Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

My last post was several weeks ago, about my disappointment with Apple. In the spirit of fairness, I must update that story.

Rather inexplicably to me, that post went, in a small way, viral. (I suppose that explains the trolling the post was getting, which at the time to me came completely out of the blue.) It must have showed up on some Mac message boards, and eventually got forwarded to people in Apple administration. Kudos to Apple that they thought the situation warranted contacting me; a few days after the post (early December) I received a response to my initial e-mail from early October. The e-mail was not from somebody in the accessibility team, to whom I had initially reached out, but from somebody on the customer relations team.

Over the next several days, I spoke at length with a helpful, professional, kind Apple customer relations employee. She was as helpful as one could reasonably be under the circumstances. She asked me what I really wanted at this point, and I told her that primarily what I'd just wanted was the opportunity to buy an iPhone. She helped me through the process and made it as painless -- as it were -- as possible. The only other thing I wanted, I told her, was the knowledge that Apple was receiving my feedback about the difficulty of using the iPhone from the point of view of this one mobility impaired user. She assured me that my e-mail to the accessibility mailing list going unread was an unfortunate fluke.

Only time will tell if any of that was true. I've been saying since this new iPhone came that I wasn't sure if I was going to keep it, but I've tested my way all the way through my window of being able to decide to send it back, so I guess I've decided to keep it. Today I'll be putting together an e-mail for the accessibility group of questions, bug reports, and feature requests. That e-mail, again, is only from the point of view of this one mobility impaired user. I will also post those here, not in the spirit of complaint, but in the spirit of sharing with interested people about the different ways some people use devices.

I'm still really unsure about this phone. I've been at a pretty steady pain level since I got it, because there really is no way to use it without hurting myself. All of the accessibility features make it possible for me to use it, but not painless. Common sense would dictate that if a device is painful for me to use, I shouldn't use it, but there does seem to be a genuine utility to having a smartphone. I survived fine without a cell phone for years, but I will admit that NextBus is something of a killer app.

I can't shake the feeling that I'm making a foolish decision.

...Except that there's this vain hope, this little spark within me, that maybe my experience means I am actually more likely to be listened to by Apple when I send them my list of feature requests, and maybe by using this device I can improve the experience of using handheld devices for all people with mobility impairments. Or at least the people whose mobility impairments are similar to mine.

Anyway, again. I want to say thank you to Apple for responding to my complaint about being nibbled to death by inaccessible ducks with the courteous and professional handholding I received. I wish my initial inquiry had received a response, but I'm willing to accept for now that the situation was a fluke. Like I said, only time will tell.

I'm leaving comments closed on this post as well, because I'm going to link to it, in the spirit of fairness, from the prior post. That post is still generating hits, and I'm an extremely conflict-avoidant person. I don't want the trolls to follow the link and leave comments here.

The Happy Nappy Bookseller has compiled a list of middle grade and young adult books by authors of color published in 2011 to complement Zetta Elliott's list of middle grade and young adult books by black authors published in 2011. 47 black authors published 2 American Indian authors published 28 Asian authors published 17 Latino authors published 2 authors of Mixed heritage published These lists could be useful resources!

Last night, because I needed something to read, I grabbed a copy of Sarah Dooley's Body of Water off the shelf at school. I expected it merely to be an enjoyable time filler, but I was floored by how much I enjoyed it.

Basic plot: Pagan 12-year-old (from a Pagan family) is made homeless when her trailer burns down. Character growth ensues.

I read so much speculative fiction for work that realistic fiction has had an disproportionate ability to impress me lately. Even without that, however, I suspect I would have found beautiful: a lyrical tear-jerker that required about half a box of tissues to get through. The Pagan threads are neither exclusionary and offputting to a non-pagan, nor are they pasted on; they are vital to the story's thematic development.

Ah, I see that Kirkus gave the book a star, which surprises me not at all.

I feel that as full-time academic staff but part-time adjunct faculty I can 100% attest to the accuracy of advanced faculty wrangling techniques, which explains why cat herding is so much easier than faculty wrangling. (h/t pauamma)

Since I do lecture as adjunct faculty, does that mean I can publicly state my feelings about faculty? Or will I be seen to be speaking as a staff, and not as faculty? :D

I love Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I couldn't be employed or a member of online communities without it. But that doesn't mean there aren't things about it that make me gnash my teeth. Here are my top three quality-of-life-affecting bugs which have been introduced in the past couple of versions:

1. The newly introduced inability to use "spell" commands in the flow of normal dictation. It used to be that an utterance could be "And the characters are named Bob, Lily, spell echo india lima oscar november whiskey yankee, and Ahmed." Now there has to be a pause-for-command on either side of the spelling command: "And the characters are named Bob, Lily, [BREAK] spell spacebar echo india lima oscar november whiskey yankee [BREAK], and Ahmed." Unless you dictate all the time you might not realize how incredibly disruptive it is to thought and flow to have to break like that. In my daily life there are any number of words I have to dictate with spelling commands which are just not worth adding to the dictionary, because I might dictate them three times total. The way it used to work was perfect. (Version 11 change, I think. It might have been version 10.)


