Recently, attention returned to concern about
the role of accessibility in the U.S. government transparency movement. While gov website operators might well deserve a good grade for effort, most sites have obvious failings that experts and users repeatedly point out. In this post, I show some of my personal problems and suggest corrective actions. Visually impaired people can hear a realistic experience with a capable, free screen reader to better understand how websites respond to an intermediate level visually impaired, task oriented user. Sighted readers and accessibility specialists are urged to consider alternatives to reduce causes for stumbling around.

Hear me Stumble Recording

Download MP3 recording (38 minutes, 17 MB) trying tasks at whitehouse, disability, data, and recovery .gov. Starting with some typical tasks, I get into each website far enough to identify and stumble over some problem, then later come back and analyze the cause in both the website and my own practice, written up below. These little experiments are certainly not definitive because someone more experienced with the website might take a very different route or the proper screen reader action just might not occur to me at the moment. So, listen if you’re patient and interested to these 4 segments and follow along in your browser to perhaps grok what I’m missing in the recording.

For the record, I was using Windows XP, Firefox 3.5, NVDA RC 09, and PlexTalk Pocket as recorder.

The BLUF — great availability of useful information but fall short of
excellence in usability

BLUF=bottom line Up front

The Obama administration has unleashed an enormous flow of energy and
information for citizens to use for their personal lives, political causes, and
general improvement of society. I really appreciate the nuggets of
explanations dispensed in RSs feeds and twitter streams, amplified by social
media communicators interested in technology and organizations with a special
thread of accessibility. I offer these stumbles as the only feedback I can
provide, hoping my analyses eventually reach into the administration and d.c.
government apparatus. My stumbles are not flat on my face, fallen and cannot
get up, but rather trips over seed bumps, unnecessary traversals around hazy
obstacles, and stops to reconsider the surroundings to decide my next safe
steps. Just like real physical life, these stumbles absorb way too much energy,
often discouraging me from completing a task. Informed by my own experience
building interfaces, databases, and websites plus software engineering methods
of testing, use cases, complexity measures, and design exploration, I truly
believe each stumble indicates a serious design flaw. The good news is that
while my stumbles may partially track with vision loss and continuing learning the rules of accessibility and assistive technology,
of the ‘curb cut’ principle suggest corrections will smooth the
way for other, abled users who are also troubled with usability difficulties
they cannot understand without the accessibility and usability framework.

Summary of my stumbles on typical .gov tasks

1. Website: whitehouse.gov
   
   Task: Find a recent blog post received by RSS
   
   : stumble: Post was not in recent list, didn’t know how to use archives, didn’t trust search
   
   Follow up: Navigated around November archive, eventually found links to previous articles
   
   Suggestions: Factor archives, Use landmark pattern for list sections
   
   Comments: Now has a text only version but similar navigation problems
   
   Grade: C. Text Only site isn’t much of an accessibility improvement, please work on organizing this mass of information. RSS feeds more useful than website. Also, use your clout to force social media services to become accessible, too.

2. Website: Disability.gov
   
   Task: Discover information about public transportation in local community
   
   : stumble: Found ” Transportation” main topic but could not reach specific information
   
   Follow up: Read “how to use” and eventually figured out info organized by state
   
   Suggestions: “See sidebar” isn’t sufficient so data needs better organization
   
   Comments: Site content is effectively transmitted by RSS and Twitter. good survey can help improve site
   
   Grade B: Good process, but not yet organized properly or communicating website use

3. Website: data.gov
   
   Task: Trial download of a data set using search form
   
   : stumble: Very hard to understand search form components distracting headings and social media,
   
   Follow up: Eventually got search results, but unsatisfactorily
   
   Suggestions: Start over
   
   Comments: Only for wonks on salary, not advised for citizens
   
   Grade: Incomplete, do over, or adapt expensive recovery.gov interface and data management

4. Website: Recovery.gov
   
   Task: Find recovery funding projects in Arizona
   
   : stumble: Locating form for query and then results
   
   Follow up: Found the form under non descriptive heading, easily set query, drilled down past top of page to text version of results table
   
   Suggestions: Make the “Track the money” foremost part of page, submerging feature awards and website data
   
   Comments: $10M+ project needs more usability and accessibility input

Individual Website Analyses

whitehouse.gov — this National Landmark needs ARIA landmarks

I don’t visit this site often but I do read occasional blog and press briefings in my Levelstar Icon RSS client. One article caught my attention, about encouraging Middle Eastern girls, and seemed worth a tweet to my followers with similar interests. But I needed a good web address so set off to navigate myself through the site.

