deborah | Entries tagged with technology

I've been involved with a lot of non-profits over the years, and as I watch the current round of drama around the OTW elections and code rollout, I can only think how normal, even minor, this drama seems as non-profit drama goes. I know that's cold comfort to the people who are miserable, piled upon, abused, or what-have-you, but it comforts me, because I know there's nothing unusually wrong.

( Some observations from the peanut gallery )

I do wish I had participated in one of the candidate chats, because I would have asked whether all roles are expected to be volunteer indefinitely. I don't know of any organizations who have managed to do systems administration in a completely volunteer way. Naomi, I think, understands the difficulties of why systems is so difficult to do as volunteer, and I'd like to know what she and the other candidates think about possible solutions to that problem.

In any case, everyone I've worked with at the OTW has been great: the angry people and the placid people, the burnt out people and driven people, the people who focus on the Archive as the flagship of the organization and the people who think the Archive already draws too many resources away from other projects. Like many nonprofits, the organization's biggest source of friction is that there are too many bright people who care passionately. I'm not going to downplay how very real a problem that is for sustainability. But on the other hand... Well. I think I've absorbed too much business-ese lately, because I'm thinking that if I were going to do a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis of the OTW, the "too many bright people who care passionately" would be both Opportunity and Threat.

As a side note: The AO3, from the inside, does a better job of automated tests (in that it has them) and QA than most other software projects I know, and yes, Dreamwidth is nowhere near as good at the OTW at these, I saw you people over there claiming that DW does it better. I've seen inside both sausage factories. Software development is hard, yo, Anyone who thinks crappy releases never see the public has never used Windows Vista.

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:

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.)

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)

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:

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.)

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.

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.

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.

It looks like dreamwidth really wants to make a final decision (well, final for now) on what to do about alt and title attributes on userpics. As of right now there are only two users of screenreaders or other non-graphical browsers participating in the poll and conversation. Please, especially if you are a screenreader user or have other accessibility needs which give you opinions about mouseover and alternative text, take the poll, join the conversation.

And it's my bug, so then I will code it. In my copious free time. *grin*

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.

An open letter to those implementing mobile device accessibility:

I know that hands-free mobile device control is difficult, and I am grateful for the amount of voice control which has been implemented so far. The ability to dial a number, send a text, send an e-mail, or leave a memo are all useful. Now here's what I would like to see next:

A microphone which stays on until turned off, rather than tap-to-speak. I understand this could have implications for users who don't know how to use it, but then, the same goes for having a telephone in the first place.

A 36-item vocabulary, probably native to the phone, of the letters in the alpha-bravo alphabet and the digits 0-9.

The ability to start an app installed on the phone by saying "start [app name]". E.g. "start Angry Birds". (No, I have no idea how to control Angry Birds by voice. I just don't know the name of a lot of mobile applications, as I don't have one, because I still can't use one. Hence this post.)

A seven-item vocabulary, probably native to the phone, that can be used in webpages: page up; page down; back; forward; show numbers; go to address; press enter. "Show numbers" would put a number next to every clickable or selectable element (much like the Firefox extension mouseless browsing), allowing those items to be selected by dictating from the digit vocabulary.

The command "microphone off".

The command "dictate here", allowing the user to open up a remote-processed standard dictation window in any field or application.

Now, I will admit that I have never done any mobile programming, and I have no idea what the limitations are for vocabulary recognition. Am I mistaken in my belief that adding another 46 items to the local-to-the-device vocabulary (on top of the ones that already exist such as "send a memo to") is something a contemporary mobile device should be able to handle?

As a bonus, I see in the Android accessibility best practices that all applications should be designed to pay attention to the directional controller as well as just the touchscreen. Great, that opens up the possibility for four more voice commands: up, down, left, and right. That brings us up to 50 desirable items in the native vocabulary.

Can your phone handle that? And if not, can the next generation of your phone handle that? And if not, why not?

(Geeze, I'm starting to feel like I should add HV1569.5 to my default icon.)

I'd like you to meet my new friend, who is totally 1337. Her name? BARBIE.

( Many images behind the cut, as well as description. )

I do understand that computer engineer Barbie is kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. If nothing else, she's still Barbie. But right now I'm focusing on glee. She's not a pretty pretty princess or prom queen: she's a hacker extraordinaire.

Besides, with two older sisters, this is the first time I've ever had a brand-new Barbie before.

Current Mood: happy

There are two tools I really wish libraries had, and would pay for as services. Somebody needs to build them. Are you listening, OCLC or LibraryThing?

NetFlix for ILL. I'd like to be able to queue up a list of books (like my list of books I need to read at worldcat) and have a system where one of them would be ordered for me through interlibrary loan, and each time I returned the book, it would automatically order the next thing on the book for me from interlibrary loan, no more effort from the required.

I'd like to have a system where other people could add books to that list. In fact, I'd like to have a system where I could subscribe to certain people who recommend books, and everything they recommend would automatically get pushed onto my queue. That way I wouldn't have the system where I leave the tabs open for months and finally add all of the recommended books, slowly and painstakingly, to my queue.

