then on the Sunday afternoon there was a show-and-tell session. Where everyone had to pitch their idea their proof on concept and talk about where they wanted to go with their idea on the future.

And so, I wasn’t feeling quite brave enough to stand up in front of everybody. So Dominique, who I’ve just introduced you to, he was the voice of Enabled by Design. So, and yeah, and we were awarded first prize. But the other projects were fantastic and the energy from that weekend was great.

So I would just like to say that in December they’re running the second Social Innovation Camp, and so if anyone’s got any ideas that they want to share. Or if they just want to get involved in the weekends, I’m sure they’re going need hackers and so, yeah, get involved. I definitely recommend that.

And so yeah, the events at Social Innovation Camp. I’m sure Christian can tell you a bit about it as well..

Christian: I think she covered it quite nicely. It was quite great to see and also quite inspirational to this day and for tomorrow, as well. It’s great to see that the people just went there and said like, “Hey, we want social change, we’re have a problem,” and was like this is the people for example that is a real pain, not really convoluted process. So they wanted to make like a website where people can rate their prison visits, not like they’re involuntary ones, but the ones where they visit people in prison. A bit like: rate my hospital patient rating, these kind of things.

It was interesting to see the energy that all these times you saw that Denise sitting down there are like 12 guys around her, all hacking along. And setting up Druple and setting up a little system and discussing if they will go for video upload from the beginning of the pitch, or if they already goes.

I saw the energy flowing there. I saw the geeks like yeah, Druple I’ve got these 5,000 plug-ins. So we can all plug in, great. Actually, that’s what I wanted to show, and this is where I want to go with this. And this is the kind of left-right thing that I want to be able to happen. I want basically Geek speak stopped from over developing things that nobody needs and other people basically listening to geeks.

Another thing was to gather a festival. One of the things, one of the winners there was talking about fighting, knife crime in teenagers with some ID system which is yeah, a daring attempt, that’s good. And then they’re like: when you design agencies and if anybody is in the audience here that can build us a website, that would be great.

We got funding now, so we want a website to talk about the knife crime in children. How about you make a Facebook group? How about you make where the kids hang out, and actually talk to them there. When you have a mass of people to talk to, when you have a community, you can think about building up a website.

We always go for the fast, quick technology solution, but we don’t really understand the problems of people. So in terms of technology, therefore the geeks in the audience, so let’s quickly have a show of hands. Who’s going to be here tomorrow for hacking? Who here considers themselves more a designer? Good.

Who’s a hard core hacker? Yeah, you people don’t count. I interviewed you, I know. And anybody who is in a project manager role or managerial role and came here to learn about this things? Good, we got two or three. I think, because if we come up with great ideas and companies don’t give us the money and time to do it, that’s a bit of a problem.

So in terms of for the hackers in the audience, when you staff work at the moment, you bought yourself a new computer. Well, that’s mine, but the other one’s there. And what was the first things that you found that helps you a lot when you solve problems? What were the biggest problems of several websites, although you can even change them if you want to but as you try to build systems around them? What were the biggest interface elements or frustrating moments for you? Not the BBC…

[Laughter]

Denise: Well, I have to admit and for one thing, I suppose using my computer the first place was a bit of a barrier. And having a desktop or a clunky laptop isn’t actually ideal. So, it’s a good excuse I suppose, but a Mac kind of meets my needs and that’s good as an excuse, isn’t it? And…

Christian: Or other soft notebooks from other vendors.

Denise: Oh, yes. I’m sorry, other vendors. I’m not used to this…But basically a lightweight computer that meant that I can actually take it with me, actually do things with it, than rather just be attached to my desktop all the time. In terms of websites, I’m not going to name any. I’ll just think of general things like maybe having screens that are very busy and a lot things that are going on.

It’s very distracting, especially when you got a visual impairment and your eyesight is quite as good. You find it hard to see some things. I suppose if you got a really busy screen, you’ve got lots of things flashing, lots of things going on, things popping out and it makes it impossible to try and figure out what it is actually you’re trying to do and navigate around the page.

