Indirect Manipulation

It’s May 1, smack in the heart of spring, which is a time of fresh beginnings and new developments. I reckoned I already had two blogs I was sorely neglecting, why not add one more? With that in mind … I’m announcing the launch of AniktoBlog, dedicated to user-centered web accessibility and Section 508 topics. This coincides with a public marketing push for my company Anikto LLC, which I formed this year to help folks with such matters.

What, I didn’t mention that I own a company? Sorry.

Last year I wrote something about how an art form’s method of delivery can influence the creative process. Today’s NY Times Magazine includes an article by Virginia Hefferman on the Flickr aesthetic of photography. This is more than technology providing an outlet for users to post contributions; it’s a new approach to image-making that embraces digital manipulation and distribution as its core elements. One example cited is an Icelandic artist named Rebekka Guoleifsdottir:

Tellingly, (Guoleifsdottir) learned to work Flickr before she became proficient with a camera. She discovered how to create the minicollections called “photostreams”; how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Guoleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

When I was studying photography in art school, I remember much discussion about what exactly constituted the “post-modern” aesthetic. Back then, it had a lot to do with recognizing and commenting on imagery’s importance in defining culture. The arena was dominated by the likes of Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Joel-Peter Witkin … a nonstop bludgeon of polemical refutations and exhaustively intimate viewpoints. I thought it was all a load of rubbish, quite honestly.

Now, however, I think it’s safe to declare that we have entered a truly post-modern era – one where objects of beauty transcend both process and product. When Hefferman describes a Flickr artist who endorses “digital processing as the antidote to film’s inhumanity,” I realize that we have at once cultivated a reliance and a distrust of technology. This method of publication has influenced artists’ creativity to the point where one can describe “the quintessential Flickr image” and everyone knows exactly what that person’s talking about.

There was an intriguing debate on Slashdot this week regarding the efforts designers make to accommodate users with disabilities. The discussion appeared in response to a ComputerWorld article from Wednesday explaining how many blind users still have difficulty navigating overly-designed websites:

“It can take a while to wade through a strange site — it can be maddening,” complained Jay Leventhal, who is blind and serves as editor of AccessWorld Magazine, produced by the American Foundation for the Blind in New York. “Sometimes you find what you want to buy, but then you can’t find the submit button. It seems to literally not be there. A skilled [blind] user can navigate a majority of the sites on the Web these days, but you have to master certain tricks, like jumping from header to header in order to skip over a lot of junk, and use the search function to get the information you want. An average user can struggle for a long time looking for something and will even struggle on a familiar site.”

The article resulted in many positive comments; however, one reader indicated that users with disabilities should “get a grip” and that they “have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, as a diabetic, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used.” The idea behind this thought is that current economic conditions will determine the extent and feasibility of providing accessible content suitable for all abilities.

I would suggest that anyone who feels this way about web accessibility should acquaint themselves with the concept of Universal Design. UD is a broad-spectrum approach intended to benefit everyone, including and not limited to people with disabilities. Examples abound in such areas as architecture, travel and technology. The economic benefits are palpably clear; you might be surprised to know that people with disabilities spend four times the figure spent by tweens (demographic aged 8-14).

On a related matter, IBM has a tool called aDesigner which examines applications for accessibility and includes support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Flash content.

I have somehow managed to trick a number of organizations into letting me speak about web accessibility. These will be happening in the coming months; one is confirmed and a couple more are tentative (but highly likely).

For the confirmed … I’m scheduled to speak at the Penn State Web 2008 Conference on June 9. It looks to be quite exciting. Steve Krug, author of the book Don’t Make Me Think, will be giving the keynote. Krug is considered one of the premiere thought leaders of the industry, so of course there’s no pressure on me or anything.

My presentation is called Applying Universal Design Principles to the Web: Understanding Web Accessibility. It will cover the seven principles of universal design in the context of the Web, explore the legal and technical aspects of barrier-free design, and provide some practical guidance to help organizations navigate this tricky landscape. I promise to be reasonably entertaining and not talk for too long.

I’ll provide more details on other presentations as their respective dates and locations firm up.