2. The brand-new feature of the sleeping microphone to hear random background noise as a "wake-up" command. It's become comical how frequently I'm speaking with a friend or coworker and I suddenly have to indicate silence while I say "go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep," while meanwhile my computer processes whatever utterances at has heard in the interim, often to exceedingly disruptive effect. If you use a computer hands-free, using the "microphone off" command instead of the "go to sleep" command is pretty much impossible, at least without some kind of foot switch. I really hoped this bug was going to be fixed in the first NaturallySpeaking 11 patch, but instead they just introduced new commands for direct tweeting and Facebooking. (Version 11 change)


3. The dropped letters/doubled letters in non-Select and Say windows. This didn't used to happen. If you complain about it to Nuance, they just say they don't support non-Select and Say windows. It's really bad, and happens non-deterministically. Sometimes the first character of a dual-key sequence gets dropped, so, for example, "select all" turns into "a" (since "select all" is "control-a"). (Version 10, I think)

Aside from the bugs, here are my top Dragon feature requests:

1. A couple of versions ago, Dragon introduced the ability to operate (e.g. Select, bold, delete) on a word which is repeated multiple times in the window. You say something such as "bold Dragon", and a number appears next to all of the incidences of the word "Dragon". Then all the dictator needs to say is "choose 2" to choose the second incidence of the word "Dragon." This is fabulous. Now, Nuance, could you add this feature that when I say "choose 2" Dragon hears me uttering the command "choose 2", and not the dictated text "choose 2"? Four times out of five, Dragon thinks I am saying anything other than "please select the item with the big red 2 next to it". (I'm calling this a new feature, not a bug to fix, because it never really worked right.)


2. I would love a revamp of the advanced command editor and the Command Browser in general. It is, ironically, fairly difficult to navigate all of the features of the Command Browser via voice . It's also difficult to do any kind of nuanced sharing of commands between two different computers. And while revamping the Command Browser/advanced command editor interface, is there any way the documentation could get a revamp as well? Those "advanced command editing with Dragon version #" books are pretty basic, and don't get into the rich features in any depth.


3. Could there please be the ability to press the Windows key in an advanced command? The Windows key is not the same as CTRL-ESC, although both of them pull up the Windows start menu. It is a single key which sends its own key binding, and multitude of programs require the Windows key in particular.


4. Could you consider working with vendors who make other accessibility tools (e.g. JAWS, NVDA, Qwitter) for better interoperability? Right now, it's impossible to use any of those tools entirely hands-free with NaturallySpeaking, unless you buy the $900 J-Say package to interface with JAWS.

I want to post my notes from the Boston accessibility unconference, but I need to come to terms first with my discomfort at being in any way a public figure. It's possible I might pull back from the accessibility community simply because I don't like being in the public eye.

Instead, I will give you "Ferdinand at 75", A post from Philip Nel which ably demonstrates how meaning is created by the context of the interpreter.

I like to start off my semester by talking to students about how you can love media you find deeply flawed; part of learning to think critically is being willing to put aside your affection or dislike for a text for a little while. (And then you need to be able to take your emotional reaction back, and see what happens to it when informed by critical thinking. I'm all about multilayered response.) The examples I use are usually texts which are deeply flawed vis-à-vis some axis of political oppression which touches me personally: feminism, usually. There are plenty of movies I love that have deeply ingrained misogyny. On another axis, there's Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy, a fabulous book with the despicable Jewish moneylender.

But it's easy to talk about the the books you love when you're in the group under attack; not so easy when reading the book makes you into an attacker-by-proxy. Over at the Kirkus blog, Vicky Smith writes "Guilt and Pleasure":

Do you ever love a book that you feel you shouldn’t? I'm not talking about a typical “guilty pleasure” sort of book--legions of smart, emancipated women find themselves tucking into Twilight and its spawn as if they were chocolate-covered nougats. A little shamefacedly, they confess that they find the sexual politics of so many of these books utterly retrograde but nevertheless hugely enjoyable. But that guilt is a light one, not the kind that a person really feels, well, guilty about.

And then Vicky talks about what it feels like, both as a reader and as a reviewer, to have enjoyed 13th Child. It's an interesting essay, I think. As a reviewer, I share the worry she addresses:

A colleague at another book review asked me that summer, "What are you going to do about Thirteenth Child?" Of course, we had already done it. Because of our ferocious pre-publication schedule, we had gone to press with a starred review before I ever became aware of the controversy. Certainly, I was a member of that presumed non-Native audience, and I lapped the whole book up without thinking twice.