Another thing can be that icons to click on can be very, very small which is all very well if you’re very dexterous. But I suppose at the moment I’m not a very dexterous person. I can’t really… my hands are quite numb and it’s my fine movements that are very shaky. So it does make it very difficult to navigate around the page and you can end up clicking on the wrong button and being taken away what you want to see, which is very frustrating.

And sometimes with, I suppose, icons on the toolbar, I sometimes, you can accidentally… If they are too close together, you can accidentally click on the other so you’ll end up opening another application which is also frustrating because you end up having to wait for thing to load. Then close it down and then get back to what you were trying to do.

Christian: My favorite irony there is when you have these font re-sizing tools in a 10 × 10 pixel button.

Man 3: I was just wondering, in terms of methodology or just philosophy… I might be getting too specific, too early here. But do you like it if people try to fix as many problems in the design as possible, just in a single design or do you like site that is can be adapted to your specific problems?

Denise: Well, as I was saying in my presentation, I quite like the idea of the universal designs. That’s kind of meeting as many people’s needs and taking into consideration as many people’s needs during the design process. So I suppose it’s quite useful if our website is as accessible as possible. And if there are people still having problems, then, well maybe they need to look at other ways and trying to adapt their experience. But really it would be lovely if we can have websites that sort of set-up from the beginning to meet as many needs as possible.

Christian: It’s also a bit of a problem, isn’t it? Because you’re run into say accessibility issues with the systems you provide. I mean, it’s always the way like it and we have a preference panel that can change your website around. But finding the preference panel and that now navigating that form, it’s the other issue. But my geek answer to your problem would have been, yeah, icons are too small but they are keyboard accessible. So are you using a lot of keyboard navigation?

Denise: I have to admit, no I’m not. Because I’m not… I’m still learning. But I definitely need to learn those sort of things. But also, typing can be quite difficult for me, so keyboards and shortcuts can be…it’s all very well as I say, you’ve got good control of your fingers, but if you’re shaking or you’ve got tremors, you can end up pressing keys multiple times and shortcuts don’t work as well. So it’s kind of bit of both really.

Christian: That’s a bit of a problem. Because most operating systems have sticky key settings, for example, or have like universal access as it’s called on a Mac now. There’s great, great tools in there. I mean, if you don’t tell people where they are or if we don’t explain to people where they are, I blame software vendors as much as I play in PC World and other computer shops. Like when you sell a computer, people show you the graphics accelerator, what games you can play on it. What people don’t show you like hey if your mom wants to use it, the one with the glasses, she can actually turn it on and you can zoom it here. So we have to get that a bit more out into the main market to get it more interesting for people as well. Is there a question here?

Man 4: Yeah, I’m talking about not using a keyboard although it is hard to navigate by mouse. Are there, maybe, third parties or third tools, whatever, you can use to make it easy to use either of them or is it just a marginal thing to make it easy…

Denise: I suppose that’s the thing. I don’t actually know about everything that’s available. So I need to be educated as well about what’s out there, what people need. I’m just kind of a lay person, trying to make use of my computer the best way I know possible, I suppose. So that’s another reason why I’m here today is to find more what’s out there, what can be used. I was talking to Chris about a few things I ended up buying. It’s got a really useful tool that it can read text to you. But I wouldn’t have heard it about that until I spoke to Chris.

So yeah, it’s kind of about education as well and it’s going to tell people what’s out there, what’s available. So I’m sure there are sorts of things out there that people which they know about them, they’re quite hidden away for certain things.

Male Speaker: And I think let’s add a chain of websites that is going to make an ideal, a very good example you can use very well.

Man 5: Scriptingenabled.org!

Denise: Of course, Scriptingenabled.org

Man 5: Very good.

