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

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.

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

I am proud to announce the schedule for the two days of scripting enabled and also that Jeroen Wijering will be coming over to Scripting Enabled to get first-hand information about accessibility and online video and implement it in his amazing JW player. The JW player is the de-facto standard open source player for Flash video in Web Sites and lately also got a Silverlight build.
I’ll get Jeroen also to meet with the BBC and Yahoo’s online video divisions to see what can be done about accessibility of our systems.

Things are shaping up, and I am a-tingeling

I spent an enjoyable morning traveling through sunlit London (seriously, is this supposed to be July?) visiting the offices of justgiving.com. I got the tip to talk to them from my ex-colleague and now full-time Moo, Mecca Ibrahim at the last Mini Bar.

Justgiving.com are a lovely bunch of people that make it easy for charities to raise money by making the right people talk to each other. After I stated my Scripting Enabled case and generally chatted about the abundance of miscommunication between geeks and the IT challenged we found a lot of ways how we can help each other, me with helping them with their upcoming APIs and partnerships and them by advocating my cause to charities that should be involved and some monetary sponsorship for the event.

So thanks, justgiving.com and I hope we can do a lot together.

Some people asked if there is a mailing list to get updates about Scripting Enabled and to discuss all things about the idea and conference. I set up a Yahoo Group for this:

• Subscribe to the Scripting Enabled Group on Yahoo Groups

If you have problems signing up, please comment here and I will try to help you out.

The first step now is to find a location for the physical location of Scripting Enabled. We need two locations, one for the presentation day (preferably with a lab showing different assistive technologies) and one for a hack day where a lot of people can come with laptops and hack around.

The dates I was thinking about were the 19th and 20th of September. Friday will be the presentation day, Saturday the hack day.

So if you run a lecture hall and are happy to host us, please get in contact! We can pay a bit but I’d rather list you as a sponsor. This event will get some good coverage so there is a benefit for your university/organisation.

cheers

Chris

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