All About Access

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.

Rich Burridge has worked out how to run Orca from a thumb drive. Excellent!

I’m currently “on the road” doing a training, but I will definitely give this a try when I get back.

Thanks Rich!!

In the spirit of openness, Rich Burridge (with my full support) has decided to move a conversation he and I were having into the open.

The conversation had started out innocently enough around the redesign of an Orca feature, but it eventually led to a bit of a rant on my part. What was I ranting about (this time) you ask? Lack of user participation.

You see, once in a blue moon you come across something that seems too good to be true, but actually isn’t: There really are free operating systems (Linux and Open Solaris), there really is a free office suite (OpenOffice.org), and there really is a free screen reader (Orca) which shows the potential of rivaling its $1000 commercial equivalents.

But it doesn’t end there; on the contrary: At the risk of repeating myself, the Orca team is actively soliciting user input and basing their design upon the feedback they receive. There have been times (I’m starting to lose track of how many) where I’ve filled an RFE suggesting that “such-and-such feature would be helpful for the end user” and the response has been “okay” — often it’s not “okay, thanks for the suggestion, we’ll take it under advisement”, but “okay, we’ve implemented it, please give it a try and see if it meets your needs.” If it can be easily and reasonably done, Will, Rich, and Mike do it; if it cannot, they start looking for what it will take to pull it off the needed functionality. In other words, there is a free operating system, a free office suite, and a free screen reader whose design we can contribute to so that it best suits our needs. All we have to do is participate.

Yet people are not participating. That is what I was ranting to Rich about.

Of course, I am exaggerating a bit (as friends, colleagues, and regular readers of All About Access know all too well that I am wont to do) — but only a bit. Some people are participating. Some people are sharing their needs and wants with the Orca team. Most, however, are not. Why is that?

Rich had some thoughts on that matter:

Why this is all strange to the blind users who are now trying out Orca is that they are so used to paying a large sum of money to a commercial organization and dealing with the way that support is handled in such a company, that they don’t realize that alternatives exist.

Used to “dealing with the way that support is handled in such a (commercial) company”: check. “Don’t realize that alternatives exist”: check. “Used to paying a large sum of money”: I don’t think so. The average blind user doesn’t pay a large sum of money for their screen reader. The average blind user is provided with their screen reader through their local school district, vocational rehabilitation agency, employer, charitable organization, etc. It’s like medical care: Some of us pay large sums of money because we do not have health insurance; some of us pay large sums of money because we need a screen reader but for one reason or another can not obtain funding. But in both cases, that is not the majority of the respective populations. Far from it. Most of us are provided with what we need — or we do without.

So why am I nitpicking on this one point when Rich’s observations are, on the whole, spot on? Because I think the medical model of rehabilitation services is largely to blame for the limited participation of persons with disabilities in open source communities.

If everyone really were used to paying large sums of money for their screen reader, I think they’d be beating down the proverbial door to check out, and contribute to the development of, Orca. And that would be good for everyone who cares about affordable assistive technology for computer users who are blind. Does that mean I think we should immediately dump the model we currently use for providing assistive technology services? No, not any more than I think we should immediately dump the model we currently use for providing health care services. In either case, such a drastic measure would put far too many folks in a position more unsatisfactory than the status quo.

So what then do we do? To be honest, I’m not sure.

All I can think of doing is what I’m already doing, namely making people aware of the free, open source alternatives to the commercial products they currently use — or would use if they could afford to do so — and encouraging them to participate.

I also hope that as more and more members of the Independent Living community become aware of free, open source solutions for computer users with disabilities, we’ll see a significant increase in participation. After all, the FOSS movement has a lot in common with the IL movement.

I’m certainly open to other suggestions.

This past Friday, I had the great pleasure of attending the first of what will hopefully be a regularly-occurring event: The Orca users group in Boston. Thanks so much to Joe Lazzaro of ITD for hosting it! And thanks to Will Walker of Sun Microsystems for presenting not just Orca, but also the “big picture” of Linux/UNIX. I think we all came away with a FAR better understanding than we arrived with.

The turnout was great: 22 individuals, 17 of whom are blind or visually impaired; the constructive feedback even better! At the end of the day, we had compiled a list of “request for enhancements” which, as promised, I entered in Bugzilla that evening.

The subsequent response from the Orca team to the RFEs amazed me. I suppose by now it shouldn’t have. In the past couple of months, I’ve come to realize that the Orca team members truly care about creating compelling access to Linux/UNIX for users who are blind, and that they put in the long hours and effort required to ensure they accomplish no less. Still…. It was, after all, Friday night. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to have been at least a little bit surprised to discover Rich examining each RFE I entered more or less in real time, in many cases responding that it would be easy to implement and describing how he would go about doing so. For a guy who claims to like science fiction, Rich has clearly learned nothing from Scotty on Star Trek. By Saturday morning, Rich was beginning to implement the solutions to the straightforward RFEs and soliciting feedback from users and the team on the rest. Will joined in the discussion, and work on the Boston RFEs continued throughout Saturday. Sunday was no different. Like I said, these guys take their work — and user feedback — VERY seriously.

If you’re wondering how I know that the Orca team doesn’t take weekends off, it’s thanks in large part to Bugzilla. Any time someone comments on an item you have entered, you are notified via email. I also periodically browse the RFEs and bugs that others have entered, adding myself to the CC list of the ones I care about so that I can follow their progress as well. Bugzilla even has RSS support. Unlike commercial software development, what goes on in the open source community is incredibly transparent: If you want to know how things are progressing, all you have to do is look. If you want to influence that progress, participate. Bugzilla is a great resource: Again, it’s users and developers partying together!