Denise: Oh, just trying to think. Oh, I supposed Facebook’s quite good in terms of it’s quite, well set out and I know where to fins things. It’s not too busy. Well, it depends on how you set your profile page, I suppose. If you’re adding loads and loads of add-ons, then it will get a very really busy. You’re in control of all of that. It’s like, that’s quite good. And I like the fact that it just makes the world kind of more open so I can keep in touch with my friends, it makes the world more accessible to me. So like, in that way it kind of balances out to the fact the columns I suppose. It’s actually a good application to use.

Christian: What do you use the web for? And you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to!What’s your main purpose to go on the web? Maybe, some people go for gaming, some people go for checking if the tube is down again. Some people go to the BBC to watch their great programs? What is your main driver for going on the web?

Denise: Well, I found this when I was particularly ill, when my mobility was really, really bad, I wouldn’t be able to get out the house. I would be sometimes bed ridden even sometimes just stuck at home. I’m would be completely bored. And I wouldn’t really want to watch the morning TV. It’s just not what you want to do. I know a lot of people say "Oh lucky you you can watch This Morning", but it’s not true.

Denise: But basically the web is my lifeline to the outside world. So now I can communicate with my friends, find out what they’re up to, I can use Skype, I can chat to people and find out about the accessibility of venues before going to them. Say, let’s go to this concert. Let’s check it at the Internet to make sure I won’t have to walk up ten flights of stairs before I get to where I want to go. It’s a really useful tool to do all sorts of things. I suppose, also things like listening to music, anything really. So I suppose I’m really quite average in terms of what I use the web for.

And also as I’m now starting up Enabled by Design, I’m kind of using the resources that out there in terms of setting up a business, learning about the blogging world, and learning about technology I’m quite new to this technology sort of stuff.

Christian: Are there any big MS self help group sites?

Denise: Well, the main one is the MS Society and the MS Trust as well. They do a lot of research work which I’m really kind of interested in and speaking to the MS Trust. To see if they are interested in doing a small article about Enabled by Design and kind of explaining what we’re trying to do. So I’m kind of hoping that by getting in touch with different charities, different organizations that we’ll be able to raise awareness and get people completely involved as well.

Christian: Cool. Any more questions or well, yeah?

Man 7: Hello. Just checking. When you do something on your computer and Chris had mentioned that you go buy a computer you are shown the fancy whizzy stuff you’re not sold. Some of the tools are already built in the computer. I was just pondering the idea… for people who are going to make use of some of those tools, how are they going to get to know about them? And some of it could be by pushing education down from, it could be the vendors, operating systems, websites, whatever.

Some of it is getting down to the personality of the person who’s actually using the computer whether they’re motivated themselves. I have, in endless discussions with geeks, when there’s lots of stuff built in so next time people will discover it. But to discover it, people have to have the motivation to go and explore. And where can people who have disabilities, visual impairment, probably they’re not exploring because they had some bad experiences in the past. They’re just too scared.

So I want to put the question to you. With the people you’re working with, people you’re aiming at, what’s the general kind of approach of people? Are people motivated and want to go and explore and discover or have their bad experiences in the past impinge them doing that?

Denise: I suppose, they come in two camps really. The group that you’re talking about, who kind of feel disengaged through everything, feel like they’ve already kind of tried to give it a go and it’s not worked. So, they’ve given up and aren’t willing to think things differently. And three of our projects, we’ve kind of come across people who kind of like, Oh, why try to re-invent the wheel? Why try to and change things? It’s just the way it is. And I suppose if you provide education and make that readily available, it’s basically quite nice that there was kind of almost like a tutorial application that you could hold up as soon as set up your computers, so you can figure out what your computer can do in terms of accessibility.

Because I’m sure that there’s all sorts of, I mean, nice little things that you can use in terms that would make everybody’s lives easier. Not everybody, you might as well know… I don’t know. You might download a book off the Internet. That and if your computer can read the text to you, then, that’s almost like an audio book.

