Wendy Chisholm

Yesterday, I presented as part of a social media event and had an awesome time. The other speakers were stimulating and fun.

For the first time, instead of creating my slides in XHTML/javascript (I like Eric Meyer’s S5), I used Open Office Impress. I figured, “why not.” We’re using Open Office for the book and it works pretty well. Plus, I noticed I could export my presentation in tagged PDF. I assumed I would happily and easily generate a tagged PDF and that would be that. So, on I trudged, delivering the file without testing it.

Today, I wanted to publish my slides on my website and on slideshare. So, I opened Acrobat to take a look at the accessibility of the PDF. I knew that the images would not have text equivalents so I was prepared to add those. I was not prepared for the following 4 hours of frustration…which is resulting not in an accessible PDF but in this blog post.

First off, Open Office Impress did not generate a tagged PDF despite me checking the checkbox. boo!

Secondly, when I generated XHTML instead of PDF, I lost all of the formatting and images. boo!

Thirdly, Acrobat only saves about 45 characters worth of each of the descriptions of the images despite giving me a text box that will allow me to enter at least 256 characters (I’m guessing because that’s the limit in the HTML 4.01 spec). boo!

I learned a valuable lesson today: all future decks will start and end in XHTML.

At barcampSeattle, Bryan, Dylan, Matt, I, and several others started a dialog about helping people adopt accessible design practices. The summary of our discussion was, “make it cheap and easy.” Last week, inspired by a comment from tantek, the dialog continued on twitter. We compared accessible design to green/environmentally-friendly design….and doughnuts.

I’ve been working on a mental stew with the following ingredients:

• “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about one family’s year-long localvore experiement – eating foods raised by themselves or neighbors and minimizing the cost of fuel used to produce and consume the foods they eat.
• “Vegetable Gardening West of the Cascades” about the benefits of gardening in the Seattle area and how we could eat fresh veggies from our gardens year-round…assuming climate change doesn’t shift our winter temperatures too many degrees.
• We’re preparing to paint the outside of our house and I’ve been researching the greenest option – paint or stain. Which lasts longer? What are the effects on the environment? Where are the materials produced and how much fuel will it take to ship to our painter? The costs and products are not quite there yet, which is frustrating for me as a consumer.
• My son is toilet training which means many more flushes of our toilets. We received the water bill yesterday and are consuming noticebly more gallons of water *per day.* What if we only had so much water in a cistern or a well and couldn’t just pull more from the city? When will I be able to view our water supply like I do our bank account? When we overdraw, it has to come from somewhere.
• I’m co-writing a book on Universal Design of web applications and I’ve been tearing apart, challenging, and reconstructing my knowledge about accessibility, disability studies, culture, and web technologies.

<stream-of-consciousness>
As a consumer, I *want* to do the green thing. I want to buy efficient toilets and use the least toxic paint. I am driven by making the world a better place, not only for myself, but for my son. What holds me back are costs and fears. The fears are: How long will the water-based paints last? Will they protect my house as well as paints with pest/herbicides? In Seattle, where there is so much water on wood, this is a big question. The costs are: Water-based paints costs almost twice per gallon than latex paints. Stains need to be reapplied more often. Then, there’s what I prefer. I like the way paint looks.

I am trying to understand the point of view of designers and developers who have not whole-heartedly adopted web standards and accessibility. I think they have similar struggles with fears and costs. I believe that most people want to do the right thing but they aren’t sure they know how, don’t have the time to find out, and fear the costs.

If I were to put in more efficient toilets, the city of Seattle would give me a rebate. I assume the reasoning by The City of Seattle goes something like: We’re all in this together, so if more people save water there will be more water for all of us. I guess I get my own tax dollars back when I contribute to the greater good.

While I think there are plenty of reasons to make your sites accessible, perhaps monetary incentives would help. I don’t know where we’d get the funding, but imagine if you added appropriate alt-text to all of the images on your site, you could get a rebate. What do you think? Would it work? If we could raise the money, is there a better way to spend it (like buying technology for people with disabilities)? do you have other ideas to make accessible design “cheap and easy?” Is that the right target? Other thoughts?
</stream-of-consciousness>

The book…in process. This is a screen shot taken with my phone then emailed to flickr. I wanted to see what they would do with the text.

First, I edited the title of the photo on my phone from random text (imgnnn) to “Testing” then I created an email with “Testing for text” as the subject and “Will this text show as description?” in the body. Flickr used the email subject as the title of the photo and the body as description. Cool!

On the flickr page for this photo, the actual alt is null. How do you folks feel about that? Since the title is a good equivalent, does the image itself need an equivalent in the alt attribute? I certainly want an alt present on the image element – even if it is null – to indicate that it has been considered. I could repeat the title as the alt value, but that would be redundant. Too bad there isn’t a way to associate the heading with the image to indicate they create a single semantic unit, but then again, this whole page is metadata for this image…in a sense the whole page is a single semantic unit.

If you all had this debate while I’ve been “away,” please point me to the archives. Thanks!

I’m speaking at an event at zaaz next week that ought to be a lot of fun. Here’s the line-up:

“Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond” – Brian Fling, Flingmedia http://www.flingmedia.com/

“Money, Media, and Your Mom’s Peach Cobbler – Social Media Marketing Done Right” – Justin Marshall, ZAAZ www.zaaz.com”

Single Athletic Female seeking Single Slender Male – The marriage of social media and metadata”-Samantha Starmer, REI http://www.rei.com/

“Slow Community” – Nancy White, Full Circle Associates http://www.fullcirc.com/

“Inclusive Universe 1.0 – Integrating Universal Design into Social Apps” – Wendy Chisholm

More information at: You’re Invited: Social Media Event at ZAAZ Seattle July 8th.

