Ian Forrester
AbilityNet - Accessibility 2.0 Conference

Robin

Okay. Great. So last speaker before the panel, Ian Forrester, heads BBC Backstage, which is a designer developer network like no other. The aim of BBC Backstage is to take as much BBC data as possible and make it publicly available for republishing, remixing, mashing up etc. etc. And he’s going to be talking about tools and technologies to watch and avoid. So from mash ups to API’s, what’s hot and what’s not.

Okay then. Thank you very much indeed.

Ian

Thank you, Robin. Can everyone hear me okay?

Audience

Yes.

Ian

Excellent. Right so the frustrating thing about being last is that all the other speakers kind of hit on all your points and you kind of go, ‘Ah no, I’ve got to change a few things’. So I’ve changed these slides quite a bit, but there’re eighty slides and I’m going to whip through them pretty quickly. The slides will be online later and I will have more and more information to add. So you don’t have to write down everything, just try and take it all in.

So the first thing I wanted to talk about, this is the overview, is the participation revolution. Everyone talks about Web2.0. Web2.0 for me and the need for backstage is not about AJAX. It’s not about being able to refresh part of the page or anything like that. It’s about participation and that’s a key thing. Our illustrious leader, well used to be our illustrious leader, Ashley Highfield, wrote this in Arial, ‘Get web savvy or we die’. Yes, a real core to re-build the website. Re-think the website. And re-think about what it really means for the BBC to have a web presence.

As part of that, some of you might recognise this, this is when Ashley actually installed Ubundo on to his BBC laptop. He was asking lots of questions and one of the questions he asked was, ‘Who actually owns Ubundo? Who runs this? Who do I talk to if I need to get support?’ The answer was, ‘Well the users’. And he kind of made a kind of double look and went, ‘Huh? The users? So I’m my own support? That doesn’t quite work. How does that work?’ And this is what this is all about. It’s about everyone participating, everyone taking a part in the greater picture.

We’re in a user control revolution basically. That’s what it’s about. And the key thing about this when it comes to accessibility is that we need to stop thinking about the same old people and saying, ‘Okay we give them content. What about them submitting content. How do we get them to put stuff into YouTube? Put stuff into Facebook?’ A part of that is changing the tools and some part of that is a lot of human factors. Accessibility isn’t a one-way street. You guys, web developers, web designers, web content producers, the BBC ourselves, we make content and we put it out but our content gets reused, it gets remixed and that should be true of the disabled users as well.

So I want to ask a question. How many of you guys think you are not disabled in the audience? Put your hands up. Okay. So the guy in the suit at the back, tell me what that says on the front of there.

Audience

Inaudible

Ian

Exactly. I actually read that. I was at the back and I could read that from the back so I have 20:20 vision, if not better. So I can almost read what’s on your laptop. The point I’m making is that we’re all somewhat disabled, or I prefer the word ‘unique’. Everyone has this view of disabled people in wheelchairs and like with canes. It isn’t true. We’re all disabled in some way. I’m dyslexic but I’m not highly dyslexic, there’s a gradient. So we need to think about that. And also when you get older you’re going to get problems. You’re going to get eyesight problems. These things are going to happen so we need to start designing, not just for disabled people, but for ourselves as well.

Now the key thing, and I think Chris came across this, was that when you do a good piece of work it works for both and that’s the key thing. It’s about not cutting corners. It’s about actually doing a good job and that’s what it’s about.

We need to start thinking about the separation of concerns. I’m sure you’ve all seen this but this was a screenshot from Future Web Ads where, I can’t remember her name now, but she basically showed how the same page looks on different phones. There’s no way you can design for all these phones. You’re going to have to live with the fact that it’s not going to look great for everybody. You’re going to have to start thinking about, ‘Okay, it will work and that’s the main thing. What’s the main thing I want to put across?’ And that’s the content. This is how the Web was imagined. Different user agents implementing the actual HTML in their own different way, and that’s the key thing.

So in the good, bad and terrible examples I’ve got quite a lot and hopefully you’ve seen quite a lot of these technologies. If you haven’t then they’re well worth looking into. I did cut out the inputs. I was looking at different ways of inputting content, so for example Tablet PC’s, gestural interfaces and stuff like that. And also I took out the kind of 3D world stuff like the Second Life stuff, just because I had to cut down some of the slides.

How many of you guys know about Ketchup? How many have signed up for Ketchup? One person?

