jebsblog

I admit that I am old enough to remember an ad campaign many years ago for the soft drink 7-Up where they referred to the product as the “Un-Cola” (WARNING: YouTube uncaptioned video) .  I know, I’m showing my age.

This thought hit me as I was signing up to attend the Boston Accessibility “Unconference” a few weeks ago. After reading the introduction and description on their website, I found it strangely reminiscent of the “happenings” we engaged in when I was a youth in high school and college. Very avant-garde, I thought; I’m in.

So with open expectations and my colleague Steve Sawczyn (a.k.a. @steveofmaine) riding shotgun, I ventured the three hours down to Waltham, MA this Saturday to see what would “happen.” I will admit that I was surprised by some things and not others. There were good things and disappointments. The experience reminded me vaguely of the first Tweetup I attended about a year ago; meeting a bunch of people whom I knew only through digital correspondences, blog posts and Tweets. I was quickly putting faces with “avatars” and changing my impressions at a steady pace.

There will be a formal evaluation process for the Boston Accessibility Unconference and when that comes out, I will take the opportunity to provide my full opinions there. But I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect upon the experience and post that information here while it was relatively fresh in my mind. I’ve organized my thoughts into three statements. Feel free to respond or generate your own ideas. Here are the three statements:

• What it was
• What it wasn’t
• What I would like it to be in the future

What it was

The Boston Accessibility Unconference was a gathering of about 80 fairly diverse folks who were interested in the accessibility of information technology. Like me, most seemed interested in the vicissitudes of accessible web design, but there were a number of folks whose interests appeared to branch into other areas of technology. There were a fair number of people with disabilities among the gathering.

The setting was the beautifully modern Waltham facilities of the Adobe Corporation provided by host Andrew Kirkpatrick, Adobe’s product manager for accessibility. The building featured all the latest gizmos and the most high tech restrooms on the planet. If you haven’t had a chance to hear Steve Sawczyn’s report of the skin-removing hand dryers in the men’s room, you are missing a rewarding experience. I will think of this place when I sent a hunk of cash to Adobe in a few weeks to purchase CS5 (again Warning: I don’t know if this link leads to an accessible website)

The agenda for the day was pretty free-flowing: an initial warm-up-welcome activity to create an “agenda,” four breakout periods where topics were assigned through a groupthink process, and various breaks for social interaction.

Several of the sessions that I attended were rather free-flowing with no one really taking charge and a general open exchange of ideas and opinions (some included with “hand grenades”; sorry Andrew). On the contrary, several of the sessions I attended were somewhat controlled by one or two individuals who had brought a PowerPoint presentation and seemed determined to give it whether people wanted to hear it or not.

What it wasn’t

I have to be careful here. I don’t want to sound critical or petulant because overall, the experience was very positive. But I didn’t get everything I wanted. So, if I frame this as what I was hoping for – and didn’t get – may be no one will be offended.

I was hoping for a larger picture (big picture) perspective and understanding of accessibility. I spend a lot of time in my head thinking about this topic in very global terms and I wanted to meet like-creatures and compare notes. I think they were in the room, but I didn’t have an opportunity to find many of them.

I was hoping to learn new things about areas I was interested in. I sensed a general backward reflection process or “this is what I do” attitude and was hoping for more of a what do we need to do differently attitude.

Like Guy Noir, I was hoping to find answers to life’s most persistent questions.

What I would like it to be in the future

I would like there to be a professional facilitator or facilitators who are not knowledgeable or interested in the topic of accessibility who can keep things on target.

I would like there to be more in the way of preparation beforehand so everyone can hit the ground running.

I would like for there to be more time to socialize. I would like there to be more time.

I would like to narrow down the focus to a couple of topics (may be three) and deal with them – I would like this to have been done before I got there. In essence, I want a little less “un” in the unconference.

I would like folks to leave the PowerPoints at home and just talk about the topics.

I would like everyone to be an expert and no one to be an expert. Yeah, you can tell I’m a child of the ’60s on that one!

