Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

all front end devs and designer should watch this video

2022-11-26T18:37:52Z

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.

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speech recognition at last? I have so many questions.

2019-06-03T22:14:17Z

At WWDC (the annual Apple developers' conference), Apple announced something which might be full command-and-control speech recognition for the Mac at last, for the first time.[1] None of the regular tech journalists are asking the questions I desperately want to know, however.

Most of my questions boil down to this:

How much did the Apple developers and designers of this product work with users of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows (DNS), DragonDictate for Mac (DD), and Windows Speech Recognition (WSR)?

How much did they learn about what the speech recognition community already expects as a minimal baseline, as well as what speech recognition users have been lacking in our current tools?

Because how Apple answers that first question will inform the answers to all these details:

Will this allow complete hands-free command and control? In other words, will users be able to control their computer without a mouse, a keyboard, a virtual keyboard, a switch, or mouse emulation?

Will it give access to the menus, graphical icons, or any other aspects of the standard OS X desktop chrome, as long as the code is written using Apple standards?

How will it work with tools that are not natively enabled to use it? For example, if I install an application that runs in a virtual machine (eg. Eclipse or Slack), what aspects of this speech recognition will be available and what won't?

Will it require the cloud or network access to work?

Will it have a trainable voice model?

Will it have a configurable vocabulary?

Will it be programmable, either with simple macros or with complex third-party tools?

In what languages will it be available?

Will the mobile version require a physical trigger to access, as with the built in microphone-icon-to-dictate currently available on iOS? Can it be left on all the time?

How will the privacy be guaranteed for any always-listening aspects?

Does it integrate with Apple VoiceOver?

( For context, the answers to these questions for DNS and WSR )

What other questions do people have?

( Endnotes )

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A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.

2018-12-07T01:03:48Z

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?

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Oh brave new internet, / that has such Nazis and MRAs in't!

2018-12-05T22:52:53Z

Every time some other social media site does something to drive away a large segment of its users, there's often an influx to Dreamwidth. This varies based on the userbase which is ticked off, of course; it tends to be the more female and more fannish users who are driven to Dreamwidth, while white supremacists and MRAs driven from reddit or Twitter are more likely to end up on sites such as 8chan or Gab.

This has two side effects: Dreamwidth users being excited that our platform is getting love and activity on a level that's been more rare since the great Tumblr + Twitter exodus of several years back, and new Dreamwidth users (and returnees) asking for some of the features which they loved at their old social media site. I am absolutely a fan of new people coming to Dreamwidth, and I undoubtedly agree with everyone that the UI is showing its age. It was not built in a mobile-first, multimedia-above-all world.

But it also true that the Internet is a more toxic place than it was in the heady days of Brad's garage in 1999, or in Mark and Denise's inspired 2008. Which leads me to the two hot takes I've been mulling over for several years:

Some of the features people want are products of the Toxic Internet, which has trained people to expect them
Dreamwidth's relative unpopularity is what keeps it great

Addiction and Anti-patterns

( Read more... )

In defense of unpopularity

( Read more... )

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DictationBridge

2016-01-26T00:27:18Z

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.

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new usability peeve

2014-05-24T00:23:37Z

This trend I'm seeing for massive fonts -- 22 pixels on Medium, 20 pixels (computed from 3.0625 em!) on Boston.com, when my default size is 13 pixels -- is driving my up the wall. I have my screen set to a certain resolution and my fonts at a certain size which I find readable. When the main body text is that much larger than my comfortable reading range, I have to shrink the heck out of my fonts to be over to cope, and then increase them again when I'm done.

I have my browser set to a comfortable reading size. Why are all these sites assuming I don't?

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Poetry by other means: "accessibility" is not just another boolean toggle

2011-08-02T03:29:43Z

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.

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]

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sustainability, storage, and presentation

2010-04-06T20:22:04Z

YES YES YES. An excellent post by Dorothea at Book of Trogool, inspired by Dan Cohen, about sustainability and chasing the shiny.

As I've had occasion to mention, scholars generally and humanists in particular have a terrible habit of chasing the shiny. [...]

The answer to this conundrum is not, however, "avoid the shiny at all costs!" It can't be. That will only turn scholars away from archiving and archivists. To my mind, this means that our systems have to take in the data and make it as easy as possible for scholars to build shiny on top of it. When the shiny tarnishes, as it inevitably will, the data will still be there, for someone else to build something perhaps even shinier.

Mark me well, incidentally: it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect data archivists to build a whole lot of project-specific shiny stuff. You don't want your data archivists spending their precious development cycles doing that! You want your archivists bothering about machine replacement cycles, geographically-dispersed backups, standards, metadata, access rights, file formats, auditing and repair, and all that good work.

YES. We need to be working well with the people responsible for interfaces -- but we need not to be building those interfaces ourselves. (Hopefully, I will soon have exciting news about a project that follows these guidelines. I'm not going to make an announcement until we have it right, though. *g*)

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

2009-11-07T06:55:55Z

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

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archival collection management databases, you are on my list

2009-10-06T14:07:05Z

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.

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What are your favorite digital libraries, archives, and collections?

2009-04-21T19:40:55Z

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.)

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