Bruce Lawson’s personal site

When my daughter is doing her homework using Google, I always impress upon her that the Web is not an information medium, it’s a communication medium. Just as in the real world, the web is full of misinformed idiots with big gobs. Unfortunately, you can’t see their staring eyes and crazed grins on the web.

I was checking out an excellent YouTube video by a screenreader user called Importance of HTML Headings for Accessibility that shows how screenreaders navigate the heading tags, and investigated some of the “related” videos. Oh dear.

There’s an XHTML tutorial called “Changing colors and adding paragraphs” that sets bgcolor on the body tag, and only ever previews the page in IE. “Formatting paragraphs” uses align atttributes. The “using tables for layout” tutorials made me wish I still smoke, and then (more productively) wonder how to do screen grabs and make my own tutorials.

So I left a comment

I’m sorry, but this video seriously misinforms the audience. The bgcolor attribute is old-fashioned because it mixes style with the content.

The way to do this is with CSS: body {background-color:red; color:white;} or whatever color you want.

If you’re looking to learn web design, please use books recommended by the web standards project http://www.webstandards.org/learn/reference/books/ or use Opera’s free Web Standards Curriculum (www.opera.com/wsc). (Disclaimer: Opera is my employer.)

Seriously, for all those who think the standards war is won, check out the You Tube tutorials.

I love my work making and writing about websites and standards. You could almost say I’m married to it. But, as Princess Di said, there are three people in this marriage. The interloper is Windows Vista.

Dear Vista, don’t be jealous of Dreamweaver. If I want to open a file with it, and I even have Dreamweaver already open elsewhere, don’t ask to confirm my action. I know you don’t like Dreamweaver, but I do. And it’s my computer, not yours.

Dear Vista, if I decide to save a file as newreq.pem or newreq.txt or even analsluts.jpg in the root directory, please let me. Don’t tell me that you’ve saved it, but then deny all knowledge when I browse from another app, try to find it through Windows or even tearfully execute a desktop search. You might not like the name I gave the file, or the location I chose, but—dear Vista—it’s my computer, not yours.

Dear Vista, if Millsy sends me a zip of some html and some images, please don’t pretend it’s empty just because he made it on a Mac. I know you get insecure (you’ve always been insecure) but I need those files. And please remember that I’ve got a printer connected. It can get a tiny bit annoying when you lose track of it so I have to uninstall it and reinstall, just to print an email.

Dear Vista, when we first met we set up this machine up together, so you know that there is only one account on it, and it is mine. So if I want to move a file, please don’t haughtily tell me that I do not have permission to do it. I do have permission, because I’m the administrator—which means it’s my computer, not yours.

With my last job I had life insurance, but when I decided to move to Opera I had to get my own insurance so that my mortgage would be paid off if I shuffle off this mortal coil, reducing the burden on my wife.

So I rang the big brokers, moneysupermarket.com in March this year. A few questions about age, life-style etc and the guy on the phone told me that for a 41 year old non-smoker it should cost me about £50 a month. Then he asked the question “do you have any neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis?”. On my affirmative reply, it was practically as if klaxons started sounding in the call centre.

So in May, a special nurse who does no nursing came to my door to extract some blood from me in order that Legal and General might learn just how risky I am. “You’ll hear from us soon”, said the lady who does nothing but take lepers’ blood.

But I didn’t. On chasing up money supermarket at the end of June (four months after my application), I was told to write a letter to Legal and General telling them where I will travel to for work and pleasure. No-one actually bothered to contact me to ask me for such a letter; presumably most people with MS develop compensatory telepathic powers, so it looks like I’ve missed out there as well.

Today they called to tell me good news: they will insure my life. Bad news: there is 100% loading on the premium even though MS is very unlikely to kill me before my mortgage is paid off.

As well as paying double, they will not give me critical illnes cover (that’s where you get the money on diagnosis of a terminal illness rather than when your toes curl up, so you can have a massive piss-up before you croak). So if I get cancer (which is of course nothing to do with MS), I don’t get a pay out. If you don’t have MS, but are diagnosed with liver cancer/ brain tumour, you do get a payout. This doesn’t seem fair to me; I don’t see a link between MS and cancer, AIDS and other terminal illnesses.

