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

Antonia Hyde explained to the audience the impact of web design on people with learning disabilities. There is not enough data out there on user testing covering learning disabilities - this was a very welcome exception. Antonia also pointed out the necessity of collaboration as the first and foremost mean of building systems that work, going into detail about our collaboration on building easy youtube.

Online Content for People with Learning Disabilities: Opening Doors

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Jonathan Hassell of the BBC did a joint presentation with Phil Teare on the impacts and symptoms of dyslexia on web design and usability. Jonathan goes through the results of a BBC research and gives some tips on how to not block out dyslexic users completely.

Scripting Enabled - Jonathan Hassell on Dyslexia

Jonathan Hassell, head of the BBC accessibility on Dyslexia, its numbers and the effects on web design.

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Kath Moonan of Abilitynet showed in her presentation user research with users with disabilities and how frustrated people can get by barriers that just are not necessary. There is a lot of good content in this one, make sure to go through all of it.

Why I Hate The Interweb - Kath Moonan at Scripting Enabled

Kath Moonan's presentation at Scripting Enabled in London, September 2008. She covers the outcome of research done by Abilitynet with people with visual impairments and web sites.

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Denise Stephens did a wonderful presentation on how the world is in her eyes and senses and what problems she encounters online suffering from MS. There are some good tips there but in general we got a great insight into good interfaces being about adaptability more than anything else.

Enabled by Design meets Scripting Enabled

Denise Stephen's presentation at http://scriptingenabled covering the symptoms of MS and how inclusive web design can help make it easier to surf the web.

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Artur Ortega and Leonie Watson showed and explained the audience at Scripting Enabled what it means to use a screen reader, what screen readers are out there and how you can help screen reader users by building your JavaScript applications the right way.

Here are Artur’s links:

• A first glance of javascript and a screen-reader:
  • Javascript and JAWS
• Examples how javascript can improve accessibility:
  • Simple, accessible data tables to YUI Charts
  • Youtube captioning
  • Yahoo! Video with off-screen video-controls
• Flash & making Video Accessible
  • Making video accessible
  • nomensa: mechanism for displaying case studies
  • nomensa: Flash game demonstrates how Flash can be accessible to all users.
  • nomensa: JavaScript to dynamically add a style switcher
• The intersection of accessible flash and SEO:
  • Searchability of flash
• Taking Javascript a step further
  • Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA
• Other Web 2.0 Obstacles without javascript:
  • Problems with microformats and abbr
• How non-visible meta data improves usability for users with disabilities
  • Natural language hack for Yahoo! search
• Beyond our horizon - our users:
  • Yahoo’s LIVE Deaf Chat Room! for our deaf users
  • flickr - Blind Photographers
  • flickr - Visually-impaired photographers UK
  • flickr for blind people using the new touchcolor system
  • flickr - Color-Blind Photographers
  • flickr - Seeing Beyond Sight Challenge - this photo challenge was inspired by a new book called, Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers (Chronicle Books 2007).
• For the end:
  • Example of the (singing) speech synthesizer Alex of the new Mac OsX

Here’s the ideas we collected in the brainstorming of Scripting Enabled hack day:

• Easy way to distribute GreaseMonkey - it is a really powerful and easy tool to use, but far too geeky. We need an easy way to tell people about its magical powers in a non-geeky way
• Accessible WYSIWYG editor based on the YUI Rich Text Editor
• Setting up a wiki for “Website Longplays” - descriptions how people with different disabilities managed to still order a CD, get to a sign-up form and so on. This would allow other people with the same conditions to do the same and tell the companies running the sites what the real issues are.
• Fixing the gallery in Wordpress to have alternative text as a must and clean up the markup
• Create a custom CSS for enabling line-wrapping for any site
• Create a “Screen Highlighter” - a script that blacks out everything on the page but the part you’re currently focusing on
• Using OpenID and microformats to auto-fill form fields
• Creating Audiobooks from the Gutenberg project with voice synthesizers
• GreaseMonkey script to add larger buttons to Google Maps
• Easy YouTube enhancements - location bar to understand searches and more enhancements flagged up by Antonia Hyde
• Microformat to mark up accessible buildings - hRamp
• Walking instructions using geolocation and TFL data
• Lonely Planet + Ordnance Survey Maps

Thanks to our Photographer, we now have a set of wonderful photos of day one online and licensed with Creative Commons. Marco rocks!

Day one of Scripting Enabled is over and I am still wondering how exactly we pulled it off. My guess is that about 90 people showed up and listened to the presentations of all the people I have to thank for a splendid job:

• Denise Stephens who rushed through her slides to show us what it means to have a condition that can change on a daily basis. From wearing Micky Mouse gloves to being Mr.Wobbly via feeling worse vertigo than Hitchcock ever did she showed us what we can do for her to make life online easier.

• Kath Moonan showed videos and results of user testing with screen reader users and screen zoom facilities. She not only embodied the rock and roll of talk like a pirate day with her fabulous outfit but also with the sheer barrage of facts and ideas we can use tomorrow.

• Antonia Hyde has the gift for technology and I am sometimes wondering if computers plot against her while nobody is watching. Despite somebody “hoovering the computer from the inside” her presentation was wonderful to see, especially when you got to learn how asking the right questions can make people with learning disabilities go off and fulfil tasks on their own and get really into finishing them.

• Artur Ortega and Leonie Watson did a splendid job explaining the technical things you can do in JavaScript to support screen readers and make the audience aware of the free options out there as well as explaining how a partially sighted or blind person experiences the web. Sadly enough there was no internet connection to show the examples, and I blame myself for that.

• Jonathan Hassell and Phil Teare explained us what it means to build games for disabled users, in what forms dyslexia can impede the web experience and that Phil’s life can be like “seen through a really slow web cam”. I was amazed to see the impact good readability has and Phil’s idea about a proxy system that allows us to apply styles to sites in every browser and change the Dom will, I am sure, have quite an impact on tomorrow.

• Jonathan, Kath, Artur of the above and Ann McMeekin for a great final panel taking some of these ideas further and thinking really big (accessibility ads on the Yahoo homepage???).

I have to thank everyone involved in the support of the event, Matt Locke from Channel 4 for the initial funding and support, Ian Forrester and Rain Ashford of BBC backstage for filming the whole event (12 GB of movie material to upload and convert), (Mother) Henny of Opera for transcribing once we picked the movies, Marco van Hylckama Vlieg for shooting over 400 pictures with skill I lack, Ann Willis and Martin Wright of the Metropolitan University for sorting out venue and catering and a few others I will mention once I am awake again.

Things to make sure in the future:

• Internet connection fallbacks - 3G sticks that work
• Second food break - I am starving right now

Time for bed - see you tomorrow.

10.20 in the evening before the big event. At 7.30 I will meet with a friend at the train station to pick up the only person we got in for Scripting Enabled from another country: Jeroen Wijering to help people make the JW player the best and most accessible player out there.

Nearly all the speakers called me at one time or another to ask details about their presentations and if what they do is enough, so I am having a really great feeling about this - I want to move the accessibility world closer to the current developer world and we’re primed to get this done.

8.30 I will be at the location with another workmate and friend coming along as the official photographer and the BBC backstage folk putting up the camera equipment. I am sure most of the presenters will come very early, too, to try out their equipment.

Time for bed soon I think, looking forward to seeing all that are signed up tomorrow!

Chris

At dconstruct in Brighton this year the BBC backstage people interviewed me about My job and also about Scripting Enabled. Here are the videos:

• Watch the video on normal YouTube
• Watch the video on Easy YouTube
• Watch higher quality video on blip.tv