Modus Cooperandi

Cooperation Commons is Live and Getting Livelier

The Cooperation Commons blog is up and running.

That is where I'll be doing most of my cooperation-related blogging from here on out.  Please check out the entire Cooperation Commons site which will become a repository for mulitdisciplinary information about cooperation.

My personal blog will remain at its current location.

Modus Cooperandi Transforming

Modus Cooperandi is undergoing a bit of a change.  As part of the Cooperation Project, we are reformulating the site.  In the next few days, we'll be doing some extensive testing which will show up in the guise of nonsense posts mostly.

In a week or so, we will have new and interesting content and more lively posting.

In the meantime, pardon our mess.

Plone Testing Ignored by Millions

Please disregard these posts that test our new plone site.

Designing cool things for people with disabilities...

Designing cool things for people with disabilities...
"Design students who create products for disabled people are hoping to attract the attention of manufacturers at an exhibition in London this week."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272516.stm

   

Mr Goodland conducted research among people aged over 65.

   

He found that items which were the most difficult to use were video recorders, vacuum cleaners, central heating timers and telephones.

   

He decided to concentrate on timers and phones because both are vital to a person's well-being.

   

Among telephone users, he found the most common problem was dialling.

   

 

           

Highlights of Independent Living 2005     In pictures

   

   

In order to overcome this he designed a photo frame holder into which pictures of the person whose number is required can be inserted.

   

The user simply has to tap the photo or the holder in order to dial the correct number.

   

He says it has the added advantage of working with an existing phone, avoiding the need to learn to use a new handset.

Over 65--that's a big market of folks.  Making technology work for them is a pretty cool idea.

What are three young Griffindors doing on an accessibility blog post?

Stunningly enough, they are part of www.jkrowling.com/, the official website of J. K. Rowling, which is Flash and accessibility enabled.

In a posting to the Universal Access group at the Trace Center, Gregg Vanderheiden said:

   

It has implemented accessibility features and was written up by the Universal Design Education Newsletter as a paragon of accessibility.

....

      

If one  believes that parallel optimized content is a good approach – this is a  fascinating example. 
If one  believes that one format should meet all – then this is a separate but equal  approach.Currently the new guidelines are trending toward accessible form should be available from the same URI which is true for the home page from which the flash launches.

   

 

What a great idea--for all the people who are Harry Potter fans.

Creating a business case for web accessibility

For years, a theme has come up on various accessibility lists asking if anyone knows of a good business case for accessibility. Recently the WAI created one for web accessibility, which is certainly a good place to start. This excerpt gives a flavor of the problem many of us have faced in trying to convince companies that there is money to be made in doing their website right.

   

"The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. The Web is used for receiving information as well as providing information and interacting with society. Therefore it is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. An accessible Web also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.

      

There are initial costs for organizations implementing Web accessibility; however, the initial costs are often offset by a full return on investment. In order to be willing to invest the initial costs, many organizations need to understand the social, technical, and financial benefits of Web accessibility and the expectations of the returns throughout the organization. The justification to commit resources to a project is often called a "business case". Business cases usually document an analysis of the project's value in meeting the organization's objectives, the cost-benefit analysis, and the expected outcomes."

    

The rest of the article can be found on the W3C's WAI pages.

Convergence and Procreation

Over the last several months, there have been several concepts floating around that I'd like to tie together this morning.  In the end, they all reveal something important: People's expectations in relationships are fundamentally changing.  This is probably evolutionary but is being triggered now by how our relationship to people, ideas, and things are now more controllable.

On-demand television means we watch whatever, whenever.  Videos, the same.  E-commerce means we can buy what we want, when we want, for a good price, get comparisons with like goods, discuss it with other users, etc.  All of this to the extent that we want to.  We don't have to do any of this, but there is the option.

The Unconference is a great example of our new relationship.  Google it.  Unconferences have grown out of people's growing lack of satisfaction for being talked to.  The egalitarianism of the Internet has led many to expect that they will be in on the conversation - not a recipient of unchallenged wisdom.

For years people have said that the value of any conference is the mixers and not the seminars.  That's because we learn more from our peers than we do from experts, surely.  But more importantly, it's because we care more about things we actively engage in.  We retain more when we are active.  We get more when we give.

AJAX and Accessibility

Link: Better Living Through Software - AJAX and Accessibility.

We've been getting more and more interested in RIA which means we're also getting caught by the traps in there regarding using these rich tools and still create accessible content.  On this, I will simply restate what Eugene Seagriff at Panasonic once told me "Redundancy is the Key to Accessibility".  It's my mantra...
In this case, the idea is "use the hooks" (and the recent sharing of code between IBM and Mozilla is a good example of this), but go further--create redundant systems!

Are You REALLY Atrios?

Today's Yi-Tan conference call discussed an emerging theme amongst the blogophilic.  The base problem, as opined more technically by Mary Hodder, is:

How can we properly guide viewers to relevant blog content and community?

The nutshell problem is this:  Most search engines (Google, Technorati, etc.) look for links-in and links-out as a primary indicator of the social worth of a web page or blog post.  Anyone who has delved into the muck of the web for something specific knows that regardless of the impressiveness of current systems - you often find primarily e-commerce sites.

Danah Boyd (earlier post) wrote about gender issues in linking and link strength.  In essence, that men tend to link a whole lot more and a whole lot less selectively than women.  This ends up causing an imbalance in the relative strength of links WRT issues of importance to women and other factors.

So the issue here is how do we invent metrics to judge the relative social worth of one blog post over another.  The analysis needs to take into account the fact that gamers of this sytem are flooding the internet with content-free blog posts and web pages that contain key words and copious links.  These sites are primarily aimed to get eyeballs to make money for the people putting up these sites.  They are web spammers.  Web spammers are very good at gaming rankings like these and defeating their purpose.

Community is measured differently by different people.  Some measure it by the amount of participation in discussions. Some measure it by linking.  Some measure it by blogrolling.  But all these are, at best, indirect measures.

Direct measures may be no better.  If our solution is merely to tag links by their relative importance, those tags are easy to spot and easy to fabricate for web spammers. 

Ultimately, the issue at the moment is that there is no personal identification code for someone on the web.  There is no unique identifier.  Therefore, we have no content fingerprint with which to weed out serious content from spam.  We have no way of creating real reputation management.

Nancy White's quest for the ultimate community indicators is an element running along side this activity.  The ultimate answer to both question probably lies at their intersection somewhere in the future.  When we can measure via indirect means the strength of an emerging or emerged community then perhaps we can evaluate the relative worth of its members' contributions.

In the meantime, I will direct you again at Mary's post which provides a weighting of many different metrics which is either skimming off the existing metric soup or it may be a good Wisdom of Crowds approach.   It might be harder to game, but it may also be harder to obtain a good ranking because there are so many indicators to satisfy.

Other posts by other people on this topic can be found here.

DJ Big Blue vs. Mozilla

Link: PRESS RELEASE IBM Contributes Open Source Code to Make FireFox Browser More Accessible.

Yippee!  This is one of those things I'm always glad to see.  I use multiple browsers but frankly get pretty frustrated with IE and the amount of spyware I get slammed with when I use it.  However, working on accessibility issues, I tend to focus on IE use because that's what my screenreaders are optimized for.  However, it looks like IBM has teamed up with Mozilla to make Firefox more accessible, a move that can only be good.