At some point, we’ll have to come to grips with the idea that machines need to understand data in the same way that humans do. This is the idea behind the semantic web, something that a number of folks are watching and discussing. Some are even referring to it as Web 3.0:

The semantic web (or “web 3.0”, as some people are trying to re-brand it), is the name given to the idea that the pages of the world wide web ought to carry more than just the meaning they are intended to convey to the human reader. They should also, the thinking goes, be tagged and flagged in ways that machines can make semantic sense of, as people make semantic sense of language. That way, machines could make instant connections that would take serious amounts of time for people to see, or might even elude them altogether.

It will be interesting to see how this evolving landscape changes the way users communicate with businesses and each other. I was thinking about it while noting that this month, the Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee (TEITAC) recommended updates to the Access Board accessibility policy. Included in the report is a guidance for updating Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act as it pertains to information and communications technology.

On another note: well-deserved congratulations to Linda and Hinda.

American Express may come under legal action for the lack of accessibility of its credit card website, since a decision three months ago to present data in PDF format. Officials from the company have reportedly apologized to their customers and say they are working to fix the problem.

At issue here is the accessibility of the PDF, something that Adobe insists is feasible but for some reason has escaped the requirements of this upgrade:

The Royal National Institute of Blind People says others are also struggling to use their screen readers to make sense of some forms of PDF documents from a number of financial firms.

Hugh Huddy, the RNIB’s development officer for digital accessibility, says sometimes no data can be read at all:

“We have had complaints about financial statements, insurance certificates and government documents. It means that information is unreliable, it might not be accurate or they just might not be able to make sense of it.”

The Disability Discrimination Act says any company which provides a service must make “reasonable adjustments” to ensure they are accessible to everyone.

In other news: if you’re a standards-based web designer, chances are you’ve made use of Hx tags as a design element. Stoney deGeyter would like you to stop doing that, and he provides some excellent guidance on how to best optimize your page architecture. Count me among the guilty, but no more …

Last night a tornado blew through downtown Atlanta, disrupting events and destroying dozens of homes and businesses. I learned about it through Twitter, of all places, because my local news website didn’t include the story in their National section. It was also through Twitter that I first heard about Sarah Lacy’s botched SXSW interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and this week’s partial evacuation of the US Capitol.

There are a couple of trends at work here. One is the increasing parochialism of local news networks, telling me way too much about minor stories that take place 45 miles from my house, while neglecting events of true significance. Also of note is my reliance on a social network of digital acquaintances–friends and colleagues who contribute to a shared intellectual pipeline of common knowledge and interests.

In theory, I find this trend less disturbing than I probably should. In practice, there is the risk of a story gaining life through various mutations of accuracy. A 2004 press release falsely “exposing” Barack Obama as a radical Muslim remains a topic of debate, even though no proof has ever been provided to validate the claim. Whatever you think of the current crop of Presidential candidates (and please be respectful if you decide to comment on such), it is interesting to see how digital technology enables the spread of false journalism before any sort of truth emerges. In today’s New York Times Magazine, Farhad Manjoo thinks the development is more psychological than technological:

To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

Manjoo also notes that despite Obama’s skillful attempt to extinguish the Muslim rumor, including a “clear, point-by-point rebutall to every argument in the chain e-mail,” the rumor didn’t die. It’s possible that we may be entering an era where hearsay and innuendo retain more impact than ethical journalism, if such a thing exists anymore. Rumors have the ability to adapt over less time through different voices and contexts, establishing a new code of conduct. Have we rejected the importance of meaningful research in favor of “broken telephone” parlor games?

You may have noticed this week that Microsoft caved in and decided to support Web Standards interoperability with its IE8 beta release. According to my very informal poll of maybe 15 people, the responses ranged from “finally” to “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Personally, I feel I should be reimbursed for all the time and effort I spent retrofitting compliant design structures to Internet Explorer’s antiquated box model.

Second … check out this interesting case study in management vision and leadership. You may recognize the subject.

Third … beauty and brains are a deadly combination. Evidence of such would be Mrs. Kel’s appointment to the Friends of the Glenside Library Board of Directors. I spend my days and nights in the presence of library science royalty.

A month or two ago I was giving a presentation and somehow, in response to a question regarding The Future Of The Internet, blurted out that in ten years websites will no longer be the primary stream of online information delivery. Everyone got a big chuckle out of that, but it sounded so good I repeated it, this time with conviction. And you know what? I still think it’s true. (Cue laugh track).