Am I an isolated case? Have you had any discriminatory treatment by the insurance industry because of a disability? (You can write to me privately at “bruce” this domain name if you prefer).

I haven’t done it in a long time. I’ve held it in. I’ve got a gold star on the chart on my anger management therapist’s wall. But it’s time for a rant! GrrrrrRRRRRRRRRAGGHGH!

I’d quite like an iPhone. I think it’s a nice piece of kit, although the beauty is in the user interface rather than the features. I mean, 2 meg camera with no video? Only 16 Gig of music? Can’t take the battery out? No bluetooth headphones as standard? Lock-in to one carrier? How much?!?!

But what really gets on my moobs is the way that otherwise sensible people get all moist around the gusset about it, standing in line for hours to buy one, and then racing home to fetishise it. Independently-minded people, whose opinion I respect about any other subject, switch off their bullshit-filters and make twitter even more banal than usual with their excited Beatlemaniac squeals and prepubescent worship-squeaks to the monopolists in black polo-necks.

It’s beautifully designed. It’s brilliantly marketed: you are being manipulated and you know you are and you’re still pathetically grateful for it. But it will not give your mouth sex appeal; it will not make you look five pounds thinner. Because it’s just a fucking phone.

This is tongue in cheek. I’m not insulting you personally. This is not my employer talking.

Why does Windows Vista hide everything? Where the hell did it put Ubuntu when I installed it as a service running within Windows?

Why the hell does it take about 900 key strokes to install anything because of stupid security access messages?

Why did my screen go blank and I had to reboot? Why are trackpads so shit?

Why are all mail servers different with their incomprehensible authentication options and their SSL messages that would baffle Stephen Hawking?

Why can’t I get all my emails from Eudora on my old machine, import them into a mail client on Vista, that allows me to sending emails from multiple personalities (so emails *to* this domain go out from this domain, while emails to my gmail account go out as that)? Does such a thing exist? Why can’t I find it?

Why have I spent a day doing nothing except wrestle with a new laptop that was supposed to save me time?

Why does Windows Vista Home Premium (hah!!) randomly forget that my HP C5180 printer is installed on the network, whereas the creaky five year old Windows XP machine doesn’t? Like I really want to reinstall the fucking printer drivers every time I print an email.

Why won’t things JUST FUCKING WORK??????

ARRRARAHTTGAGHGGAGDYSADHGSHGDHASDHGGDGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Thanks. I wish I could say I feel better for that.

It’s unsurprising, I suppose, that if a group of like-minded individuals go into conclave to write a specification, they will be angered and annoyed when that spec is criticised and questioned by outsiders. This is what has happened when the microformats spec and HTML 5 specs came under scrutiny.

Testing shows the gulf between theory and practice

Most microformats adherents seem to agree with an article that James Craig and I wrote, hAccessibility, that pointed out that the current spec’s use of the abbr element is inaccessible to some users. In theory, “Austin, TX” is an abbreviation of “30.300474;-97.747247″. In practice, it doesn’t work (mp3).

It shocks me that when this flawed idea was originally mooted, a trivial test with a forty-minute demo version of JAWS would have shown it was inaccessible, yet no-one thought to do it. As they say, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not..

Creators of new techniques and specs need accessibility at the heart of their specs, and that means testing.

Goodbye headers, hello again <kbd> and <samp>

A similar problem is happening with the HTML 5 group. Like many people, I haven’t paid much attention to the WHATWG until now, because it was “a loose, unofficial, and open collaboration of Web browser manufacturers and interested parties” with an “invite-only steering committee”. It all seemed highly pie-in-the-sky, and there were other, more immediate tasks at hand, like evangelising accesibility in existing technologies like HTML, or emerging technologies like microformats.

Now that the WHATWG spec is to be the basis of HTML5, a lot more scrutiny is directed at the spec.

The HTML5 spec ruled nothing in and nothing out. The criteria for retaining an element or attribute is that of usefulness. I personally question whether the computer-science kbd, var and samp elements should go in there (really, when was the last time you used these on a client’s business site?), but that’s not the reason for my rant.

As Roger Johansson recently noted, the HTML5 spec drops two useful attributes from data tables - the headers and summary attributes that WCAG recommends.

Lachlan Hunt, who’s heavily involved in HTML5, wrote,

They haven’t been removed. They just have not been added yet due to lack of evidence to support them.