I was surprised to find a link to an “accessible” version, not sure what that mean. It turns out to be “text only” which doesn’t mean much to me if the navigation is the same as a screen reader is abstracting from text decorations anyway. Hence, I was faced with a branching decision with no criteria for which branch to take, somewhat confusing.

As usual to refresh or familiarize myself, I take a “heading tour” to learn the main sections of the site and target the section for my task. Soon, I find the “blog” section but the article list is mainly on President Obama’s Asian trip, not reaching back as far as the article I wanted was a few days old. I declared a “Stumble” by not knowing how to use the archives, needing to train myself and wander a bit more off recording.

Following up later, I found myself confused about the organization of past material. I took the November link but ended up in more heaps of videos, blog posts, briefings, etc. Eventually, I got to blog article lists and found the web construct that linked to past articles, looks like “previous 1 2…. next”.

Answer: DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano blog post on ‘Meeting female students in Abu Dhabi’

To analyze a bit further, let’s separate accessibility from usability. This task seemed to take a little more effort than needed, because I stumbled around learning the archive information architecture and list results patterns. Nothing in the screen reader or the HTML seemed problematic. Headings helped, not hindered. Perhaps this is a stubble that can only be prevented by more practice, but it’s possible we have a jumble of website content that could be factored to make paths easier to follow.

Traversing a list divided into sections is a common pattern, often intermixed with links to articles and media. The list of blog posts was indeed an HTML list that could be followed by items, but got strange at the end the next-previous section is labeled with something like LSQUO, which makes no sense in a screen reader. This construct is also easy to miss using links rather than items. Could this pattern be

standardized (see below)?

Duh, why didn’t I just use the website Search? Unfortunately, I have a deeply ingrained mistrust of site searches, mainly from getting gobs of results that don’t help. Like, how would I know the rules for making a good search query? Is it “Napolitano Abu Dhabi” with quotes where, and default being conjunction? And these words are not the easiest names to type correctly, so is there spelling correction? Well, it turned out “Napolitano” (2nd try) turned up the article about 4 results down but with the same search result bar construct. OK, I’m convinced to bring Search back into my website explorer toolkit. and will work to overcome bad experiences from past generations of website searches.

Overall, I grade myself as a B with my improving mental map of the site, but definitely prefer using the content by RSS feed, i.e. getting blog and briefings spoken from mobile device. Sorry, but whitehouse.gov still gets a C in my ratings, mostly from the need to have a stellar, near perfect website to model for not only .gov but also community, state gov, professional associations, universities, etc. Only 10 months into the website, the amount of content, useful individually, may grow into a giant heap of links that drive citizens away. Regarding accessibility, I simply don’t see the rationale for the text only site and recommend looking ahead to using better overall structure with landmarks (see below).

Disability.gov is very useful but maybe convoluted?

Disability.gov is a regular in both my RSS feed list and Twitter tweetroll. The site has a general framework of disability needs and resources. New resources and classes of resources per day of the week are routinely broadcast. I have a warm feeling when I see these, like somebody is actually looking out for me in that great USG bureaucracy.

For some local surveys, I anticipate needing data and examples of regional transportation systems supported by public and disabled communities. Ok, I know I’m delusional that a conservative wealthy retirement oriented city will even consider such a thing as services for economic, environmental, or social reasons. But, hey, there’s a sliver of hope. Indeed, this is a typical way the USG can foster citizen innovation through better and more transparent data.

The website navigation sidebar is straightforward with tasks and information topics. In the recorded session, I picked Transportation and then got stuck. I had a page headed Transportation, nice, with topic overview, but no real information, just a use the sidebar. Ok, but how? why? After, in my follow up, I figured out that information was organized by state, which makes sense, but wasn’t explicit when I stumbled.

Choosing Arizona from the state list, I found a number of resources, none of which lead directly to the Tri-city Prescott area. Tucson was well represented, but I knew that, been there, seen the buses, and vision services. Overall, I found this site satisfactory, with an encouraging amount of information, but I’m still somewhat befuddled about the relationship between topics and sidebar and details.