So there’s all sorts of things that people can use their computer for, but they just don’t realize. I suppose, I’m probably in between the two groups. I’m kind of still learning and I want to learn. There’s a slight difference in terms of I still want to go and find out what’s available this is getting to the people that just feel like oh, it’s rubbish, I think it will work and that’s because they’ve had bad experiences in the past, unfortunately. Does that answer your question?

Man 6: Thanks for answering.

Man 7: And just a quick one. As one of the problems also, I mean you have like Windows and it’s like you learn that once. It’s then the the same thing when you go from computer to computer progress, every single website, however has it’s own idioms of design. It’s like everything’s always laid out in a different way. Where as application on specific operating system, very often has similarities between them. So I guess it’s probably difficult. I think that’s where designers have to think like one of them who is coming up with an most innovative design. Also come up with a little bit like… well what is the standard? What is a recognized design pattern that really works well, because that’s one of the requirements as well. How do you feel about that?

Denise: I think that design is really important from what I’ve been learning. We’ve got better back end kind of things that are going on but the front end of design is the first thing that people come into contact with. If you’re feeling bombarded, your senses is bombarded by your website, you might just walk away from it and say it’s too much for me. I’m not even going to go and try and see if I can use this. You can’t even find if it is an accessible website in the first place. So it’s both design and the techy background stuff needs to kind of work together and to make the experience much easier.

Christian: Quick plug in that case, on the Yahoo! Developer Network, we have a design pattern library that can be reused to build these designs before you actually come up with your own layouts. And all are user tested in our systems and used in our live systems. And all of them are licensed Creative Commons. So all of them have an accessibility section as well that explains the accessibility impacts of these automotive panel of animation of those exists. Sadly enough, they don’t quite full respect. They get all these feedbacks about "yeah, that looks really pretty but aren’t really blue" rather than like "that’s a great concept for a main market". Everybody loves this from the perspective of the person with MS or as a person who is blind and has a problem.

So, look at those and if you find something there, please email us on the Developer Network and we will put them in there. Because the license is Creative Commons and they are meant to be augmented and to be added to. Any other questions?

Man 8: Hi. You’ve talked about websites that you find particularly useful, particularly accessible. I’m just wondering about what you like, what you think in terms of attractive websites. Because I don’t have any particular access need although I’m shortsighted and I find myself attracted to websites of beautiful design with tiny fonts. I increase the fonts and increase the fonts and often break the design. So I’m just wondering, you know, when you look around the web, do you find yourself coming across lots of websites that you think actually that a really fantastic, really beautifully designed website and does it get you thinking about… apart from what we talked about with larger icons, menus, things like that, what you would like to see in terms of attractive websites.

I think that there’s always sometime of a feeling that you can make an incredibly accessible website that… Because of that you might be not be attractive to other users. So I’m just wondering what you might regard in terms of attractive, even beautiful design?

Denise: I suppose I’m a little idealistic. I would hope that is possible get an attractive website is accessible. I think things like very, very small type in the first place. I don’t really see how that benefits anyone, really. If you are taking all those things into consideration from the very beginning, you can maybe… I’m not designer myself so I’m speaking maybe naively, but I would that if you kind of concentrate on those things in the first place and integrate all the accessible options in terms of font size from the beginning then you can incorporate it into the design. I don’t see why accessibility has to be ugly.

Christian: That’s actually quite an issue. Isn’t it, I am going to Atlanta. I complained to one of the designers of at @Media when he was on the panel talking about great designs. I was like, oh, everything you showed, was wonderful but not maintainable and really, really hard to read for someone without 20/20 vision. And I know him so well that we’re now going to do a talk together in Atlanta. We can say make accessibility sexy. Well, I’m coming from the tech side and he’s coming from the design side, how can I make things for accessibility or for people with disabilities onto design to make the whole design more inclusive, more interesting.

We still have a question of how to do that, how to make it sexy, but other than… but what we’ve come up with much. It will be there. I think it’s very much important that we challenge designers, as well, to say like it’s all in the beauty, pushing the envelope of technology, there’s also a beauty in limiting yourself to a user need.