The headers attribute: I’m aware that this one currently has better support in ATs than the scope attribute does, but for most cases it’s redundant.

If the problem is just associating cells with their headers, we should investigate alternatives that would make it easier, such as defining an algorithm for more accurate implicit association.

That would be better because it increases accessibility, while reducing the requirements on authors. However, that needs research and evidence to determine if it can cover sufficient use cases reliably, which will allow us to figure out if headers is still required.

Now, in my opinion, one of the reasons that screenreaders are the Netscape 4 of the assistive technology world is precisely because they try to use heuristics to figure things out, rather than use the specified standards. If, for example, everyone had used the (now-deprecated) menu element for navigation, assistive technologies wouldn’t need to try to guess where content starts, and authors wouldn’t need to code the dreaded “skip links”. But that’s another side issue.

The burden of proof

Testing is vital, particularly at the border of accessibility theory and practice. I wonder, for example, if tabindex and accesskey would have made it to the HTML4 spec if there had been full testing with assistive technology users?

What I really want to know from the HTML5 people is who they think is going to do this research that will provide the evidence that their gang requires before useful attributes are restored to the specification.

The WHATWG spec is funded by big business, all of whom have millions in the bank. Maybe now the spec is “official”, they will be funding user research with disabled people using assistive technologies. Perhaps they will invite representatives from the manufacturers of the big screenreaders to work with them. They could even fund those representatives, given that assistive technology vendors aren’t anything like as rich as Apple, Opera, Mozilla and Google.

After all, it’s impossible to imagine that they would make arbitrary decisions to remove or retain certain elements, all with unknown accessibility side-effects, and put the burden to prove the usefulness of removed attributes on a small group of volunteers, isn’t it?

Also see Gez Lemon’s more sober article, The HTML Scope/Headers Debate.

The Prime Minister has responded to the petition over UK government sites’ accessibility, which came about because of the fuss Dan Champion and I made over the Department of Trade and Industry’s disastrous redesign:

“The Government is committed to ensuring that all government websites are accessible and easy to use for people with disabilities.

Action 7 of the Prime Minister’s Digital Strategy is to ‘improve accessibility to technology for the digitally excluded and ease of use for the disabled’.

This strategy is to be implemented by DTI with support from OGC and eGU (now the Cabinet Office Delivery and Transformation Group). A cross-government review of the Digital Strategy is currently under way under the supervision of the DTI).”

Joined-up government? My arse.

I’ve always been a bit of an apologist for Microsoft, but the experience I’ve had upgrading my Windows XP operating system has left me determined never to buy their damn products again.
Continue reading Goodbye Microsoft

The fourth rule of Accessibility Club is: Accessibility Club is not Fight Club. Now, there are people in this world who don’t honestly care about accessibility, and yelling at them isn’t going to change their minds. Those people just need to be kicked in the balls.

But there are people in this world who do care about accessibility, even if they’re not always able to do everything you, personally, would like them to do. Yelling at them isn’t going to make them start doing the things you want them to do, and runs a real risk of alienating them entirely. People who are making good faith efforts but suffering under real-world constraints are not your enemies.

Amen to that! Read the rest - it’s good stuff. (Hat tip: Jim O’Donnell)

Chris Beasley (passim) accuses me of having “socialist leanings“. Oooh harsh. Oh wait! I do have socialist leanings! I confessed it on my ‘About’ page three years ago.

The reason for this accusation is that I believe that people with disabilities should be able to participate on-line. And if a company won’t make accommodation and code its website accordingly, then it’s OK for that company to be sued.

Mr Beasley disagrees, as the handicapped are not normal, and it costs ten times as much “to send one disabled kid to a normal highschool than we spend on the smartest kid in that highschool.”

Mr Beasley notes that I have MS and am therefore the type who “sees enemies where there are none”. (Everyone with MS is paranoid. We’re not normal, you see.)

Patrick Lauke has already tried to comment on Mr Beasley’s blog, but the comment was deleted and Patrick’s IP was banned, which rather leads me to wonder exactly who is “so used to fighting and defending that he sees enemies where there are none”.

Censoring people is also odd for someone who declares himself a “libertarian”. But then that’s the battle-cry of the terminally right-wing: “Free speech and equal rights, for all those who look like me and think like me!”