I would like (and am still hoping for) a continued conversation. Perhaps that’s why I wrote this.

Final Thoughts

I’d like to truly thank all those who organized this. It was a risky activity and I think it came off wonderfully. I would like to particularly thank the sponsors for their financial and in-kind contributions. I promise to do whatever I can to make this happen again.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to “pass the hat” or pay a few bucks to be there.

I hope we do not wait a year for another Boston Accessibility Unconference. The topic and the work is too important. I would like almost a monthly (daily, hourly) opportunity to converse – there has to be a technology that we can use to do this. We should make that the first priority.

How can I help?

What do you think?

Feel free to comment!

Last week (April 22, 2010) Samuel R. Bagenstos, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on technology accessibility, civil rights, and federal law. It is a long piece of testimony, so I decided to break it into parts to make it easier to digest.

In my first blog on this testimony, I described Mr. Bagenstos’ commentary on e-books and the rights of people with disabilities. In his testimony, he also briefly discussed the issue of website accessibility. But in this section, the message was less clear. He notes that the federal courts “have reached different conclusions” with regard to the issue of web accessibility for “private places of public accommodation.”

Mr. Bagenstos’ does make it clear that the websites of federal, state and local governments must be fully accessible to people with disabilities. However, he notes technical differences under Title I, Title II and Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which lead to some of the confusion, particularly with “private places of public accommodations covered by Title III.” So, at this point, it is not clear as to where we are with regard to all websites needing to be accessible. It seems definitive case law is not quite there yet.

Here is Mr. Bagenstos’ testimony regarding website accessibility:

The Department of Justice Positions Regarding Website Accessibility

The Disability Rights Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division began to provide technical assistance to a host of public and private entities that were in the process of assisting federal agencies with Section 508 compliance, and much of its guidance on making Internet sites accessible developed from there. There are several sets of standards describing how to make websites accessible to individuals with disabilities. Government standards for website accessibility were developed pursuant to Section 508. Many entities elect to use the standards that were developed and are maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative, a subgroup of the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C7″).

Ensuring that people with disabilities have a full and equal opportunity to access the benefits of emerging technologies is an essential part of our disability rights enforcement at the Department of Justice. Because the Internet was not in general public use when Congress enacted the ADA and the Attorney General promulgated regulations to implement it, neither the statute nor the regulations expressly mention it. But the statute and regulations create general rules designed to guarantee people with disabilities equal access to all of the important areas of American civic and economic life. And the Department made clear, in the preamble to the original 1992 ADA regulations, that the regulations should be interpreted to keep pace with developing technologies. 28 C.F.R. pt. 36, App. B.

The Department of Justice has long taken the position that both state and local government websites and the websites of private entities that are public accommodations are covered by the ADA. In other words, the websites of entities covered by both Title II and Title III of the statute are required by law to ensure that their sites are fully accessible to individuals with disabilities. The Department is considering issuing guidance on the range of issues that arise with regard to the Internet sites of private businesses that are public accommodations covered by Title III of the ADA. In so doing, the Department will solicit public comment from the broad range of parties interested in this issue.

There is no doubt that the Internet sites of state and local government entities are covered by Title II of the ADA. Similarly, there is no doubt that the websites of recipients of federal financial assistance are covered by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The Department of Justice has affirmed the application of these statutes to Internet sites in a technical assistance publication, Accessibility of State and Local Government Websites to People with Disabilities ( http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/websites2.htm ), and in numerous agreements with state and local governments and recipients of federal financial assistance. Our technical assistance publication also provides guidance with simple steps to ensure that government websites have accessible features for individuals with disabilities.