My copy of “too late to die young” has several bent pages with underlined passages. Here are a couple of my favorites.

“We need to confront the life-killing stereotype that says we’re all about suffering. We need to bear witness to our pleasures.”

About a trip to Cuba, “It’s the old socialist formula, ‘From each according to ability, to each according to need,’ played out one to one. It’s hard to pin down, but I get the feeling that being a crip is no big deal here. People talk to me. On a family trip to Mexico, people were afraid to look at me; they sometimes made the sign of the cross, my mother helpfully explained, to protect themselves against the evil eye. In Paris, cabs wouldn’t stop. Even in Charleston, where I am so much at home, people tend to address my able-bodied companions. In Havana, I’m a person.”

Not sure where this one is from, but it is quoted in the Inclusion Daily Express story,
“The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”

At lunch last Friday, I learned about “the float.” Today, I found this article, What PayPal does with your money that says, “The money-transfer service earns interest on funds in its custody” and describes how other folks are kind of miffed at paypal. Cool. I’m not alone.

Actually, now that it’s been explained to me, I’m not miffed anymore. Now, I’m just puzzled. Why couldn’t the customer service folks tell me about the float?

service rep: “Listen, chick, you get this service for free. In order keep it free, we need to accrue some interest. You signed an agreement that said your money could be combined with others and blah blah blah.”

Done and done.

I am schooled in the ways of human factors. I know that if your user feels dumb, there is probably something wrong with your system. I know that you should give your user a way to back out of a mistake. I know that most of the “user errors” that cause harm could have been prevented by better design.

I feel dumb.

Here’s my situation: Yesterday, I tried to transfer money from my checking account to my paypal account. It didn’t show up. I poked around and finally noticed the “details” link on the transaction and learned it was going to take 3-5 business days to transfer the money. That wasn’t what I had in mind. I searched for a way to cancel the transaction. No dice.

I called my bank. “Nothing we can do.”

I called paypal. “It takes 3-5 business days. Nothing we can do.”
me: “Why does it take 3-5 business days?”
service rep: “It takes 3-5 business days. Nothing we can do.”
me: “May I talk to your supervisor?”
service rep: “Sure. But she’ll tell you the same thing.”
me: “Ok. I’d like to hear it from someone else.”
service rep’s supervisor: “3-5 business days. Nothing we can do. It’s a process. If you want to complain you can print this form and mail it in.”
me: “You are an online service and you want me to print and mail something?”
service rep’s supervisor: “You could email service@paypal.com”
me: “Right. That sounds really helpful. Thanks.”

I was kind of huffy at this point and sent out a couple tweets. Then, here’s where I feel really dumb: On the “Add funds by electronic transfer” page in paypal, just above the drop-down and text entry field is this line, “It takes 3-5 business days to electronically transfer funds from your bank account to your PayPal account.”

Ok. You told me. But, I missed it. I’m dumb. And that mistake will cost me 6-10 days without access to my money while it sits in limbo to transfer from my bank to paypal then more limbo when I transfer it back to my bank account.

I get it. Dumb. But, how is it that when I buy my groceries down the road the transaction shows up in my online checking account before I’m home? How is it that when I pay my bills online, the payment is taken out of my account the day that I say I want it taken out of my account and it doesn’t take 3-5 business days for the company I’m paying to receive the payment? How is it that if I make an error in paying someone, I can call my bank and say, “don’t let that one go through?”

Ideally, I’d like a way to stop a process and don’t understand why paypal can’t stop a process that they initiate. (Could someone explain that one to me?)

At a minimum, could they give me some sort of alert message after I click, “submit” that says, “Are you sure? Are you really really sure? Go back and read the terms, dummy.”

Would you like your site reviewed for web accessibility?

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness. Our goal is to raise $25,000 for that purpose.

I’m volunteering my time. How about you?

Spread the word.

Here are a few brief glimpses of memories; they don’t do justice to the awesomeness that is John Slatin.

I went to dinner with Anna and John then we went to Body Choir. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away. At first, I felt a little awkward, but I started moving to the music then realized that I was connecting with people without words. Through movement, eye contact, I was interacting with people in ways I never had before. In the car afterwards, I had many questions and we had a wonderful discussion about intimacy – something I’ve always struggled with. That was a pinnacle discussion for me – one that caused me to question how I think. I’m still growing as a result of that discussion and still have further to grow. As I’ve read Leukemia Letters over the last 2 years and about all the people surrounding Anna and John, I see that the wisdom and the openness we talked about that night is the strength behind the love and the connections.

June 2005: We were in Brussels for a WCAG WG face-to-face meeting that was to start the following day. John and I were sitting on a bench in a park, Dillon at our feet. I had told family and a couple friends that I was two months pregnant and decided to share the news with John. I had slept every afternoon for the two weeks leading up to the trip and was anxious about how I would manage 8-12 hour days in meetings. “I can’t leave the meetings every afternoon. What will I do?” He replied, “If you need to leave, then do it. If people ask, then tell them.” I could always count on John for calm and clarity. I could talk with him about things that I couldn’t with other people. I didn’t know it at the time – but we were both tired. John would return home from that trip and begin the first of many hospital stays.

I wish I could be in Austin this weekend. I want to be part of the energy of the amazing people that surround John and Anna. You both have been influential with your wisdom and your love, your energy and your calm. Thank you. I love you.