At one point, I was presented with a survey. Sure, I’ll give you feedback, thanks for asking. As usual, I didn’t know how long the survey would take, like how many questions. First accessibility glitch was that required fields were designated by some symbol not read by a screen reader in normal mode, probably an asterisk *. That meant I had to switch into listening more punctuation in the screen reader or just answer all questions. Silly, why not say REQUIRED, rather than use a little symbol. Next, I couldn’t figure out the form of answers, which turned out to be radio buttons labeled 1 to 10 and NA. Ok, that’s a lot of tabbing but not overwhelming, as I whizzed through the questions. Then, came a switch to some combo boxes for answers. Annoying, suggesting the survey wasn’t vetted by many people using screen readers, but not really too bad. Do other gov sites have comparable surveys? They should.

Overall, I rate myself and disability.gov with a B. I need more practice, and the website developers need more feedback. But really, I know they’re trying, and somebody will likely read this blog. Good job, and I truly appreciate the resources, framework, and the RSS and tweets.

data.gov for wonks, not citizens

Oh, my, this site is annoying. The headings are sparse and inappropriate. There’s a sideline off to social media sites that aren’t accessible and in the way. A link says “Click here” which indicates deprecated thinking and cluelessness about hyperlinking.

The main purpose of this site is a distribution point for datasets collected from various government agencies distributed in XML, CSV, and other formats usable in spreadsheets and statistical analyzers. Great, but the form is a mess.

I tried to query fo ex ampler datasets, any topic, from National Science Foundation. The agency list is long, painfully, with check boxes. That’s about 40 tab or next line key strokes to get to NSF. Then I found the Submit button. Not so good, which I learned by reading “No search results” at the bottom of the page! Most important effect of a search is to know if it succeeded, produces results, geez! What did I do wrong? Do I need to select format and make an explicit query? Ok, tried that with term “computers”, All Categories, All Agencies. Got 2 results this time, both on illegal exports, spooky and uninteresting.

Argh, I gave up. I’m sure this site will eventually be useful for policy wonks willing to train and practice, but I, an ordinary citizen with a research background, didn’t feel like I could get much out of here. Sadly, the form’s long list of check box agency names uncoordinated and un searchable was painful. But worse was not getting direct feedback about number of or absence of search results combined with uncertainty about the query actually executed. I had little confidence in either the site or myself as searcher, but, luckily, I don’t forecast any personal need for data.gov. Sayonara.

So, I rate this sucker a big Incomplete with good intents but pretty clueless about accessibility and usability. Hey, download NVDA and try this out yourselves, data.gov designers. There are lots of ways to design forms and search results. Back to the design stage, please Now that recovery.gov is launched at great expense, perhaps some of the interface and data management functionality can be used to refresh data.gov, but who am I to reorganize .gov ..

Recovery.gov Usable but Cluttered

Well, it wasn’t fun but I can use this website. The big problem is clutter. I go here to “Track the Money” and cannot find the form to do so. Uh, oh. Plenty of stuff about the site itself, some of the big featured expenditures, but where’s the form. Oh, there it is, under heading “Data, Data, and More Data”, cute but not obvious. This time, I decided to drill down on National Science Foundation awards in Arizona. Unlike data.gov, the agency selection was single choice reached by the convention of first letter, N, and a few key strokes to make the selection. All right, but now what?

So, the search seems successful yielding another page with lots of accessibility and agency clutter at the top I had to listen through. Back and forth a bit, I found the link to text presentation of the data, accompanied with a blue map.

Looking for text data, same boring junk at the top then up comes the table of rows of actual data. It’s hard to navigate by row and column, some columns have no real information, like I know I asked for ” National Science Foundation”, read in every row. But painfully working row by row I can find an interesting item like $80K created .17 job –wow! Indeed, the award details is there and readable and interesting.

The big problem with this iteration of Recovery.gov is that the website is in the way. I definitely do not plan to post anything on MySpace social media service but I have to listen to or bypass this silly text and thought too often to learn what’s on a page. It just seems goofy to send a Recovery dataset to a “friend” on a social network, although it could be relevant in a mature Twitter thread. If the gov goal is to incorporate social media into its normal workflow, then there are big questions of stability, accessibility, and much more of these profit-seeking, ad-driven enterprises.

