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.

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!

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash

My talk at @mediaAjax 2008 about Scripting Enabled, what lead to it, what we can use now and where we are going with this. Now also available as Audio

Read "Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash" with Easy SlideShare

Watch "Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash" right here, right now

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

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

Well, a lot of people asked me about the next Scripting Enabled and if I will do another one soon and such, and I am happy to think about that but the idea of Scripting Enabled is much bigger than me and can be a much bigger disruption or “kick in the arse of the accessibility world” if you take it on and organize your own Scripting Enabled events.

Barcamps have been a very disruptive and successful way of networking and sharing information without having to pay expensive conference tickets. Furthermore, they’ve been a great opportunity for people who had no previous experience in public speaking to test the waters. What I don’t like too much about barcamps is that they are no rules at all about what will be covered and that there is no centralized repository for what has been released.

Therefore I decided to turn Scripting Enabled into an unconference with a few rules:

• It has to be free
• It has to be a mix of information and hacking around accessibility
• Everything has to be released as CC or Open Source
• Scriptingenabled.org is the source of truth - I want to know about events
• Use the social web to store the photos, slides and links

The details of the rules and the nice-to-haves are here.

I am happy to provide support and I am actually right now writing a presentation for a university in the US on how I organized Scripting Enabled and why which can be a blue-print.

Let’s get out there!

Chris

It injects a big green link button taking the user to Easy YouTube to play the same video into the page above the video:

You can install the GreaseMonkey Script by activating the following link on a GreaseMonkey enabled Firefox install: Install Easy YouTube for YouTube

I am pondering to also add an off-screen link for screen readers, would that be useful?

The speakers and presentations

I have to say I am very very grateful to all the speakers. The main idea of Scripting Enabled - removing barriers both for disabled users and between geeks and non-geeks - was fully understood and every speaker stuck to giving a lot of great facts and showed examples that lead to a lot of “oh, so that’s how it works” moments. Nobody showed off, tried to get an own agenda through or was “purely inspirational”. Pragmatism ruled, and I loved every bit of it. Well done, Ladies and gentlemen (incidentally, I am quite sure that this was the internet related conference with the largest amount of female speakers in London so far).

Showing videos of real users testing sites and getting stuck at seemingly easy barriers was technically more challenging (Murphy’s Law kicking in heavily) but also very effective. It is so much easier to see the issue when a human shows it than when some expert explains it and the geek in us takes every expert advice with a few pounds of salt.

The slides of the presentations are available right now and I will pick up the video material this week to get it transcribed. I will be out of the country for a week (touring the US - sort of) and then upload them one by one.

The participants and the hack day

I also have to say a big “thank you” to all those who came to see, collaborate and hack. I was very happy to see that it worked out and a lot of people that signed up also came. This is an issue with free events, people are happy to sign up - and effectively hog a ticket - but then don’t show up as there is no pain (i.e. loosing money) in not going.

The people that came were interesting, interested and managed to drive the conversations forward by asking the right questions without showboating or wasting people’s Q&A time with comments instead of grilling the experts.

The hack day was a revelation to me. I am organizing and participating in a lot of hack days and witnessed a decline in drive and commitment in the ones I participated lately. The mashup culture is in a small pickle, as almost everything has been done and a lot of small and cool ideas are instead of being released considered the foundation of the next new big startup.

The normal procedure of a developer day or hack day - built something, then show it to everybody in a minute and get prices - was not happening at Scripting Enabled. First and foremost was that I wanted to disrupt the process by not offering any prices but entice people to release things and start communicating across geek boundaries instead.

Boy did we manage to do that! The original schedule planned from 4 to 5 presentations of what has been developed but albeit things being ready, nobody cared much to show what they did if there is more time to work on it and get information straight from the experts we normally cannot reach. We left the building at 7.15 only because we had to leave, not because of people losing interest! It was great to see developers, designers, screenreader testers and researchers work together on building solutions and several people who asked me if it is worth while to come as they are “not geeks” went home having built their first hack with the help of others.

The releases

The outcome of Scripting Enabled might not be the amazing amount of hacks normal developer days have, but it was not meant to be that. It is a start, not a factory. All the releases of the London 2008 edition are posted and will be tracked on the Scripting Enabled wiki and we will report on them one by one here on the blog.

Thanks, Thanks, Thanks!

As said before, I am still pretty much floating on air seeing that everything worked given the fact that my planning for the event was pretty topsy-turvy. There is no way I’d have managed to pull this off without the help from the people involved.

First and foremost I want to thank the sponsors:

• Matt Locke of Channel Four for the initial funding.
• Sophie Major of Yahoo Developer Network for giving me the time to pursue this alongside my day job and sponsoring the food on day one.
• Simon Doggett of justgiving.com for catering on day two
• Rain Ashford and Ian Forrester of BBC backstage for filming 9 hours of presentations!
• Henny Swan of Opera for agreeing to get these 9 hours transcribed!
• Marco van Hylckama Vlieg for an amazing job in taking beautiful photos of the whole event

Very much I would like to thank the crew of Gameslab and the Metropolitan university for sorting out the venues for me. Martin, Ann, Kumy, Andy and the forgotten ones - you saved my butt!

The future

Now that this is over Scripting Enabled will go into phase two: chasing up the hacks created, releasing all the information and videos out into the wild wild web and enticing others to carry the idea into other places, more on that later on here.