scripting enabled at georgia tech
DESCRIPTION
An introductory explanation of scripting enabled and accessibility hacking i've given at Georgia Tech this morningTRANSCRIPT
Christian Heilmann,, Georgia Tech, Autumn 2008
Hello, I am Chris.
I love the mashup and ethical hacking movement.
Barcamps, Hack Days, Mashups, Crowdsourcing, the
social web.
Things that make me happy.
... but I felt that it all became a bit stale.
We’ve been mashing things up nicely.
Many a photo has been placed on a map!
However, was that really something new?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow_(physician)
HACKER!
John Snow helped the London authorities in 1854 to trace
back the reason of cholera...
...by placing the deaths caused by cholera on a map
and analyze the surroudings.
The answer:
water supply!
Another example comes from advertising.
James Webb Young’s
“A technique for producing ideas”
is a book about coming up with new ideas...
...presented in 1939 and published in 1965.
Amongst other things, he claims this to be about
combining old elements.
Mashups are much more than just a technical feat.
Anything purely technical can be created by computers.
This is why we now have “mashup generators”...
... effectively killing all creativity in the mashup
camp.
Which makes developers that could still move and shake the market get bored and
stop hacking.
This, to some degree happened to me.
{sad kitty}
I was wondering what you could do with the drive of the
mashup community...
...realizing that there is one part of web development that needs a strong, swift kick up
the backside.
Accessibility
For years, I’ve been preaching and begging for
people to consider disabilities when they develop.
The problem was first and foremost a lack of communication.
It is *very* easy to get bad and incomplete information
about web accessibility.
The reason is that it is not sexy...
Publishers don’t really look for new books and people
don’t bookmark and link blog posts.
We will change this tomorrow!
WebmasterJam
Session
People who work with people that need assistive
technology are most of the time not geeks.
They are people people, not computer people.
Geeks on the other hand love everything.
They especially love shiny new technology.
So, there is a camp of people that are annoyed with the web as it doesn’t work the
way it should...
... and on the other hand there are people that are getting bored of it as they
know all about it.
This was the gap to close.
The solution was YouTube.
At Accessibility 2.0 Antonia Hyde showed research results
of how users with learning disabilities have problems
using YouTube.
http://www.slideshare.net/hi.antonia/rich-media-and-web-apps-for-people-with-learning-
disabilities
Shortly before YouTube announced their API to build
your own YouTube Player.
I took the API and Antonia’s findings and built
EasyYouTube.
Screenshot of Easy YouTube
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk
I put it online and asked for feedback...
The feedback was amazing!
So I did more...
Easy Flickr screenshot
showing donkeys
http://icant.co.uk/easy-flickr/index.php?s=donkeys
I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy
captioning interfaces.
I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy
captioning interfaces.
http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html
Which inspired others to hack their annotations API:
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/youtubeannotations/
And again others to build a whole web app about it:
http://www.tubecaption.com/watch?v=jpCPvHJ6p90&vcId=137
This was going places.
Special needs driving innovation.
We had this before...
What inventions were created because of disabled
users?
The speaker.
OCR Scanning
Remote Controls
All of these were great because they had input from
people who need barriers removed.
Without this input, we build lesser successful solutions.
This is why I organized
Scripting Enabled
On the 19th and 20th of September, around a 100
people listened to 6 speakers...
... speakers with different barriers to the web or
researchers that spoke for people with barriers.
On the second day about 30 hackers took these insights
and built solutions that work around these barriers.
We now have presentations on the barriers faced by the
blind, dyslexic, learning disabled, the impacts of MS
and and and...http://scriptingenabled.org/presentations/
The videos of these talks are now being transcribed and
will be online soon.
We have hacks working around these issues.
Easy Google Maps
Reduce to the max
Easy Audio Books
Stylesheet Selector
Accessible Editing
...http://scriptingenabed.pbwiki.com/
The energy at the event was amazing.
For *nearly 10 hours* we presented and discussed in Q&A sessions on day one.
Hackers didn’t bother with presenting and competing
with their hacks from 4–5pm as intended...
... but instead stayed till 7.30pm and kept hacking until we had to leave the
building!
There was good blog coverage on all kind of
personal and professional (BBC) blogs.
Some companies are right now taking the results and
embedding them in their own systems (audio books).
The video player research is already in use in Yahoo video and I am helping drafting our
API specifications.
There is more happening and available to you:
http://icanhaz.com/twitterwithlang
Using yahoo live a group of deaf people wereable to chat online for the first time.
Yahoo live showing hard of hearing people chatting with
another in sign language.
http://blog.deafread.com/abcohende/2008/02/15/yahoos-live-deaf-chat-room/
Screenshots of uk.video.yahoo.com with and without JavaScript
http://uk.video.yahoo.com/
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
http://dt.in.th/2008–05–18.javascript-karaoke-lyric-scroller.html
Screenshot of the JW Video Player
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player
Screenshot of the JW player with captioning and audio description
showing a scene from Coronation Street.
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player
http://code.google.com/p/google-axsjax/
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/socialaccessibility/
http://webvisum.com/
What does the future hold?
I’ve come to realize that Scripting Enabled is a great
concept.
I spent about 10 hours of planning and less money than
the plane ticket to here on the event.
As I don’t have the time to run it wherever I want to, I
opened the event up.
Anyone can run their own Scripting Enabled, if they follow these simple rules:
It has to be free
It has to be a mix of information and hacking around accessibility
Everything has to be released as CC or Open Source
Scriptingenabled.org is the source of truth – I want to know about events
Use the social web to store the photos, slides and links
http://scriptingenabled.org/host-your-own-scripting-enabled/
What about it?
Thanks!Chris Heilmann
http://scriptingenabled.org
http://wait-till-i.com