I give myself an A for conquering this site, although I’m still stumbling around tables of data. Recovery.gov gets a B for assembling this information in readable form, although not in dataset forms as relative to missions like data.gov. In other words, it looks like a lot of page scraping to identify trends. My suggestion is simple: get the “Track the money” form front and center and press the website, social media, and features into the background. Overall, better than I expected, although the recording and further use leave a feeling of irritation, like having to sweep off a desk of junk to find a phone to get the information needed. Like, just give me control and let me track the money myself. I’ll be back.

General Suggestions for Improvement

It’s Time to Bring Landmarks to .gov

I’m getting spoiled by really accessible websites like AccessibleTwitter and BookShare that use the ARIA landmark feature to structure pages and search results. For example, the .gov sites could be separated into (1) agency logo and babble, (2) navigation, (3) main content, (4) reference to other gov sites and external services. Bookshare shows how to organize search results integrated with the next-previous results page bar.

Indeed, this brings up the issue of consistency among .gov websites, which could be kind of nice and helpful. Not meaning to squelch individuality of agencies or artistic license or experimentation with diversity, but a citizen wanting a simple answer to an information question isn’t as impressed with decorations as with ease of use, especially on return visits. And visually impaired users especially appreciate predictability, a trait shared with most human beings, when confronted with pure tasks. With all due respect,most visits to gov websites are not for tours through marble halls or to expand social networks to include anonymous civil servants, but rather to get a piece of info as fast and readable as possible.

Should gov sites link to inaccessible social web services? NO!

All gov 2.0 buzz seems to involve social media, as in Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes Flickr and MySpace. But the accessibility of most of these sites is way below that of the .gov sites. Can a website assert it is accessible if it links to patently inaccessible services? I think not. The good news is the movement toward alternatives like Accessible Twitter and accessible versions of YouTube. These should be mentioned in accessibility statements. Or, better yet, no links to unless these billion-dollar enterprises raise their accessibility levels to the acceptable status demonstrate by these alternatives. Perhaps there should be a warning label on sites known to be poorly designed or not for the newbie. The US government uses its clout for diversity, why not also for accessibility?

After spending several hours on these websites, knowing a lot myself about social media, the focus on social stuff seems rather silly considering the weight of the data involved. Am I, is anybody, going to post a link on MySpace or Facebook of a significant query and insight? I doubt it. Rather, these sites give an impression of trying to be oh, so cool, gotta get our stuff out to the fan pages on Facebook. Gimme a break. From a screen reader user, this is just pure clutter in the way of your main mission, stuff I have to listen to redundantly and irrelatively. Try it yourself and determine what value is really added from social media service references so prominently in users’ faces/ears. Even scarier, if gov agencies are adopting these inaccessible, unstable services for actual business, the traditional discrimination policies must come into play, as well as questions about judgement. For example, Twitter is a great news medium, but its rules can, and do, change at any moment.

How about a gov BEST and WORST practices competition?

I personally don’t get any value, but rather irritation, from the skip links and text size adjustments. First, the skip links are often just plain wrong, often enough to mistrust and not worth a false link and recovery. Text size adjustments are relevant to those who need large fonts not supplied by browser adjustments. Pages with good headings and landmarks don’t require skip links. Pages that aren’t crowded with text don’t need on-page text size adjustments.. To me, these are accessibility decorations that amount to screen reader noise. It’s rather jarring to find major inconsistencies among gov websites, e.g. text-only at whitehouse.gov but not others, different HTML form patterns, and greatly varying degrees of conventional accessibility.

As complained about in the whitehouse.gov blog lists, there’s a common pattern that might be nicely standardized. A list of, say 100, items is divided into sections with a bar of links: previous, 1, 2, … next. If you’re drilling down through several pages of results, getting easily into this bar is important. A landmark is a natural way of identifying results.

Does every search form have to be constructed differently? Above tasks required me to figure out the subdivisions of forms (usually not labeled) and then the form elements. There’s probably a special class of gov site users who can whack their way through a form down to a data set in no time. But the ordinary citizen has to struggle through understanding then mastering the form, finding results, and interpreting answers, which can take hours. How about an award for government service by providing a superior form that other sites can emulate? And give those web designers a bonus or promotion, too!

Sum up, getting better? Yes or No?