Audience

Inaudible

Ian

Okay. No. Now for the guys that don’t know what Ketchup is, Ketchup was another social network and the idea why it was Ketchup was that once you put in your username and your password for another account it would automatically pull down all your friends and add your friends to your list. Now that’s great because you don’t have to fill in and type in all your friends’ names again. That’s great. That’s fantastic. A lot of sites use this. However, Ketchup is bad, or was bad. It would spam all your friends and tell your friends to join Ketchup and then it would write emails like you, as if it came straight from you. That’s a problem.

The problem with that whole process is that we use this quite a lot on a lot of sites. This literally is the definition of phishing. Now when I look at that page I kind of look at it and I kind of [inaudible] and I think, ‘Okay, well I’ve never heard of [Zanal?]. I don’t really know all this other stuff. It looks a little bit dodgy, let’s be honest’. Okay? How do you put that across to someone who’s in a screen reader? All they get is forums and they get some of the text. How do you explain that actually what the stuff you’re filling in may be used for phishing? Is it just the domain name? It’s kind of like the look of it kind of gives you a clue and that’s something to think about I think.

There are ways around this. One of them is this [inaduible] based system. But there’s a problem with this. This is from Flickr so I look at this and there’s a list of applications on the left and what they can do in the middle and you can remove the permissions. That kind of works pretty well but do I know really what read, deletes, writes, what does that really mean? Does delete mean it deletes all my pictures? Can it also write my pictures? There’s a lot of plain English stuff that needs to be considered in this kind of system.

For you guys that are kind of [inaudible] at the back I thought, ‘Well I might just used OpenID or [O Off?]. Well OpenID is great but there are problems. One of the problems is the redirect. For you guys that don’t know, with Open ID you log in with OpenID, it switches to another site and then switches back. That redirection causes huge problems when you’re using like a screen reader or a mobile phone and it’s a bit of an issue. Now I’m sure that the phones will get better and the screen readers will get better, but it’s a problem right now. There are some really good applications like this seatbelt, which will do the Open ID for you on your desktop, which is worth looking into. So instead of it switching to the other site the application pops up and it’s kind of a trusted application because you installed it, which is really good.

Moving your friends to this is a problem and I mean the thing about this is we all want to do this. We want to be able to move from one system to another and it hasn’t been solved yet. This is actually from, I think, DOPLA so what you can do is you can point at a URL that has a load of e-cards on it and it automatically adds people as a friend. Great automation, it beats having to write your friends names in again and their ages and all that stuff but it’s still not very accessible. Hopefully the social network portability group will sort this out.

There’s also a problem with transferring your data so this is from Yahoo Photos. Now Yahoo Photos were great because they actually did this. Most sites don’t do this but they were closing down and they allowed you to move your photos somewhere. Now the options were Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, Shutterfly or Snapfish. Or you could download all your photos and then upload them all again. Now which option would you prefer? The one where they do all the work or the one where you have to go file download, file download, file download and then file upload, file upload, file upload? That’s a real problem. And there are sites like Epson, which did this. The only way you could get your stuff out of Epson Photo Centre was to log in and one by one file save as, file save as, file save as. Now that’s painful for someone like myself. It’s going to be even more painful for someone who has real problems with the mouse or that kind of thing. It’s just a real, real problem.

End User Licence Agreements are a pain in themselves and something to really be looked at and I don’t have a solution for this quite yet. Even this small part of the End User Licence Agreement from Facebook is full of so many weird and strongly formed words and you could really get confused. If you want to join Facebook you have to agree to this. You have to agree to this and more, that’s a problem. We need to find ways of summarising this content into plain text so that the user knows upfront Facebook own everything you do when you are a user. That’s a real problem.

The [inaudible] Commons actually do something similar where they have the nice Small Summary Licence, which explains the: You can do this. You can do that. Then they have the complete End User Licence Agreement, the complete legal document, which you can read through if you want to. And they also have a Machine Readable Licence so your machine can pop up and say, ‘Actually, you can use this. You can use that. You could do that with it’. That’s something that’s got to be considered. And also these symbols pop up everywhere and they’re great. Most people in this room have probably seen one of those symbols and you can probably work out what they are and the small description really helps.

Some of the other tools I’ve seen are priority video tools like Quick. So Quick will allow you to stream straight from your mobile phone onto the Web. The problem with Quick is that it’s flash video and anything flash video is a nightmare, is an absolute nightmare. This happened before where SCABLE if you fast-forward fifteen minutes then you get to the bit that’s really interesting. Well if SCABLE could edit the video and then put it up that’s so much better. Who wants to sit there waiting for it to stream and then wait fifteen minutes in to watch that bit.

