Pushing the Accessibility/Usability Gradient

Information flows like water. Water flows downhill. The work of a blind reader to get access to print/visual information is like swimming up a river. There are just so many rivers to swim, and sooner or later you can choose to go with the flow and take in the information that comes pouring past you in a form you can use.

So the work of accessibility is energy expended moving against a gradient. Blind or not, most computer users also experience the energy demands of working against a gradient, a usability gradient. If a web site takes more than a few seconds to figure out how to use – click – you’re off to the next link which had better work or – click – again. In our attention economy, there is too much information for any human to keep up with. You do not have to waste time pushing against a gradient to get information unless you choose to do so.

Accessibility/Usability Gradient . I like the pairing of these terms. Pairing the ideas allows you to probe accessibility with another concept that a wider audience can relate to. And so, this fits what I’ve been thinking about with Lifehacks: new geek metaphors that can be applied to the phenomenology of disability.

If these roses could tell a story…

… the florist industry would be chagrined. I don’t know whether Inspector Clouseau continues to investigate what happened to them along the way. The e-commerce transaction turned out to be protracted and painful like a root canal. Seeing the photo helps me remember that all I was trying to do was send flowers on an otherwise happy, loving occasion.

There is a back story here about trust and accessibility/usability in an attention economy. Yep, and you thought it was just a vase full of flowers! Someday soon I may revisit the story for my Re-Imagining Accessibility gigs this spring. But for now, I need to try to stop and smell the roses.

Cultural Adaptability in the Creative Age

Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's newly formed College of Design, talked about the Design Age in a recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune article:

The information economy is still with us. But the paradoxical effect of the Internet is that it has made information so widely available that it holds no real economic value. Everybody can get incredible amounts of information, so there's no competitive advantage of having it. The idea of the design economy is that, for developed countries like ours, which cannot compete in a global marketplace on price or even quite often on the quality of a product, we have to compete on the basis of innovation, creativity and imagination, which takes you to design. By design, I don't mean just aesthetics but function and cultural adaptability.

Several quick thoughts related to Re-Imagining Accessibility:

1. When accessible information was scarce – when accessibility was a function of a scarcity economy – blind readers/knowledge workers were at a competitive disadvantage. In an attention economy choked with over-abundant information, that competitive disadvantage decreases as everyone seeks better accessibility/usability solutions.

2. Disabled workers may not be able to compete according to conventional productivity measures. They need to build skills and experience in terms of innovation, creativity and imagination. Rings true for me. I wouldn’t have a literacy, let alone a job, without these assets.

3. Disabled people who make adaptations and negotiate accommodations on a daily basis generate the kinds of cultural adaptability Fisher is talking about.

Thanks to Richard Florida’s Creative Exchange for the pointer to this article.

Blogger, Beware: You Get What You Pay For

I’ve been ant-crawling through the blog’s html code for the past two hours. I finally figured out why some key words (usually place names) get chopped out of the blog feed in Bloglnes. For example, if you read Hail to the Bully in Chief in Bloglines, you wouldn’t know where the cruise missiles might have been headed. I won’t give you the answer here because it would just get hacked again in the feed. When I looked at the code surrounding the word, I found that Google/Blogger inserted something like this:

st1:place st="on" Tehran

Ihad to modify the syntax so the code would appear here and not be swallowed up as another tag. This is too 2Deepgeek! Bloglines choked on it. So did I. My guess is this is some kind of tag for Google advertising. And also some kind of geo tag. Maybe if I activated AdSense you’d see an advert for the Tehran Hilton.

I read blogs in Bloglines, not on the blog page itself. When I read pages with conventional blog architecture, pages with text tumbling down one fat and one or two skinny columns, my screen-reader (ZoomText 8.1) reads across the columns. The content gets garbled. It sounds like Finnegans Wake or a teenager’s continuous partial attention. Reading blogs in a feed aggregator like Bloglines allows me to separate signal from noise because feeds usually deliver only the fat column’s content. that’s how RSS revolutionized my ability to read on the Internet.

So when I launched this blog, the first thing I did was subscribe to the feed. I’ve been very disappointed with the result. I thought I was doing something wrong. It’s the kind of problem that gives editors ulcers.

There’s a reason why this blog is designated version 1.0. Version 2.0 will be powered by a different blog platform that allows me, not Google, to control these shenanigans.