Christian: So, we’re almost at the time for cookies and coffee. So, I want to thank very much to Denise. You’re finished here, you’re off the hook now!

Denise: Thank you.

Todd Kloots of the Yahoo User Interface Library has written a good tutorial on how to set up a test computer with several screen readers. This is great. Whilst I strongly advise against testing without users who are dependent on a screen reader to surf the web (and thus getting the real experience) this is great information to get some initial testing done.

Just a quick post to tell you about some interesting items on the web. First of all the interview Dan Rubin and me gave after our talk at Webmaster Jam Session in Atlanta on making accessibility sexy has finally been released: Designing Accessible Web Sites

Secondly, over at the YUI Theater Todd Kloots of the YUI team has a great tech talk about creating web widgets that are accessible to screen readers using ARIA: Developing accessible widgets

Enjoy!

Chris

The first go at taking Scripting Enabled on the road happened over the weekend of 1 and 2 November. The event was hosted by Adobe who donated their well-wired Adobe University space in Seattle.

On our first day we heard from Jeffrey Bigham, Anna Cavender, and Chandrika Jayant about research at the University of Washington, including WebAnywhere, SlideRule, MobileASL, as well as the results of several user studies they’ve conducted.

Next up was Ryan Benson, an undergraduate student at the University of Washington. Ryan talked to us about keyboard-only navigation, highlighting Firefox’s caret navigation and configuring a browser to highlight current focus (and how even 1 pixel borders around elements can break static layouts).

After lunch, T.V. Raman and Charles Chen introduced WAI-ARIA, described the AxsJAX framework and demoed AxsJAX applied to Google Reader, Amazon, and Jawbreaker. All of the AxsJAX demos are available from the AxsJAX Showcase.

Eitan Isaacson gave an overview of the testing tool he’s working on Specular (slides). He wrote a good summary of the event.

After that, we broke into a few groups. One group worked on AxsJAX scripts for Amazon while the other worked on AxsJAX for Facebook. Others of us took time to learn AxsJAX, play with Silverlight, look at Flash accessibility, and I’m not even sure what else.

Day 2: The Amazon subgroup demonstrated what they had accomplished on Day 1 and asked for feedback on a couple of issues they ran into. In particular, how do you handle multiple live regions changing at the same time? One example we looked at was purchasing a video game. When he selected PlayStation instead of Nintendo several things changed: price, review comments, ship dates, and version (to name a few).

Then, it was back to work. Christian made a brief appearance via skype. We worked for a few more hours after lunch, until it was time to head to the pub, where we wrapped things up and started talking about the next event. Google has offered to host a Scripting Enabled at their Bay Area offices in early March.

All-in-all, it was great to hang out with such an amazing group of folks who are making the web (and the world) more accessible. It’s good to know there are so many good accessibility-related projects going on in the Seattle area.

Next time around, we’ll do a better job advertising the event…and hand out t-shirts.

YouTube just announced a new feature that you can deep-ink to a certain time of the video by adding a time stamp to the URL. I was working on this for EasyYoutube, too, now I am just waiting till the API supports it natively, too (you can already jump to a time but the URI splicing and detection would be cool).

To jump directly to a certain time in a video, just add the time stamp with a URI hash

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qie-N8idatc#t=1m54s

They are also detecting timestamps in comments and link them directly. There is a slight problem that YouTube automatically redirects you from www.youtube.com to yourcountry.youtube.com (for example uk), and that breaks these links! I’ll pester my contacts to look into that.

Well done YouTube!

After Scripting Enabled London was over and I think can be considered an all-out success, I offered to take the idea on the road and allow everyone who wants to host a similar event if they abide by some simple rules.

One of the people who immediately took this opportunity on is Wendy Chisholm from the University of Washington. I asked Wendy some questions and what you can read now hopefully will get more people to sign up.

