Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The weirdest thing for me about the continuing existence of the Free Software Foundation is that by one metric (the propagation of libre free software licenses as part of the global computer ecosystem) they've been wildly and completely successful, and yet by their own metric they've been so overwhelmingly defeated that the GNU fields have basically been sown with salt. And it's all their own doing, as well; if the FSF had spent the last decade or so being more than an 501(c)(3) vanity project to entertain RMS, then maybe they could have helped the actually useful organizations fight against the world of proprietary, closed, non-federatable systems, in which the actual threats have nothing to do with eeeeevil open source, non-libre licenses, but have to do with a massive world in which all that FLOSS software underlies surveillance capitalism and horrific concentration of capital. They could have fought more effectively against a world where instead of hooking up your libre RSS reader and your libre chat client, you have to install proprietary tools to do the simplest job, if they didn't think there were few greater sins than collaborating with someone using a *gasp* Apache license -- or worse, a proprietary software package a user is required to use to do their job.

Anyway, as I've pointed out before, RMS once said, when someone asked about accessibility in free software,

"the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."

tl;dr the FSF can eat my shorts, emacs sucks, and vim is great.

I'm supposed to be at Linux Conf Australia now, ready to give a presentation on "User-Created Content: Maintaining accessibility and usability when we don't control the content". Due to the vagaries of snowstorms and the helpful Can Don't attitude of Emirates, I'm not there, but luckily Her Fabulousness the amazing fu is going to give the presentation in my stead, which makes up at least a little for missing the conference myself.

I've uploaded my slides to slideshare, though if you're at LCA I suggest going to see fu speak instead (her presentation will differ from mine, of course, in style if not in content).

The topic:

Social Media sites, Content Management Systems, and Learning Management Systems rely on end-users, not web developers, to create the content at the heart of the site. How can we design our interfaces to encourage users to create usable, accessible content? Can we train our users without annoying them or driving them away? What tools can we give them to make it easier for them to create the best content? We want it to be easy for our users to create content every bit as accessible and usable as we would create ourselves.

The meat of this presentation is in the notes; I'm not big on text-heavy slides, which is great during a presentation but harder to follow when downloading a presentation. On Slideshare you can view the slide notes on a slide by slide basis or in a PDF I've created of the entire presentation. Sadly PPT-to-PDF notes view has no alt for the slides, and slideshare has no way of modifying a transcript to include off-slide text. In other words, my authoring tools got in the way of the accessibility of my content. >:( The most accessible format might be downloading the PPT directly from slideshare! (All non-decorative images in the Powerpoint have alt.) I will upload audio at some point.



Oh, and if you're at LCA, mark's giving an introduction to Go tomorrow, so you should go to that, too!

I'm grateful to the Free Software movement. I don't deny that the movement, the FSF, and the GNU Project have changed the world for the better. But every time I actually interact with Free Software people, I end up contemplating violence. (Note: I'm distinguishing Free Software from Open Source here; be aware that the link I'm giving here is to a Richard Stallman rant.)

In this thread "A Call to Arms" on the GNU mailing list, Eric Johansson desperately tries to bring sanity to a discussion about enabling Free Software to interact helpfully with proprietary accessibility tools (in this case, Dragon NaturallySpeaking). And time after time, Richard Stallman derails the conversation.

When Johansson tries to explain about the poverty of many people with disabilities, Stallman counters with Billions of people today are too poor to [use computers] and To lack money is unpleasant, but it does not mean you have lost your freedom. (Contrast being broke with being in jail.) When Johansson explains that Free Software is currently something completely unavailable to dictation users, Stallman reports Our goal is to eliminate proprietary software. Towards that end, we have to teach people it is bad. We cannot do that and simultaneously suggest a "solution" that includes NaturallySpeaking -- that is a non-starter here. He thus completely ignores Johansson's larger point, which is that you can't teach people that proprietary software "is bad" if you take away a system that works for them and replace it with one that doesn't.

But the kicker. My God, the kicker:

Responding to Johansson's assertion Let's say I bought into the philosophy. I would get rid of my computer because a free system that I can't use is fundamentally useless, Stallman retorts "Can't use" is such a strong statement that I wonder if it is another exaggeration, Even if you have no hands, there are other ways to input besides dictation.

Sometimes I feel like it's my responsible as both a developer with disabilities and a female developer to speak up in these conversations instead of just lurking. But by all that's holy, that man is poison, and why would I want to be exposed to that kind of poison?

For the record, I hate being tied to Windows. For 10 years I've been on an operating system I despise. I worked on the XVoice project, which has been in a continual cycle of develop-and-stall for years. I would LOVE to be able to be working on non-proprietary software, and this No Compromise attitude is precisely why I can't. So Richard Stallman, if you read this, I want you to realize that YOU are why I'm working on a Windows machine. You are why I can't leave. You are why I use Microsoft Word -- because it's the editor that understands my dictation software. You are why I use Adobe Photoshop instead of the GIMP. You are why I am unable to use the Free Software that I love.

And meanwhile, when Bill Cox asks Will programmers who use Windows and Naturally Speaking, or Windows and JAWs hesitate to join a FSF community? I can only point to this thread in which he asks it as my answer. Will I be willing to speak up and be a voice in the community whose recognized god gets pandered to when he questions the reported adaptive technology needs of another developer? I think the answer is apparent.

This weekend, I attended Boston's first Accessibility Unconference. I expected to be going only for the networking opportunity, but I found the whole experience fabulous. Certainly there were some frustrations -- the location, for example, could have been more accessible by public transit. But overall, it was a great day.

I spoke about Dreamwidth, not surprisingly. Just as others have talked about the rich developer community that's built when you provide a development environment which is welcoming to women and encouraging to newbies, I talked about the accessibility gains that you get from creating a nurturing environment in your open-source community for people with disabilities. I talked about how being encouraging not just developers with disabilities but also newbies with disabilities made it more likely for your project to have a rich and motivated pool of testers using adaptive technology -- which prompted one participant to say something along the lines of, "you should rent those people out; everybody wants actual disabled testers!"

Other people's talks were also compelling. Jeanette Beal talked about low tech solutions for improving independent living, and gave us all a good reminder that adaptive technology isn't all about Web 2.0. I was sad the session on HTML 5 video was pretty brief, although that was all of our faults, because it shared a session with Flash video and we all asked too many questions of the people discussing Flash.

And the networking was nothing to sneeze at, either. I was thrilled to finally meet the blogger behind Dis/positional. I had long, enlightening talks with Judy Brewer (who was puzzled by my starry eyes) and Mike Gorse (lightvortex), a developer who works on Gnome accessibility. I learned that Patrick Timony, adaptive technology librarian at the DC public Library, is going to be presenting at SAA, and I promised to send those of my coworkers who will be attending the conference to talk to him. I didn't have enough time to talk to him about his interesting ideas about accessibility and archives, but I made the connection!

Above all, I was overwhelmed with being surrounded by more professionals with disabilities than I had ever in my life met offline. More programmers with disabilities. More female programmers with disabilities. At one point I was hard pressed not to start crying. Dreamwidth has been great for introducing me to other professionals, other techies, other female professionals and female techies disabilities. But I underestimated the emotional impact of being surrounded by that many of us in one room.

(ETA: One glorious moment happened when an attendee of the conference was chatting with me (note that my disability is mostly invisible) and she said "I see a lot of visually impaired people here. Are they here to learn about what kind of adaptive technologies are available?" And I responded, "No, they are mostly programmers and accessibility professionals," and she looked thoroughly taken aback. I think my little heart grew three sizes.)