Overall, although using these sites made me rather grumpy, the trend is toward better accessibility, more usability, and genuine transformation of how citizens use USG data. My wishes are:

1. Work on clutter and removal and helping users find direct paths to important data, i.e. work on the most significant use cases.
2. Designers and maintainers of these website should listen to recorded TTS of their pages and contents for several hours to really appreciate the clutter effect of featuritis, accessibility decorations, and social media silliness.
3. Cut down on the social media crap and rethink what really matters. Yes, these services are useful but really, do they deserve so much prominence? Will they still be here 3 years from now?
   It just seems incongruous to think of sharing recovery datasets with ad-hungry “friend” oriented services. Most serious is the hypocrisy of declaring accessibility on a gov website when these lucrative services so actively ignore accessibility and force visually impaired service users to volunteer developed accessible alternatives.

4. The most important use of this data is not visible to most citizens. Namely, RSS feeds are the best way for someone to monitor these sites, scanning article titles, downloaded to a mobile device, with rare visits to actual websites. How can the USG foster better offline use of important government developments?
5. Is there a “curb cut” effect from feedback like this? I hope so, that fixing stumbles precipitated by accessibility bumps and usability gaps will help everybody.
6. Finally, a cautionary warning I just heard from my CNN news feed. Many recovery awards seem to have fallen into fallacious congressional districts, making the whole record keeping of job data questionable. Apparently citizens reporting award data don’t know what congressional district they belong to (I’m AZ ONE, I think, maybe). Now, data base developers and instructors know, there’s a TRIGGER for that. Zip codes usually map to unique districts but that might not be a requirement or implemented yet. Just saying.

Related Posts

• Obama whitehouse.gov almost on target, January 2009

• Hear me Stumble around whitehouse, data, and recovery gov, May 31 2009 with recording
• Universally Designed from Knowbility.net comments on recovery.gov

• Series of gov web website evaluations from Jim Thatcher

• Let’s all use our headings, My Accessibility Check

• Accessible Twitter, alternative interface,
  Easy Youtube, alternative interface,
  Accessible Youtube interface,
  mobile, easier Twitter interface,
  simpler, mobile Facebook interface

• Marco’s firefox accessibility blog tips on ARIA landmarks

• AYWC post “Are missing, muddled use cases the culprit for accessibility?”

Here are a few things I’ve learned in the past 2 months while working on three projects related to this blog:

1. “Learning and Sharing on the Social Web”, a lifelong learning course at Yavapai College

2. “Using Things That Talk”, an assistive technology demonstration session at Yavapai College

3. 2nd Tuesday AAUW Book Club

General Lessons Learned

1. Blogs, blogging, and bloggers are still somewhat mystifying, although legitimized by the “Julie and Julia” movie. Some people will readily comment, while most need encouragement. It takes several trips around a blog to understand its structure, find the comment space, and adjust to the theme.

2. Facebook has driven interest in social media, like “my family wants me to post and view pictures this way, now what?”. While I appreciate the attraction of everybody having a place on the web, similar to the spirit of the recently defunct GeoCities, personally I have several problems with Facebook:
   • I’m turned off by the use of “friend” for every opportunity to snag an email address. This demeans a very important relationship for the sake of advertising placements.
   • The privacy policy is a slipper slope, starting with request for birth date, then more and more info to link up wih “friends”. I do not want to personally segregate people and my personal information, especially when I don’t understand a complex policy.
   • All the interfaces I tried, m.Facebook, lite, and regular were cluttered and sometimes inaccessible with my screen reader

   • As a 30 year veteran of the Internet and early adopter of the Web, I don’t like to see the splitting off and duplication of fan or public sites even if this racks up more interaction.

   So, my Facebook page, says, I hope, that “Susan maintains a blog and an active Twitter stream. Please use these or email”. Uh, and, of course, my vision doesn’t support faces or pictures any more, so I’m outta there.

3. Many people are perfectly happy with email, specially if they are primarily receivers or have limited interactions. However, anybody on mailing lists with members prone to “reply all” is looking for better solutions, especially if they are coordinators. That’s what drove the AAUW book club above for keeping track of future books, allied information, and questions. I have hopes for, but not yet tried out in a group, the Posterous email-based blogging service
4. I personally favor using blogs as reference collectors. For example, in the AAUW book club blog are podcasts, articles, and other outlines easily linked in via comments whenever we encounter them. This leaves behind not only a great resource for new members but also for general web browsing. It’s just great to have a place to share a tidbit of information without the fuss of email lists or message replies.
5. Presenting information in a classroom while visually impaired is easy enough with a helper to run the PC connected to the projector. Since I cannot see much of the projected web page beyond a white on white blur, I just talked away and kept my accompanists on track. However, this got harder when doing the assistive tech demos and the audience members couldn’t all see that well either.