1) So, Wendy, what made you want to organize an own scripting enabled?

I wanted to attend the London event, but I wasn’t able to travel at that time. I had a great time at BarCampSeattle this summer and like the idea of people getting together face-to-face to collaborate on solutions.

I’ve been working to make the web accessible since 1995 and have the most fun working with like-minded people–problem-solving, brainstorming, designing solutions. My background is in computer science and industrial engineering, and I got away from development for a while, but I’m back into it and this event came at the perfect time. What drew me to the event was the “nothing about us without us” approach that you took–bringing together people with and without disabilities to move all of our experiences forward.

2) Who do you already know that is coming and who are you expecting? What kind of attendees are you looking for?

Some of the more recognizable names include T.V. Raman and Charles Chen from Google, Matt May from Adobe, Eitan Isaacson (Accerciser), and Jeffrey Bigham (University of Washington, webAnywhere).

Other folks range from professional trainers to college students to developers to project managers. We have a mix of people with and without disabilities and a good balance between geeks and non-geeks.

3) You work for a university, and there are a lot more stricter laws when it comes to publication. For example, as far as I know all university lectures that are filmed also need to be captioned. Wouldn’t that be a good topic to cover?

Captioned videos would be great topic; it is a huge issue in higher education. I’ve spent the last year evaluating 20 higher ed sites and most of them have video but few of them have captions.

Easy-to-use, inexpensive tools would address most of the reasons people are not providing captions. Although, part of it is educating people about the tools out there. There has been a thread the last few days on the uwebd mailing list about what formats to use for video and how to make them accessible. It seems like the consensus is leaning towards Flash and adding captions to Flash is supported in a variety of tools.

An issue I’ve been wrestling with personally is providing accessible versions of slide decks. The last time I checked easy slideshare, slides with images were missing (e.g., slide 3 from easy hack fodder).

(Edit: I work around this issue now by putting text behind the image in keynote)

I spend 30-60 minutes per presentation cleaning up the tagged pdf generated from open office and adding alt-text to every image. I would love for Open Office to generate better tagged PDF or for a tool to clean up the PDF generated from Open Office.

Then, I would love to see easy slideshare use all of the alt-text and other information that I’m providing…perhaps the issue is that slideshare strips the information on import, in which case I would love to see them fix that (as well as add text equivalents to the flash buttons on the slide viewer. I’ve contacted them 3 times about it to no avail). Or, maybe there’s another solution out there that people can tell me about!

4) The format of Scripting Enabled is pretty open, you can invite speakers to talk about any topic. However, one of the things I wanted to make sure is that the presenters have a disability or work directly with groups of disabled people to get information first-hand rather than some “experts” profiling themselves or their products. Do you have an agenda idea?

We have a growing ideas for sessions section on the event page. So far it includes:

• How do screen readers interact with Ajax widgets?
• What are the accessibility issues with social sites, like Facebook, and how can we solve them?
• Rich media sites
  • YouTube, Hulu, CNN, BBC
• Highly interactive sites
  • Online games (Jawbreaker) and web applications (Google Finance Stock Screener, Google Reader)
• Real time collaboration
  • IRC, IM, Google Docs/Spreadsheets
• Efficient access to content rich sites
  • Wikipedia, CNN, New York Times
• Virtual worlds and 3D reality
  • Second Life, Lively
• For all the sessions:
  • Who is the target audience? What is the need?
  • Identify solution techniques and prototypes.
  • Explore alternative access through programmatic APIs.

5) As a web developer I am always very frustrated about not reaching into universities or local government as the IT standard in these institutions can be dire in comparison to the open market. One thing I’d love to see are some Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts that enhance accessibility and thus advocate replacing some older browser that is in use since 1999. Would that be an idea? Maybe something university-focused?

