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.

This is one of the demo videos that Kath Moonan of AbilityNet showed during her presentation. It is a user testing interview of a blind user trying to use YouTube with a screen reader and then try the same task with Easy YouTube.

• Watch the video using Easy YouTube
• Watch the video on YouTube

Trying two more locations this week. London is an annoyingly expensive town.

Ok, here goes. I had the idea for scripting enabled, an event, nay a framework revolving around ethical hacking to increase the accessibility of existing systems for quite a while.

The main driver was giving my presentation “Fencing-in the habitat (See it on slideshare here or read the transscript here) at “Accessibility 2.0″ a conference organized by AbilityNet revolving around the problems disabled people face when trying to take part in the social web or using “web 2.0″ applications.

I’ve been an accessibility consultant for quite a while and I got bored with the stagnation in the field of accessibility. Far too many experts preach truths that applied in 1999 but are really not that big an issue these days and far too many developers put in quick fixes that appear like accessibility improvements but are more or less pacifier buttons.

A pacifier button is a button that closes the door in lifts - or seems to. In most cases the button is not connected to any real circuit and it makes no difference if you press it or not. They are however a psychological crutch as they give the human who is about to be trapped in a small room at the mercy of technology he doesn’t know or understand a sense of “being in control”.

I’ve covered a lot of these seemingly great accessibility ideas in the talk and will not go into detail here. Suffice to say it is easy to make people believe in magic accessibility bullets and automatic testing mechanisms, but damn hard to make them try to grasp what problems humans have with using their systems.

When Antonia Hyde of United Response gave her talk “Rich Media and web apps for people with learning disabilities” (see Antonias talk on SlideShare or read the transscript of Antonias talk) I learnt a few new things and above all I heard a call for help. Antonia wanted to have a video player that is accessible to people with learning disabilities.

As it were, I played around with the YouTube Video API the day before, and was amazed that YouTube completely opened the player up to developers to create their own controls. I took Antonia’s wishlist and created Easy YouTube.

The response was amazing, and I was amazed to see schools contacting me and thanking me for creating a player that works for children and blind people thank me for making a player that works with a screen reader - both unintended results.

This gave me a boost as a ethical hacker and mashup creator. I got bored of putting photos on a map or showing that you can do a search inside a messenger or load search results via Ajax.

I felt that I didn’t make a difference with what I did, mashups ceased to be a revolution in software development and became a fancy play thing. I took a positive spin on the whole issue at my presentation at Barcamp4 in London (”How I got my mashup groove back” On SlideShare and transcript) and vented my annoyance on my blog and asked if it is time to take mashups further.

I continued “Accessihacking”, taking on Flickr, Twitter and some other smaller things and wondered if there is something bigger in this.

When I went to Mashed08 last weekend I didn’t plan to do any hack, but just wanted to give my presentation and interview some people for YDN. When the BBC came to me and showed me that they opened up their archive of the last 40 years with subtitle data and music and video in all kind of formats I felt the developer’s itch though and built a screen-reader compatible interface to the audio archive based on my YouTube player. As the archive ceased to be accessible after the weekend, I created the SlideShare transscript viewer for good measure. I went up on stage, showed the two and asked the audience if they were interested in a hack event covering these kinds of issues.

Well, I got a prize for my hacks - financial support by Channel4 to create an event like this, so here we are.

Scripting enabled should help wake up web accessibility from its beauty sleep. Developers who do not really understand the barriers disabled people have to overcome should get hands-on information about what needs to be removed and people who are great with people but oblivious to technology should get the technical counterparts they need to make things happen.

A lot of companies have data and APIs available for mashups - let’s use these to remove barriers rather than creating another nice visualization.

Who’s with me?

Chris Heilmann