Come on, future. Make up for being a sketchy, racist place full of dying corals and failed drug wars by giving me convenient tools for checking out books from the library.

... When I put it that way, I am clearly an extremely shallow person.

The Norton Anthology Contest

Between September 15 and November 15, college and high school students worldwide are invited to submit an original online video, between 30 seconds and 5 minutes in length, depicting a work from a Norton Anthology. Creativity is encouraged! Students may choose to act out a scene from a play, compose a song based on a favorite poem, even create a claymation movie or puppet show of a short story.

I'm assuming this is a very US-centric description, despite the "worldwide" element, and by "college" they mean "student in an undergraduate degree program". (Why yes, I am sensitive about once having had it explained to me that the explainer's children were better than me because they hadn't gone to college but university.)

Anyway! This is wonderful! And yes, Norton anthology of children's literature is one of the eligible anthologies. :D

Over at the Transformative Works and Cultures blog, TWC editor Karen Hellekson has posted an excellent essay "Breaking the primacy of print". Karen asks why online-only peer-reviewed journals are valued less than peer-reviewed journals with a print presence, when the delivery medium has nothing to do with the rigorous miss of the scholarship. TWC, in particular, is a multimedia-rich scholarly journal, for which a print presence would be a watered down equivalent.

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.

I'm currently trying to normalize and shift into comma separated values files the disambiguated name lists created by four different students who don't work for my department, with whom I'm not allowed to communicate, and for whom I'm not allowed to create standard documentation. (Don't ask.) After title casing everything, my current (incomplete) Vim regular expression is: (screenreader users be warned you should skip!)

:%s#$<\([^>]*$>\)*$\(\(($*$[^)]*$$)$*\) $[^{]*$\)#\2,\7,\9,,,,,,,,,\2\3\7 \9;,MS165.001.010.00001

Yes, this is what happens when the people dealing with metadata that need to be normalized are not being managed by professionals.

(I'm doing this in Vim instead of in Perl because each file is a little bit different, so every time I open one I'm doing some hand manipulation of the data and massaging the regular expression slightly to accommodate the fact that each of the students copes with variant names, titles, and unknown personal or surnames differently.)

This is why we can't have nice things.

You know it's a good conference when you've sent your coworkers countless caffeine-fueled e-mail messages that read I AM SO BRILLIANT LOOK AT MY BRILLIANT IDEA or WE ARE SO STUPID WHY DIDN'T WE THINK OF THIS BRILLIANT THING THAT EVERYBODY ELSE IS DOING. Or when you've made a blog post illustrating academic repositories as toddlers playing with a toy truck. I strongly suspect my coworkers wish I would lay off the café con Leche already.

I have this crazy WordPad document open full of notes and links, and I can't figure out which of them are e-mails to specific departments, which of them are notes for myself for further investigation, in which of them are totally awesome blogable exciting links to share with YOU, my loyal readers.

( trying not to ramble too much outside of cut: scientific workflows, datasets, faculty information systems )

I see two overarching themes of the conference: the first is Interoperability Is the One True Religion. No silo-like repository can solve everybody's problems. We are interdisciplinary and inter-institution, and we won't solve any problems and less our resources and data can be used by other tools, other resources, other datasets, etc. The second theme I see is Duraspace Helps Those Who Help Themselves. This is open-source software, and we all need to pitch in, and everything is going to be perfect in a modular happy world where everyone writes the tools they want and shares them in an open source community.

It's international "closing tabs so therefore linkspam" day. Actually, that was a month ago -- if you noticed the links at the bottom of this post are fairly dated, that's why.

( Scholarly Publishing: California Versus Nature, Institutional Repositories, Humanities scholarship )

( Librarians and archivists: no longer advanced )

Polymers for fuel cell technologies

Awesome thing at my university: "Polymers for fuel cell technologies". Four undergraduate interns are describing their summer research project on polymers for fuel cell technologies. Orthogonal to the science or the topic of the video, all four students are deaf or hard of hearing, and the science and the video is communicated via ASL. And thank you, Tufts Jumble, for presenting the video as being about the science. Because it is.

Kill Accessibility, a blog post by Gary Barber, made me put me head down on my desk and take several deep breaths.

Barber makes some excellent points about some of the limitations of the accessibility movement. He talks about how accessibility shouldn't be an afterthought, but incorporated into good web design and universal design. He talks about how for many, "accessible" has come to mean "for people with visual impairments". He talks about the weakness of the way checklists are used, and about the low social value of improving your website's checklist.

So why does Barber lose me at the very beginning of his blog post? His first content heading: "We are not Assistive Technology users." I repeat that: "We are not Assistive Technology users." He goes on to say The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users. The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assitive technology we see.

Who is this "we" about whom you are speaking, Able-Bodied Man?

Last weekend I was in a room full of accessibility professionals, about half of whom had visible disabilities. The director of the WAI has a disability. There are people with disabilities on all of the web accessibility mailing lists I'm on. That's not even counting the other parts of the web development community I interact with, the parts that don't have any particular concern with accessibility and yet still have a multitude of developers with disabilities.