The people I work with from universities around the United States are using the latest browsers, but oftentimes the person who is saddled with maintaining the web site is not a web developer — they come from publication, marketing, office support, and other roles. It depends on the department and the organization of the university, but many times the web manager is a part-time position. Folks like this need easy-to-use, non-technical tools to maintain their sites. It’s one reason why CMSs are such a hot topic on higher ed mailing lists like uwebd.

So, that’s a good idea. I’ll send a request to that list to see what we can develop for them. We also have an active group at the University of Washington called accessibleWeb@u. We have a meeting this week and I plan to plug the event.

6) SE London was a big success as we had several charities that do testing with users with disabilities. Is there something similar available in your area?

We have several non-profit organizations in the area who I hope to partner with, such as the Seattle Lighthouse. The group I work for, DO-IT, aims to “increase the participation of individuals with disabilities in challenging academic programs and careers.”

The grant that I work on focuses on increasing the number of people with disabilities in academic computing programs as well as computing-related careers. I hope we’ll have the participation of several students and that we can turn some of the weekend’s ideas into student projects or internships.

7) At which point would you consider “your” SE a success?

I will feel we are successful if we come up with at least one solid idea about how we can make the web more accessible with a plan to bring the idea to fruition and commitments from people to help see it through.

I would also really like to see some working code by the end of the day Sunday.

8 ) Where, when and how? Tell us!

Where: Adobe Building, 701 N 34th St, Seattle, WA 98103
When: 1 and 2 November 2008
How–register at: http://ses.eventwax.com/scripting-enabled-seattle

Thank you for coming up with the Scripting Enabled idea and sharing it with us!! I’m glad the London event was so successful and I hope the Seattle crowd does you proud.

As the video transcription and editing is still taking up a bit of time, I’ve decided to make at least the audio of all the presentations available. They are mp3 files hosted on Amazon S3. Please use “save as” instead of playing them in the browser, as I do pay for the hosting

• Denise Stephens on Multiple Sclerosis - MP3 - 52MB - 40 minutes 06 seconds
• Antionia Hyde on Learning Disabilities - MP3 - 59MB - 42 minutes 46 seconds
• Kath Moonan on screen magnification and other visual aids - MP3 - 67MB - 48 minues and 35 seconds
• Artur Ortega and Leonie Watson on visual impairments - MP3 - 104MB - 1 hour 15 minutes and 23 seconds
• Jonathan Hassell on dyslexia and gaming - MP3 - 45MB - 32 minutes 46 seconds
• Phil Teare on dyslexia - MP3 - 43MB - 30 minutes and 44 seconds
• Final Panel - MP3 - 67MB - 48 minutes 42 seconds

Thanks to BBC backstage for recording the talks.

Those of you who attended Scripting Enabled in London will remember Antonia Hyde showing the video of Lizzie, a user with learning disabilities trying to watch her own video on YouTube and giving feedback on Easy YouTube. Antonia now uploaded the video for all of us to see:

• Watch Lizzie’s video on Easy YouTube

Someone with a learning disability (Lizzie) using YouTube and Easy YouTube, to give some ideas of the issues she faces online. And to highlight why Easy YouTube works for her. Shown at Scripting Enabled (http://scriptingenabled.org) in London. Thank you to Lizzie for giving me permission to share.

I’ve talked about Scripting Enabled recently at the @mediaAjax conference in London, here are slides and the audio recording of the talk:

Download the audio recording of the talk

Links in the presentation

• Hack injecting lang attributes into twitter feeds, looping them through the Google translation API
• Presentation of accessibility hacks that are in use on Yahoo sites
• Yahoo Live
• Yahoo Live deaf chatroom
• Antonia Hyde’s presentation on learning disabilities and online video
• Easy YouTube
• Yahoo Video - turn JavaScript on and off
• Timed captioning hack for YouTube
• Annotations hack for YouTube
• Tubecaption.com
• SoundManager2
• JavaScript Karaoke Engine
• JW Player
• JW Player with Audio descriptions and captions
• Access Enabling Ajax
• WebVisum
• IBM’s social accessibility project
• Scripting Enabled