Flash Outside is bad news. This is overlay TV. It allows you to put subtitles and stuff like that inside the flash screen but none of that stuff exists outside the flash screen. It’s a real, real problem and so what you end up with is you have to go into the flash screen before you do anything. And also you can’t get the stuff out and there’s no way of actually telling the user that they’ve just put this in, or this is about to pop up or anything like that. It’s purely visual.

YouTube’s done a pretty good job just with tabbing. This little yellow box comes up when you do tab through it and not every media player does this. I think [inaudible] does this and a few others like Blip do it as well but others don’t.

I’m really interested in the kind of Google Docs stuff because that’s actually really good and that actually works really well and it allows you to save stuff down. And the key thing is that once you could save that file out then you can use an application on your desktop which is probably more accessible than the website. So Google Earth is probably more accessible than Google Maps, although Google Maps is really good. And also with the Google Docs you can save as text, PDF, stuff like that, stuff that really makes a lot of sense.

This is the kind of the Adobe Air stuff. So the Adobe Air stuff allows you to build applications that sit on your desktop and you can either use the Web or your desktop. I think there are some accessibility features in it but Adobe actually don’t have anything on their Website about it. So although it’s Beta it’s a bit of a worry. Is accessibility an afterthought in this? I would say so and that’s really worrying. There are open source equivalents and they are actually much better at the accessibility and being able to tab through and being able to pull out bits and pieces. So looking to those rather than that.

This is a screen shot from Juiced. Now I know Juiced is kind of down in the water right now, but the nice thing about Juiced is that when everyone first saw it they thought it was flash. It’s not. It’s actually SVG layered with HTML, JavaScript, Zool and XPL. Now that stack of web technologies working together really well to make this stuff all happen, it was actually highly accessible. You could actually select the text. You could actually look at it and pull the content out. Everything was in plain text. It just all made a lot of sense and it was actually really, really powerful. The Juiced team spent a lot of time on that making it work but unfortunately the product has kind of sunk, which is a shame.

All done. Sorry, I guess I had too many slides.

Audience

We’ll get you back next time.

Ian

Okay. That’s all right.

Robin

That was fantastic. Really, really good and Kath said we will get you back. So if the next half of the slides are as good as the first half then that’s fantastic. Thank you very much. And we started a little bit late, which wasn’t useful at all. So I think we’ve probably got time for one quick question, if there is one, before we move onto the panel. Are there any? Shall we move on? So yes. If the panel could be taking their seats?

Audience

[inaudible]

Robin

Yes please. The panel can be seating themselves.

Audience

What would be the [inaudible]?

Robin

What would be the open source equivalent of Air?

Ian

The Open Source equivalent of Air would probably be something like Zool or Cluster. It’s Clusty or Cluster? It’s well worth looking through that. That actually uses an open GL as well, so it’s pretty powerful. Does that answer your question?

Audience

[inaudible]

Robin

That was a quick question. That was good. Thank you.

Audience

I’ve been for years bitching about flash as well, and I went to the Air conference last month and yes it is true that the accessibility of it is appalling at the moment, especially the keyboard accessibility. But it’s built upon HTML, CSS and JavaScript what you build in there. You don’t have to build it with Flash. So if the player gets proper keyboard access then you don’t have that problem any longer. It’s better to look at that Air technology a bit more where it is because it’s actually a whole framework. It’s not only like little gadgets but it’s also a distribution framework, it’s an updating framework and an installer. And it does some really, really clever stuff there and I think we should get somebody from Adobe to really, really explain something about this because he is in London, their evangelist, and I’ve shunted it for years as well, but there is some really good stuff going on there.

Ian

I guess a quick reply is I looked into accessibility around Air and I found literally nothing. And then when I went to the Adobe site and there was literally zero, that really scares me.

Audience

Just as an aside, I think this is a fundamental flaw in the big software companies that are producing new software. For example, Silver Light, the new Microsoft non-competitor to Flash that’s actually very similar to Flash has come out, gone through a full version one release without accessibility. So I think this might actually be something that we need to start discussing with big software companies as to why on earth they are not producing the software accessible from the word go.

Ian

Agreed.

Robin

Okay. Thank you very much indeed. A huge round of applause please for Ian. Great. We can pick up these questions with the panel.

[ENDS]