Accessihacking - How I Got My Mashup Groove Back
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Transcript of Accessihacking - How I Got My Mashup Groove Back
Accessihacking
How I got my mashup groove back.
Christian Heilmann, BarCamp 4, London, May 2008
The once enticing and amazing world of mashups
and ethical hacking started to bore me.
I’ve seen a lot and a lot of repetition.
Random data on maps.
Seemingly useful data from other sources next to the one
I was really interested in.
My music with my photos.
... and so on.
It was all a bit like déja vu.
It was all a bit like déja vu.
The problem?
None of this made any difference to the world
around me or actually my own life.
Then something cool happened.
Find real world problems and mix those with the
enthusiasm of ethical hacking.
Instead of struggling to find problems to solve, geeks got
them delivered to them.
One entry especially got me very interested.
I was especially fascinated by enabled by design.
http://enabled.sicamp.org/
Enabled by design takes something people are very fascinated about – product
design – and marries it with a need of real people.
That made me wonder about other things that can be done
that way.
Luckily there is a whole new market flourishing – social
entrepreneurship.
• The catalyst awards
http://ukcatalystawards.org/
It is time not to “scratch the developer’s itch” but to
tackle real problems with our hacking kung-foo skills.
So what am I doing?
Reading a lot of emails, attending conferences and seeing demands made me bored of the accessibility
movement in our area.
People that really needed our help never got to voice their
concerns.
Instead we concentrated on technical details, following
best practices that never got tested in the real world and
generally stalled, waiting for the law to make accessibility
a must.
It is about people.
Not about technology.
We will never build perfect solutions without input from people who we want to help.
The biggest problem in accessibility these days is
online video.
Which is ironic, as it is also an amazing accessibility
opportunity.
Yahoo live showing hard of hearing people chatting with
another in sign language.
http://blog.deafread.com/abcohende/2008/02/15/yahoos-live-deaf-chat-room/
At the accessibility 2.0 conference earlier this year
Antonia Hyde showed what a video player for people with
learning disabilities might look like.
This was a challenge I loved.
a more accessible
youtube player
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0-btCTdN8
This is being tested and ammended after feedback
right now.
The fascinating thing is that I am getting feedback from
schools that they use it, and from blind people thanking
me for making it.
I never planned it to be screen-reader compatible!
I used JavaScript, the YouTube JS API and some
HTML to hack this system in a way the developers never
intended.
There were YouTube JS players before, but they
mimicked the interface with HTML and CSS instead of
altering it.
Other things I tried to tackle already:
Timed captioning
http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html
Twitter in natural language.
http://icanhaz.com/twitterwithlang
My question to you now is:
Am I just being a tree-hugging freak again or do we
have something cool and worth pursuing here?
In other words:
Should I organize a hackday that marries bleeding edge APIs and technologies and targets accessibility issues
with them?
Would you be up for that?
Thanks!Questions?