Accessibility in the “Participation Age”
Sun’s first Corporate Social Responsibility Report was published yesterday. The report highlights — and rightfully so — Sun’s contributions in the area of access to information and technology for people with disabilities. Weighing in at 36 pages, the report highlights a number of other things as well. 
Fortunately, Peter Korn has quoted the accessibility-related section for the time-impaired.
In his entry Peter also makes the comment:
Working on accessibility is often a lot of hard, less-than-pleasurable work. A lot of it is convincing other engineers that they have to change how they do things (after first painstaking tracking down bugs and misbehaviors in other folks’ code). [....]
I had to chuckle. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but guess how I spent my weekend — and a few evenings last week. It certainly wasn’t easy work, yet the entire time I kept thinking how absolutely wonderful it is to be able to track down issues and to talk to the engineers who can fix them. It’s turning into a hobby of mine, actually. In no small part my enjoyment comes from having spent a decade on the outside, unable to look in — forced to be a consumer rather than a contributor. I have the added luxury that no one gets cranky at me because I have no impact on shipping deadlines.
In all seriousness though, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve come across an accessibility regression in the Windows environment and have been powerless to do anything about it. I mean, where do you even begin? It would be nice to know where the breakage occurred, but you have no way of knowing: All there is are vague symptoms. On a good day you can at least narrow it down to the product which is at fault, but you’re not always that lucky. So there is pretty much only one option left: complain. But to whom? At least the manufacturers of the assistive technology products can be reached. In the mainstream world you have to send off an email to some generic support address and hope that someone somewhere takes some notice, and that at some point somebody will do something about the problem — all the while suspecting that you’d have a better shot at winning the lottery. Winning the lottery wouldn’t be such a bad thing to attempt either, because in all likelihood the only way you’re going to get the fix — should a fix be made — is by purchasing a software upgrade.
In a perfect world, accessibility issues would not exist. And admittedly there are things I’d rather be doing than reading source code and ChangeLogs and trying to track down where something broke and/or could be improved. But the fact that I, a mere mortal user, have access to that code and can track such things down and can communicate directly with the engineers pleases me to no end. Open source solutions enable you to shape and refine the tools you need yourself. It may at times be hard work, but it is incredibly empowering work.
The thing that strikes me most about accessibility in the “participation age,” however, is the collaborative spirit of the community. Six months ago, I didn’t know what a ChangeLog was or where to get source code, let alone how make sense of either. The direction and encouragement of other community members enabled me to do these things for myself; I in turn do what I can to enable others. The personal growth of individuals within the community is valued – not just for the contributions that will result from the growth, but for the growth itself. A theme running throughout Sun’s report is that enabling participation does not merely bring about economic value, but social value as well. ‘Tis true, ’tis true: The end result of participating is not merely the development of the tools that you need, but the personal development and satisfaction derived along the way.