I'm not sure I know anyone who deals with books -- whether reviewers, authors, teachers, or readers (and I assume folks in publishing, although they have tighter constraints on what they can say in public) -- who doesn't occasionally have deep regret over the public or private reactions they had to a work they later realized was deeply problematic, or about problems in their own fiction. And I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't love some deeply troubling fiction. I tell my students that you can love something and find it troubling, as part of your job as a critical thinker is gaining the ability to reconcile those. But it's a lot easier for me to reconcile my feelings about great books with despicable Jewish moneylenders than it is for me to reconcile my love for, oh, A Horse and His Boy or A Little Princess. It's easier to forgive (the book? myself for loving the book?) when I'm not reading from a position of privilege.

This goes beyond Wrede to so much of our literature, both great and not-so-great. Every year children devour the Little House books despite their terribly hurtful depictions of Native Americans, for instance. Some of us give Laura Ingalls Wilder a pass of sorts, saying she was a product of her times, a forgiveness that we cannot extend to Wrede—and, depending on the reader, to ourselves, when we enjoy her series.

Read the piece, it's thought-provoking.

On Saturday, after two years without a cell phone, I bought an Android phone.

This afternoon I returned it.

I was excited enough by the phone's features that it overcame my deep aversion for being reachable (and my steadily growing distaste with El Google). It's not just the many features of the Android phones designed to lay claim to the geek's heart, of course, but also the voice control features, still inadequate but improving with every frequent iteration of the operating system. It's how hard Google pushes the Android accessibility API, although I admit I should have had the first inklings of worry when I read those pages months ago, and saw that Google fell into the trap of frequently equating "accessibility" with "no- or low-vision use".¹

Before I'd had the phone 5 minutes, when I was still getting help getting the voice control correctly configured, I discovered I was going to have to take it back. Android's haptic feedback (a fancy name for "the phone vibrates a whole lot") cannot be entirely turned off, and renders it completely unusable by me. Yet that same haptic feedback is specifically designed as an accessibility feature for no- or low-vision use of the phones.

I don't want to read too much into what is fundamentally a bad user interface design on Google's part, here. Haptic feedback is a wonderful thing, but it should be able to be completely disabled based on user option. The fact that it can't be is clearly a UI mistake.

But there's something else underlying here, and it's the idea that accessibility is a set of features which can be added, wham bam, beneficial to all of those adorable folks who need it. As everyone who has spent enough time in the accessibility world understands, one person's accessibility need is another person's spoon-sucking roadblock. (Tactile paving, anyone?) For all I often rant about how easy it would just be to add basic accessibility do applications and websites, I admit in my more fair moments that accessibility beyond the basic is quite difficult, and this is exactly why. There's no big tent that can encompass all accessibility needs. Universal design is lovely and wonderful as a concept, but it's far from trivial: there's no one universal human to design for.

In the meantime, I guess I'll just continue to be unreachable. Which isn't so bad, after all.

ETA:

The Google form for reporting accessibility problems is a marvelous exemplar of my point. On the one hand, they have a dedicated form for reporting accessibility problems! On the other hand, they have this question and set of possible answers:

If you’re encountering a problem, we need to understand a bit more about the issue, so we can help. What screen reader or other assistive technology are you using, if any?

• JAWS
• Window-Eyes
• System Access
• NVDA
• VoiceOver
• Don't know
• Other

GUYS. They don't even list any screen magnifiers in that list, let alone get wacky with it and list adaptive technologies which aren't for blind or low-vision use. Only slightly fewer of the respondents to be latest WebAIM screen reader survey listed Zoom Text than listed System Access, and that's despite the fact that users of Zoom Text might not have bothered to take the survey because they aren't using screen readers. It's like the people who created that form (and once again, thank you Google for creating that form) can't even imagine how to talk to people who have accessibility needs but don't use screen readers.

---

1. To be fair, the Eyes-Free on Android project also continually falls into the trap of using the word "accessibility" when they mean "accessibility for blind and low-vision users". And also to be fair, I do realize that touchscreen devices are a hell of a lot more disenfranchising to blind and low-vision users than they are to many types of people with mobility impairments. I'm sorry. I'm trying to own my "not very disabled" privilege here, but it's hard, because I wanted that phone.^[back]

Along with Anne Sauer and Eliot Wilczek, I've just had a new paper published: "Archival Description in OAI-ORE", in the Journal of Digital Information, a free, green open access journal. This is a version of a paper which we presented last year at Open Repositories 2010, and mercifully, has been greatly improved since the draft of the paper I wrote while running a temperature of 102°.

This paper, by the way, is our attempt to COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZE ARCHIVES AND CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sort of. Revolutionize archival description using new technology, anyway. Changing the laws of physics will have to wait until we get grant funding.

I have no objection to present tense narration in any single instance, but oh, my kingdom for a book written in past tense.

Dear authors and publishers: writing everything in the present tense will not give your book the success of Hunger Games. PLEASE STOP.