We are here. You just aren't talking to us. You just aren't listening.

Maybe the first step in the accessibility community is to recognize that some members of your own community are also the users, and to listen to us when we speak. I don't speak for all computer users with disabilities. I speak for exactly one: myself. But if you don't even know that we are here, each of us speaking for ourselves, you sure as hell are not going to be able to serve anyone in the community.

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.)

1. Here's a great post from the Archivist of the United States (RSS/

aotus_feed), where he uses the news that the Library of Congress is acquiring the digital archive of public tweets as a jumping off point for explaining the difference between the missions of the National Archives and the Library of Congress. And along the way, he showed an interesting historian's perspective on twitter:

( Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 )

2. If you are looking for fascinating new blogs, the C-SPAN video blog (RSS/

cspan_video_feed) is a great entry point into their huge collection. (I just watched a baby turtle poop in a senator's hand!)

3. I really like this Book Spine Poetry that the Somers Library in New York put up on Flickr. A couple of my favorites, linked and transcribed here:

( Book Spine Poetry )

In "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is", I learned that a long-lost stolen letter of Descartes' has turned up in my alma mater's archives:

If old-fashioned larceny was responsible for the document’s loss, advanced digital technology can be credited for its rediscovery. Erik-Jan Bos, a philosophy scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is helping to edit a new edition of Descartes’s correspondence, said that during a late-night session browsing the Internet he noticed a reference to Descartes in a description of the manuscript collection at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He contacted John Anderies, the head of special collections at Haverford, who sent him a scan of the letter.
...
Scholars have known of the letter’s existence for more than 300 years, but not its contents. Apparently the only person who had really studied it was a Haverford undergraduate who spent a semester writing a paper about the letter in 1979. (Mr. Bos called the paper “a truly fine piece of work.”)

Guys, this is awesome. This is why I do what I do! Putting collection guides online is a royal pain (ASK ME HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE EAD STANDARD), but this is the kind of story that makes it all worthwhile. Archival collections are full of hidden treasures the archivists themselves don't know about. It takes a dedicated scholar to find these lost and hidden (and rarely digitized) gems, and digital collection guides, followed up by e-reference, followed up by spot digitization, solved the puzzle.

Viva la Ford!

On a more somber note, from "Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business)":

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. “Who is this guy?” I had a hard time forming a visual image, which made it harder to try and compare each candidate to the successful people I’d worked with in the past. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which instantly revealed just how much I’d been relying on surface qualities when screening resumes before – even when I thought I was being 100% meritocratic. And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

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

Is there any particular reason that archival collection management tools, vendor provided or open source, are all ridiculously inaccessible? I mean, Proficio appears to have gone entirely out of its way to rewrite a widget set in order to avoid Windows APIs on its Windows-only product, thus rendering it completely mouse driven. Archivist's Toolkit, you are designed in academia with public funding, and you don't even mention the word "accessibility" on your website. And most of the other collection management databases I've tested are just as bad. Would a little bit of keyboard-driveability or non-graphical navigation really kill you?

I mean, I'm not asking everybody to have Moodle's stance on accessibility, but... who am I kidding. I am absolutely asking you all to have Moodle's stance on accessibility.

Remember that time I burst into tears in a meeting because of development manager said "we can't make these decisions thinking about the 3% of our users who have accessibility needs" and I shouted "those 3% are ME, your coworker, sitting right here"? That's how I feel today. It's my job to test the software. It's my job to make recommendations to my coworkers about what product we should be using. And I can't use it.

I've been enjoying Public Knowledge's 4-part video series "We Are Creators, Too," but I never expected Francesca Coppa discussing vidding to come across my blog roll!

Kudos to PK for treating vidding like any other form of video remix, not as some weird dysfunctional female behaviour. And kudos to PK for doing the shockingly unusual behaviour of not normativizing male video creation; 3 of the 4 interviews are with women, and video remix not treated as a male activity that some women do as well.

And of course, kudos to Francesca for for an excellent interview which touches on so many of the key points of vidding culture, history, and law.

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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.

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Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The Australasian Journal of Me

Entries tagged with technology

OTW Elections

Dragon NaturallySpeaking sadness

calling all screenreader users

archival description in OAI-ORE

mobile devices and accessibility

Awesome girl programmers

library tools

The Norton Anthology of YouTube

drive-by recommendation: "breaking the primacy of print"

The FSF reminds me of PETA sometimes

Sometimes the intersection of Libraries and Technology has a 10-car pileup

Open Repositories 2010

Nature versus Nurture. And by "nurture" I mean "the amazing University of California libraries"

Polymers for fuel cell technologies

We are (not?) Assistive Technology users

Accessibility unconference

national archives versus Library of Congress cage match; twitter; C-SPAN video; book spine poetry

(1) digital discovery (2) meritocratic myth

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

archival collection management databases, you are on my list

We Are Creators Too. Francesca Coppa on vidding

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