More later when I think of additional or better explanations. By the way, all these activities are lots of fun, engaging me to work hard on my skills, and interact with neat people, whom I thank for the opportunities.

This post tells a story of how the NVDA Screen Reader helped a person with vision loss solve a former employment situation puzzle. Way to go, grandpa Dave, and thanks for permission to reprint from the NVDA discussion list on freelists.org.

Grandpa Dave’s Story

From: Dave Mack
To: nvda

Date: Oct 29

Subj: [nvda] Just sharing a feel good experience with NVDA
Hi, again, folks, Grandpa Dave in California, here -
I have hesitated sharing a recent experience I had using NVDA because I know this list is primarily for purposes of reporting bugs and fixes using NVDA. However, since this is the first community of blind and visually-impaired users I have joined since losing my ability to read the screen visually, I have decided to go ahead and share this feel-good experience where my vision loss has turned out to be an asset for a group of sighted folks. A while ago, a list member shared their experience helping a sighted friend whose monitor had gone blank by fixing the problem using NVDA on a pen drive so I decided to go ahead and share this experience as well – though not involving a pen drive but most definitely involving my NVDA screen reader.

Well, I just had a great experience using NVDA to help some sighted folks where I used to work and where I retired from ten years ago. I got a phone call from the current president of the local Federal labor union I belonged to and she explained that the new union treasurer was having a problem updating their large membership database with changes in the union’s payroll deductions that they needed to forward to the agency’s central payroll for processing. She said they had been working off-and-on for almost three weeks and no one could resolve the problem even though they were following the payroll change instructions I had left on the computer back in the days I had written their database as an amateur programmer. I was shocked to hear they were still using my membership database program as I had written it almost three decades ago! I told her I didn’t remember much abouthe dBase programming language but I asked her to email me the original instructions I had left on the computer and a copy of the input commands they were keying into the computer. I told her I was now visually impaired, but was learning to use the NVDA screen reader and would do my best to help. She said even several of the Agency’s programmers were
stumped but they did not know the dBase program language.

A half hour later I received two email attachments, one containing my thirty-year-old instructions and another containing the commands they were manually keying into their old pre-Windows computer, still being used by the union’s treasurer once-a-month for payroll deduction purposes. Well, as soon as I brought up the two documents and listened to a comparison using NVDA, I heard a difference between what they were entering and what my instructions had been. They were leaving out some “dots, or periods, which should be included in their input strings into the computer. I called the Union’s current president back within minutes of receiving the email. Everyone was shocked and said they could not see the dots or periods. I told them to remember they were probably still using a thirty-year-old low resolution computer monitor and old dot-matrix printer which were making the dots or periods appear to be part of letters they were situated between.

Later in the day I got a called back from the Local President saying I had definitely identified the problem and thanking me profusely and said she was telling everyone I had found the cause of the problem by listening to errors non of the sighted folks had been able to see . And, yes, they were going to upgrade their computer system now after all these many years. (laughing) I told her to remember this experience the next time anyone makes a wisecrack about folks with so-called impairments. She said it was a good lesson for all. Then she admitted that the reason they had not contacted me sooner was that they had heard through the grapevine that I was now legally blind and everyone assumed I would not be able to be of assistance. What a mistake and waste of time that ignorant assumption was, she confessed.

Well, that’s my feel good story, but, then, it’s probably old hat for many of you. I just wanted to share it as it was my first experience teaching a little lesson to sighted people in my
own small way. with the help of NVDA. –

Grandpa Dave in California

Moral of the Story: Screen Readers Augment our Senses in Many Ways = Invitation to Comment

Do you have a story where a screen reader or similar audio technology solved problems where normal use of senses failed? Please post a comment.

And isn’t it great that us older folks have such a productive and usable way of overcoming our vision losses? Thanks, NVDA projectn developers, sponsors, and testers.