As to private places of public accommodation, only two cases – both in federal district courts – have specifically addressed the application of ADA Title III to their websites, and those cases have reached different conclusions. But the position of the Department of Justice has been clear: Title III applies to the Internet sites and services of private entities that meet the definition of “public accommodations” set forth in the statute and implementing regulations. The Department first made this position public in a 1996 letter from Assistant Attorney General Deval Patrick responding to an inquiry by Senator Harkin regarding the accessibility of websites to individuals with visual impairments. The letter has been widely cited as illustration of the Department’s position. The letter does not state whether entities doing business exclusively on the Internet are covered by the ADA. In 2000, however, the Department filed an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit in Hooks v. OKbridge, which involved a web-only business; the Department’s brief explained that a business providing services solely over the Internet is subject to the ADA’s prohibitions on discrimination on the basis of disability. And in a 2002 amicus brief in the Eleventh Circuit in Rendon v. Valleycrest Productions, the Department argued against a requirement, imposed outside of the Internet context by some federal courts of appeals, that there be a nexus between the challenged activity and a private entity’s brick-and-mortar facility to obtain coverage under Title III. Although Rendon did not involve the Internet, our brief argued that Title III applies to any activity or service offered by a public accommodation either on or off the premises.

Long live the homepage?

Apparently not. At least not according to this article by Gerry McGovern on the CMS Wire.

As a web designer and consultant I (intuitively) already knew this, but still, like most people, often think of a website’s “homepage” as the most important page. Indeed, all of the rhetoric one reads about SEO and the importance of tweaking one’s website to improve traffic is almost always directed at enhancements to the homepage.

But as McGovern points out in this article, the research is suggesting that the people who land on your website are significantly more likely to land on a page other than your home page. As McGovern notes:

Years ago people might have thought about getting to the homepage and then figuring out where to go on the site. Now they will use search or external links to get closer to the place they really want to get to. So, for example, people are becoming less likely to simply type ‘Toyota’ into a search and more likely to type ‘Toyota recall.’

With search engines more precise in their indexing, and people’s searching behaviors becoming more “mature” as McGovern puts it, we are increasing landing in the middle of websites and not at their “front door.”

So, this observation means a lot of different things to web designers, web site owners and marketing folks. It means every page of your website could be the “front door.” It means that when someone lands there, you have to grab them and “sell them” (if indeed you are selling something).

But it means other things as well. I’ll give you an example:

Recently, a friend asked me about going to see Maya Angelou at the University of Maine in Augusta and wondered if I was going or if there were any tickets left. Of course, my first action was to Google “Maya Angelou Augusta Maine.” A second later I was on the University’s webpage devoted to this event. A few seconds later, I had the University on the phone and the answer to the question. Less than a minute later, I had e-mailed my friend and we started to make plans to meet for dinner.

I think this is a perfect example of how people now use the web these days. I never bothered to look at the UMA homepage. I knew it would simply be the portal to the institution and probably be focused primarily to attracting new students, supporting current students and trying to get rich alumni to send them money. That’s what most college/university websites do, right? And yes, a quick look at the UMA homepage reveals I was correct.

Smartly, they do list the Maya Angelou event on their home page. But Google brought me not to the home page, but to the specific page detailing the event.

So, one of the changes is that designers/owners/marketing folks need to realize that websites will be used by people other than for whom you expect. This means you need to broaden your thinking about the purpose of your site and to whom you think you are marketing to.

I will continue to be thinking about the implications of the McGovern article and would love to hear your views. It is clear that we have to rethink our belief systems about design, homepages and SEO.

Your thoughts?

Thank you for the opportunity to “visit” yesterday. I’ll be posting more about Moodle here soon. I hope to update the article on my website about Moodle and Accessibility as well.

Looking forward to some discussions on the Learn Central site. Talk with you soon.

~j

“It’s always nice to learn something new…”

Seems I have been saying that a lot lately.

The latest is related to how to use WordPress. I had been making all of my posts “stick” to the home page by checking off “Stick this post to the front page” under the “Visibility” section in the Publish action box. I think I did this because when I first started using WordPress, the order of the posts were not correct (older posts were showing first).

In any case, it turns out the “sticky” button was causing more problems in that it was showing all of my posts on the home page despite the fact that I had the settings telling WordPress to only show the last five posts. Removing the “sticky” switch on all of my posts fixed this.

So the new thing I learned today…”Sticky buttons and sticky posts, make a mess!”