And then there is Rich’s blog. Rich blogs about all sorts of interesting things — one of which is Orca. That’s how I found out that this weekend he also added support for a pronunciation dictionary. Very cool! (And yes, Rich, I should admittedly read the changelogs more often than I do. Please keep blogging about Orca! )

Finally, there is the Orca web site (http://live.gnome.org/Orca) and the mailing list (see http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list for more information). If you’re interested in Orca — and I do hope that you are! — I encourage you to check out both so that you can learn more about, and contribute to the development of, what is becoming a really great screen reader.

Ok, so perhaps that’s not as quite as catchy as “Beware the Ides of March.” I nonetheless have a sinking feeling that some of us won’t be fairing much better than ol’ Julius in the weeks to come.

What’s going to happen on the first, you ask? IE 7 is going to come out via Automatic Updates.

So why is that a problem? It’s not, as long as you are running the latest version of your screen access software. And that is the kicker: Given the high cost of assistive technology — screen readers in particular — there are tons of users who aren’t. They cannot afford to. How many of these users are going to go ahead and install IE7 when prompted to do so, only to discover that web browsing no longer seems to work correctly? While I hope I am mistaken, I suspect quite a few. (First ribbons, and now this. I do wish Microsoft would stop doing us favors…. )

Rehabilitation Engineer Geoff Howard posted the following on the NHBlind-Talk list. I’ve decided to borrow it since the information is valuable. Besides, I have to conserve my energy for all of the inevitable questions and support requests that will result from Microsoft’s decision.

• If your computer is set to automatically download and install critical updates, you could turn on your computer some morning and find that you’ve been updated. The current versions of most assistive technology products are not fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
• My first recommendation is to set the automatic updates feature to “Notify me but don’t automatically download or install”. This can be found in the Control Panel, under Automatic Updates. You’ll be able to view a list of available updates as they are released, just make sure not to choose the Internet Explorer 7 update yet.
• Internet Explorer 7 turns on “Clear Type” by default, which may cause some video corruption for large print users. This can be turned off in the Internet Options, Advanced Tab.
• ZoomText users: Ai Squared working on ZoomText version 9.04. This will be a free update to users of the version 9 product. Version 9.04 will be compatible with Internet Explorer 7. The release is expected in November. You can check for the update in ZoomText by going to “Check for Program Updates” in the ZoomText programs help menu.
• JAWS Users: JAWS 7.0 and earlier do not support Internet Explorer 7. JAWS 7.10 is recommended for testing, but JAWS will not be fully optimized for Internet Explorer 7 until the release of JAWS 8.0.
• MAGic Users: Version 9.50 and later can be tested with Internet Explorer 7.
• Window-Eyes: GW Micro has some registry tweaks for some items that they have found in IE 7. Information can be found in the knowledge base section of their web site. They detail support for IE 7 in the information section for beta 6, which can be found at http://www.gwmicro.com/News_&_Events/Latest_News/?newsNo=45

A new technololgy developed by Eli Peli, an ophthalmologist and bioengineer at Harvard Medical School in Boston, augments the vision of those having tunnel vision with images captured by a small video camera mounted on special glasses. The lenses have a transparent video display mounted on them that superimposes imagery captured with the video camera and renders outlines of objects missing from the users field of view. Read all about this new technology in the NewScientistTech article entitled ‘Augmented reality’ glasses tackle tunnel vision.

Do you remember the DECtalk Express, the only decent external speech synthesizer we had available to us before the advent of software speech synthesis? Sure, getting a DECtalk Express required coming up with 1000 bucks, but the quality of the speech justified the expense. I have two of them in my possession, and they still work! Well, that’s not entirely accurate. One works as long as I sit very, very still because I managed to snap off a piece that is (was) on one end of the serial cable. Thus the synthesizer keeps getting disconnected. The other works using the damaged cable, but its own cable went AWOL long ago. So I have $2000 worth of equipment, $1000 of which is currently serving as an amusing paperweight, and $1000 of which is flakey at best.

If you don’t remember the DECtalk Express, you’re probably wondering why I don’t just run out to my local computer store and pick up some replacement serial cables. The thing is, I can’t. You see, Digital Equipment Corporation, in its infinite wisdom, created its own special serial cable for use with this synthesizer: On one end there’s a standard 9-pin female connector, but on the other end there is an RJ12. Only it’s not an RJ12. As I learned recently, it’s an “RJ12 MMJ” — a special creation brought to us by Digital Equipment Corporation. I would order replacement cables from Digital were it not for the fact that they went bankrupt a number of years ago. So what does one do??

I tried looking around for serial cable wiring diagrams — and found plenty — but so far haven’t come up with anything for DB9 to RJ12. And even if I find the appropriate diagram, I would still need to track down and order the proprietary RJ12 MMJ connector.

I did find a company that sells an adapter that sounded like what I need, but the product arrived today and is only part of the puzzle. I called to inquire. After reminding me that I was dealing with 20-year-old technology made by a defunct company, and then listening to my plea for assistance, the gentleman on the other end of the phone took pity on me and said they would make me the missing piece (bless him!).

Regardless, this is taking far too much of my time, energy, and money — and none of it would be necessary if Digital had simply gone with a standard serial cable rather than this proprietary nonsense….

So why am I telling you all of this? Admittedly in large part because I feel the need to vent. But also because it is yet another reminder of why proprietary anything is bad — be it a cable or a file format. When we depend upon a single entity for access to our items in perpetuity, we’re asking for trouble: One never knows what that entity might do down the road, or if that entity will even continue to exist. Relying upon standards that are not just open, but created and supported by multiple entities, is the only way to go.

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