RSS is a web technology for distributing varieties of content to wide audiences with minimal fuss and delay, hence it’s name “Really Simple Syndication”. However, I’m finding this core capability is less well understood and perhaps shares barriers among visually impaired and older adult web users. This article attempts to untangle some issues and identify good explanatory materials as well as necessary web tools. If, indeed, there is an “RSS Divide” rather than just a poor sample of web users and my own difficulties, perhaps the issues are worth wider discussion.

So, what is RSS?

Several good references are linked below, or just search for “RSS explained”. Here’s my own framework:

Think of these inter-twined actions: Announce, Subscribe, Publish, Fetch, Read/Listen/View:

1. Somebody (called the “Publisher”) has content you’re welcome to read. In addition to producing descriptive web pages, they also tell you an address where you can find the latest content., i.e. often called a “feed”. These are URLs that look like abc.rss or abc.xml and often have words or graphics saying “RSS”.
2. When the Publisher has something new written or recorded, they or their software, add an address to this feed, i.e. they “publish”. For example, when I publish this article on WordPress, the text will show up on the web page but also my blog feed will have a new entry. You can keep re-checking this page for changes, but that’ wastes your time, right? And sooner or later, you forget about me and my blog, sniff. Here cometh the magic of RSS!
3. You (the “Subscriber”) have a way, the RSS client of tracking my feed to get the new article. You “subscribe” to my feed by adding its address to this “RSS client”. You don’t need to tell me anything, like your email, just paste the address in the right place to add to the list of feeds the RSS client manages for you. However, s
4. Now, dear subscriber, develop a routine in your reading life where you decide, “ok, time to see what’s new on all my blog subscriptions”. So you start your RSS client which then visits each of the subscribed addresses and identifies new content. This “Fetch” action is like sending the dog out for the newspapers, should you have such a talented pet. The client visits each subscribed feed and notes and shows how many articles are new or unread in your reading history.

5. At your leisure, you read the subscribed content not on the Publisher’s website but rather within the RSS client. Now, that content might be text of the web page, or audio (called podcasts), or video, etc. RSS is the underlying mechanism that brings subscribed content to your attention and action.

What’s the big deal about RSS?

The big deal here is that the distribution of content is syndicated automatically and nearly transparently. Publishers don’t do much extra work but rather concentrate on their writing, recording, and editing of content. Subscribers bear the light burden of integrating an RSS client into their reading routines, but this gets easier, albeit with perhaps too many choices. Basically, RSS is a productivity tool for flexible readers. RSS is especially helpful for those of us who read by synthetic speech so we don’t have to fumble around finding a web site then the latest post — it just shows up ready to be heard.

Commonly emphasized, RSS saves you lots of time if you read many blogs, listen to podcasts, or track news frequently. No more trips to the website to find out there’s nothing new, rather your RSS client steers you to the new stuff when and where you’re ready to update yourself. I have 150 currently active subscriptions, in several categories: news (usatoday, cnet, science daily, accesstech,…); blogs (technology, politics, accessibility, …), some in audio. It would take hours to visit all the websites, but the RSS client spans the list and tells me of new articles or podcasts in a few minutes while I’m doing something else, like waking up. With a wireless connection for my RSS client, I don’t even need to get out of bed!

This means I can read more broadly, not just from saving time, but also having structured my daily reading. I can read news when I feel like tackling the ugly topics of the day, or study accessibility by reading blogs, or accumulate podcasts for listening over lunch on the portico. Time saved is time more comfortably used.

Even more, I can structure and retain records of my reading using the RSS client. Mine arranges feeds in trees so I can skip directly to science if that’s what I feel like. I can also see which feeds are redundant and how they bias their selections.

So, RSS is really a fundamental way of using the Web. It’s not only an affordance of more comfort, but also becoming a necessity. When all .gov websites, local or national, plus all charities, etc. offer RSS feeds, it’s assumed citizens are able to keep up and really utilize that kind of content delivery. For example,>whitehouse.gov has feeds for news releases and articles by various officials that complement traditional news channels with more complete and honestly biased content, i.e. you know exactly the sources, in their own words.

The down side of RSS is overload, more content is harder to ignore. That’s why it’s important to stand back and structure reading sources and measure and evaluate reading value, which is enabled by RSS clients.

Now, about those RSS clients

After 2+ years of happily relying on the Levelstar Icon Mobile Manager RSS client, I’m rather abashed at the messy world of web-based RSS clients, unsure what to recommend to someone starting to adopt feeds.

