Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

From heydon, What Happened To Text Inputs.

I cannot yell loudly enough that (thoughtless, ill-considered) innovation and standing out are nearly always incompatible with usability, user experience, and accessibility. Web designers and front end devs who don't have a functionality-first attitude need a new career, or they need to do work on art projects instead of usable websites. Heydon yells this with the assistance of wolves and cursing, so maybe more people will watch and pay attention.

I've been thinking a lot this week over what my ideal Dreamwidth UI would be. To be honest, it wouldn't be that different from what we have now, in many ways. This is possibly an unpopular position. 😉

Here's what I'd like to see on Dreamwidth:

General things

• Accessibility remaining at least as good as the status quo no matter what features we add. Since our accessibility is pretty awesome, that's a nice high bar.
• A site that works well on desktop and mobile, where all pages scale well on mobile. A solid, highly-usable mobile-friendly site is in many ways superior to an app (since, among other things, it doesn't put you at the mercy of Apple).
• A posting interface that allows you to use rich text, markdown, or HTML, with easy-to-find help links describing how to use each of them.
• A dynamically updating (AJAX) preview mode, in a side-by-side or in-page tab interface, not a whole new window.
• No reblogs / retweets / shares. I think I was pretty clear about a small fraction of the reasons I think those are a bad idea.
• No like / kudos / ❤️, though I feel less strongly about that than I do about reblogging.

Little things

• Increased options in the "embed" link, specifically including the ability to use twitter's embed code (and then probably reformat into something that uses a Twitter-esque stylesheet but doesn't actually pull JS from their site).
• A posting interface which lets you add images directly when posting.
• A la carte image hosting increases for paid accounts.
• An image upload page which integrates well with phone upload.
• A general improvement in the image user experience, including integrating the view and manage pages, making it clear which bit of the image text becomes alt text, and having a better UI than "copy and paste this HTML into your post."
• Scheduled posts
• Making it much easier to choose an all-site tag search as well as a single-user tag search. maybe as a paid feature.
• Tag and word blacklists (ie. "don't show me that post"), preferably with an indicator about the blacklisted post, along with some metadata, so you can make an informed decision about whether to read it.
• A paid model for small video snippets. None free, but at least little Twitter videos. Heck, we could do six second videos and do Vine.
• An optional way to generate a card snippet from a URL in a post (the way many sites turn a URL into the page title, an image, and a brief text snippet
• More legal CSS, well document, and an easy way to create a user stylesheet you can use in your posts (as at the AO3)

I also have very mixed feelings about adding a "someone is talking about you" feature. Sometimes in a threaded conversation it drives me up the wall that if I say "It's like mark and denise said upstream," and yet mark and denise will be unlikely to see my comment. But on the other hand, on Twitter, it's clear how much people abuse at-mentions, to the extent that it becomes a form of harrassment. So I have no idea how to make it work.

I know I don't understand how roleplayers use the site, too; they have their own use patterns.

What else would you like to see?

New project DictationBridge will make screen readers play nicely with dictation software: speech-to-text working well with text-to-speech! So excited about this. The first revision will be NVDA and Windows Speech Recognition, followed by Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and eventually other screen readers.

It's being billed as for blind and VI people with RSI, but as a sighted RSI accessibility programmer I am going to love this. Also since I have a cordless headset I might become a person who full-on computes while cooking.

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]

( Nothing about us without us: accessible programming and well-meaning developers )|

What are some of your favorite digital libraries, archives, and collections? I don't mean what has your favorite content, but what is your favorite user interface? Which is easiest, simplest, most clear, most fun, prettiest, cleanest, most accessible, or simply best tied into your everyday workflow? What do you like about it? What do you wish were different?

(You might notice that this entry is crossposted from its new location, deborah.dreamwidth.org. I'm going to be cross posting from the new location to gnomicutterance for the foreseeable future, and everybody with a livejournal account can still comment over there using OpenID; your livejournal account is your OpenID account. Anonymous commenting is also turned on, as always. Gnomicutterance.livejournal.com is still going to be a functional address which mirrors all those posts, but I find Dreamwidth's commitment to accessibility and usability makes it more attractive than Livejournal.)

The only way to get all these tabs out of my browser is to actually post some links.

This is one I've been saying for awhile "somebody has got to be working on this". Omeka is creating a free platform to help people create curated digital exhibits. The next thing that needs to happen is a hosted service -- not CONTENTdm style hosted service, but a real hosted curation service including preservation planning.

Republicans utterly refuse to compromise on telecom immunity, while the president insists that anyone who doesn't grant immunity to the telecommunications companies want the terrorists to win.

Why students want simplicity and why it fails them when it comes to research is a good introduction to the idea that the skills learned in googling for facts are not actually going to serve a student who needs to learn how to do complex research. Sometimes we need to adapt to user-perceived needs, but sometimes, as academic or school librarians, our job is to teach our patrons. The trick lies in choosing the right balance.

It doesn't do us much good to have an independent, bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board if the President can make it vanish simply by not appointing any members.

The MPAA's numbers about the effect of campus music piracy were vastly overblown. Only about 15% of their losses were due to campus downloading, and only about 3% probably came from on campus networks, but the record companies and Congress are bullying the universities to police anyway.

These pictures are very beautiful and very, very sad. "It will rise from ashes" is a blog post and accompanying Flickr set of images from an abandoned Detroit school system book depository. Trees growing from the soil created by burned then rained upon books; it's a kind of renewal, but renewal not from the typical post-apocalyptic vision of a rich industrial culture, but renewal from... well, I don't want to be too horribly melodramatic and say shattered potentials, so I don't know how to finish the sentence.

Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanties and Social Sciences: Shaping and Advancing the Humanities Research Agenda

Much of this panel was dedicated to speakers from the IMLS and the NIH talking about their grant funding projects. A valuable talk, but not something that led me to take many notes. The key part of this panel, for me, was Greg Crane's speech, although I've heard him give versions of this talk before. While I've often disagreed with various points Crane has made, the overarching thrust of this particular talk is what I find very valuable. His focus is not a library focus about digitizing collections for preservation or access, but it's specifically a researcher focus: what tools can we add to our resources as we digitize them to give us more than we ever had before.

( Humanities Cyberinfrastructure )

( Ray @ IMLS on the humanities information landscape )