RMDs (Roadside Marketing Devices): Don’t Be Scared – Be Scared

Two stories about threatening roadside devices in today’s NYT deserve a little juxtaposition. Michael R. Gordon reports on Bush administration leaks (sounds like a war-drum marketing campaign to me) about a sophisticated type of roadside bomb used by Shiite militia in Iraq. “Mounting evidence” points to Iran as the source. Richard Siklos reports that the president of the Cartoon Network, a division of the Turner Broadcasting System, has resigned over the panic created by roadside electronic devices in Boston. It’s hard to know when to be scared. It’s hard to keep the bad guys straight without a scorecard. It’s even harder to know who’s marketing what. Maybe we need a preemptive war on terror aimed at electronics. Or roads.

The confluence of these stories reminds me of a sound bite about war and sacrifice that keeps popping up in the media like a marketing slogan: “The Army goes to Baghdad. America goes to Wal-Mart.”

UPDATE 021107: First we worried about WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). Then it was IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Now there’s this new thing, the EFP (explosively formed). Let’s call the new new thing RMD (roadside marketing device).

UPDATE 021707: Columbia Journalism Review ‘s Michael Massing criticizes and Michael R. Gordon defends the Feb. 10 NYT story in the this week’s On the Media.

Hanging from a Supply Chain at 33,000 Feet

In the next breath, after advising us against the transgression of usurping the first-class lavatory, the flight attendant on the NWA flight from Detroit to Toronto launched into a sales pitch for the tasteful consumer products available for purchase using our complimentary copies of the airline in-flight magazine. A special offer was available for items ordered in the duration of the flight, but we had to hand in our orders before de-planing. It worked kind of like a travel class Tupperware party at 33,000 feet.

Call it convergence. There was a direct, personal appeal from a respected opinion leader (at least for the duration of the flight). There were supporting print materials providing the necessary actionable details. And there was a captive consumer audience who couldn’t go anywhere else or change the channel.

As soon as we were permitted to use our personal electronic devices I switched on a podcast of a Berkman Center talk by communications law professor Susan Crawford. Lo and behold, she was talking about what I had just experienced – corporate-style media convergence and conflicting notions of the Internet as either an emergent complex system or a sales-driven supply chain.

Here’s the gist of what she said:

The incumbents, Crawford’s term for the telephone and cable companies, believe the Internet is a distribution system. Think of it like a railroad moving goods from place to place or a department store offering an assortment of interesting things to buy. The price of everything is premised on scarcity. The incumbents want telecom regulation that preserves scarcity. They believe the Internet is its infrastructure. They built it (conveniently forgetting the monopolies they were given to do so). They own it. They should get to control it and reap the profits.

From the net-head point of view, the Internet is not infrastructure but process – the process of communication itself. It isn’t a hierarchy controlled from above but an agreement to communicate, an emerging complex system formed by myriad autonomous agents mixing it up and creating an abundance of new ideas.

Crawford develops an economic argument for future communication law that promotes the creation of new ideas rather than new infrastructure. Along the way she cites a seminal article by economist Paul Romer to make her case.

“There are systems everywhere. There are these two mind views all the time about how the world works, whether it’s a hierarchy with somebody paying for that department store or it’s an emergent system with autonomous agents muddling along and creating nonlinear forms of value,: Crawford concludes. “We should be leary of scarcity and infrastructure assumptions. We have good economic and social reasons to choose the creation of new ideas as our direction. The Internet teaches us how to do this; it dislocates the connection between infrastructure and application.”

So much to think about, I forgot my peeve about class privilege and separate but unequal access to airline lavatories.

After I was safely back on the ground and connected to the emergent system, not the supply chain, I read two blog posts about Susan Crawford’s talk by Berkman fellows who had a ringside seat. David Weinberger blogged it in real time and produced an impressively thorough summary. Ethan Zuckerman took a day or two to reflect and gave the ideas his own developing-nation economic spin.

Frog-Marching the Ad Guys to Jail

Thanks to the NYT for this shot of Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, the alleged perps responsible for the Boston bomb scare on Wednesday. Police probably need to lean more on account execs at the apex of the advertising food chain. Honestly, though, whatever empathy I might have had for bottom-feeders vanished when I heard the cheesy press conference Berdovsky and Stevens gave yesterday after release on bail. Listen on NPR. Who was their lawyer, anyway?

Maybe they'll become the Sacco and Vanzetti of viral marketing. Whether you think that’s just or unjust, wouldn’t you like to see the frog-march for spammers, telemarketers, Karl Rove, and kindred thieves in the attention economy?