Now let me clarify: I’m not predicting The Death Of The Website. As an analogy, consider the evolution of the compact disk music format. Who could have predicted ten years ago that mp3’s would leave mega-giant Tower Records whimpering in bankruptcy? (Well, I’m sure somebody did but perhaps not to that specific outcome). Music consumers have slowly come around to the idea of downloading music digitally, rather than buying a plastic artifact; controlling the point of distribution provided this opportunity for capitalization.

But I digress - my point is that much can change in the product marketing landscape in a very short amount of time. So imagine my interest in Guy Kawasaki’s thoughts regarding the 2008 Digital Outlook Report released by Avenue A Razorfish. Plenty here to chew on, but I’ll point out one item from Guy below:

Only a few years ago, a Web site’s home page was the most prime piece of digital real estate a publisher could offer. Not so much today, however. The relevance of the home page as a media buy is on the wane. Search, social networks, blogs, and RSS (among a host of other online sources) are driving more and more users deep into today’s Web properties. Now, the majority of consumers bypass a site’s home page completely.

This is the type of world I envision in the coming decade: multiple information streams, independent of device or platform; content that reads accurately and completely for users of all abilities; a mass-contributed exchange of ideas and events; and technology providing the social conduit which transforms the mundane to the extraordinary.

Will websites be a part of all that? Sure … I just don’t think that what we currently define as a “website” will endure in its current form as the primary delivery mechanism. It’s less to do with technology, more about how we input and receive information. With decreased utilization, will there even be such a thing as a destination homepage?

Good lord, haven’t posted in a while. Unfortunately, all you’re getting here today is a list of links and quotes. This is what’s known in some blogging circles as “being lazy.” A more accurate description would fall under the heading of “being busy.” When I do see something of interest I usually bookmark it with the intention of giving the piece, at a later point in time, the attention and focus that I know it deserves. So there you have it.

• My comrade Adam pointed me to Idris Mootee’s thoughts on productivity, where he questions whether good design always leads to better management of time or resource. I like the idea of a “usability culture” being cultivated by consumers’ demand for easy access to information services:
  

  (T)echnology is getting to a point which is getting too complex and we are overwhelmed with information. Our abilities to adapt to different interfaces are slowly declining. Examples of poorly designed products and digital experiences are plenty. Although there are a few good ones, most have bad-to-horrible usability for two reasons: lack of incentive and the lack of a usability culture. Companies have had little incentive to emphasize usability. For physical products, customers have no user experience until after they’ve paid for the device. (In contrast, digital service customers get user experience up front: if a site sucks, they simply drop their shopping carts and switch to another site with no switching cost.)

• Last week’s NY Times provided a succinct lesson in simplicity of design. Tucker Viemeister, who helped design the highly-regarded Oxo “goodgrip” kitchen utensils, explained why he prefers simple wooden blocks over Legos:
  

  What Mr. Viemeister, who has brought the spirit of fun and practicality to a wealth of products, most famously the Oxo kitchen utensils, values most about the blocks is how plastic they are, even though they are made of wood. With Legos, he said, the play process is more tilted toward a goal: the house or ship or castle that you build and are finished with. The Unit Blocks — with nothing to hold them together, and difficult to move when assembled — encourage a more fluid, open-ended process that is never quite finished and easily started anew.

• I’m currently designing the UX for an app that is intended to help automate the procurement and processing of sales contracts. During a field study this week, I got to experience first-hand the door2door sales experience. It’s a thankless, grueling chore, and I have newfound appreciation for those folks who do it really well. Somehow I’ll need to translate these activities into something reasonably intuitive, so it’s good to read the thoughts of Indi Young (as told to Chris Baum of Boxes & Arrows) about how to develop an interpretable mental model from observed human behavior:
  

  You and I could sit … in Starbucks and sketch out what the baristas do. If we watched them greet the regulars and non-regulars, we could sketch out their tasks and mental processes. There is a real strong mental model right there. We could note what we see, but we’re going to miss things. For example, we won’t capture what they do in before opening the doors in the morning. You don’t necessarily have to do it the hard way – going out, doing the interviews, and combing the transcripts for tasks. However, that’s the most agnostic and data-driven way to do it, and by going through the extra effort is how you’re going to make discoveries of things that aren’t already in your head.

• My Wyncote homeslice Dr. Toub is now on iTunes. I loved Steve Layton’s interpretation of David’s textbook piece, so I’m quite certain that his version of darfur pogrommen is well worth your time.
• This cracks me up.