1. Modern browsers provide basic support for organizing bookmarks, with RSS feeds as a specific type. E.g. Firefox supports “live bookmarks”, recognizing feeds when you click the URL. A toolbar provides names of feeds to load into tabs. Bookmarks can be categorized, e.g. politics or technology. Various add-on components provide sidebar trees of feeds to show in the main reading window. Internet Explorer offers comparable combinations of features: subscribing, fetching, and reading.

2. Special reader services expand these browser capabilities. E.g. Google Reader organizes trees of feeds, showing number of unread articles. Sadly, Google Reader isn’t at this moment very accessible for screen readers, with difficult to navigate trees and transfer to text windows. Note: I’m searching for better recommendations for visually impaired readers.
3. I’ve not used but heard of email based RSS readers, e.g. for Outlook. Many feed subscriptions offer email to mail new articles with you managing the articles in folders or however you handle email.
4. Smart phones have apps for managing feeds, but here again I’m a simple cell phone caller only, inexperienced with mobile RSS. I hear Amazon Kindle will let you buy otherwise free blogs.
5. Since podcasts are delivered via feeds, services like Itunes qualify but do not support full-blown text article reading and management.

So, I’d suggest first see if your browser version handles feeds adequately and try out a few. Google Reader, if you are willing to open or already have a Google account, works well for many sighted users and can be used rather clumsily if you’re partially sighted like me. Personally, when my beloved Icon needs repair, I find any of the above services far less productive and generally put my feed reading fanaticism on hiatus.

Note: a solid RSS client will export and import feeds from other clients, using an OPML file. Here is Susan’s feeds on news, technology, science, Prescott, and accessibility with several feeds for podcasts. You’re welcome to save this file and edit out the feed addresses or import the whole lot into your RSS client.

Is there more to feeds in the future?

You betcha, I believe. First, feed addresses are data that are shared on many social media sites like Delicious feed manager. This enables sharing and recommending blogs and podcasts among fans.

A farsighted project exploiting RSS feeds is Jon Udell’s Elm City community calendar project. The goal is to encourage local groups to produce calendar data in a standard format with categorization so that community calendars can be merged and managed for the benefit of everybody. Here’s the Prescott Arizona Community Calendar.

The brains behind RS are now working on more distributed real-time distribution of feeds, Dave Winer’s Scripting News Cloud RSS project.

In summary, those who master RSS will be the “speed readers” of the web compared to others waiting for content to show up in their email boxes or wading through ads and boilerplate on websites. Indeed, many of my favorite writers and teachers have websites I’ve never personally visited but still read within a day of new content. This means a trip to these websites is often for the purpose of commenting or spending more time reviewing their content in detail, perhaps over years of archives.

References on RSS

1. What is RSS? RSS Explained in simple terms
2. 
   Video on RSS in Plain English emphasizing speedy blog reading in web-based RSS readers

3. 
   Geeky explanations of RSS from Wikipedia

4. Whitehouse.gov RSS links and explanation (semi-geeky)
5. 
   

6. Examples of feeds
   • feed for this blog http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com/feed
   • tweets for slger123 on Twitter or
   • Whitehouse Press Briefings feed http://www.whitehouse.gov/feed/press/
7. Diane Rehm podcast show feed

In line with current U.S. rumblings about our massively messed up health care system, here is my personal diatribe against insurance profiteering, and appeal for attention toward disability services. I don’t usually post negative stuff or rants, but we’re all angry and my story of disability resilience is part of the record submitted in support for a public option. Other Vision Losers may find comparable experiences and those not yet disabled may gain some insight about life becoming disabled in early retirement before Medicare in these dark ages of private insurance.

Note: there are many local geographic references, with some Prescott AZ Resources for Visually Impaired.

Background

I have myopic macular degeneration, a lifelong progressive deterioration from birth or growth spurt causing elongated eyeballs and correctable near-sightedness until too much retinal atrophy. My last sliver of good vision left in 2005 taking driving, print reading, face recognition, and surrounding detail into a swirling world of haze. Glaucoma onset at age 60 now costs about $800/year in standard meds that control eye pressure. I have had no other treatments since 1998 with cataract removal following extensive surgery for retinal detachment in 1993. I currently have 3 retinal exams per year with the usual tests.

I am single, not a veteran, did not seek employment after job termination in 2005, preceding my eligibility for employment-based disability benefits by about 6 months. I easily qualified for social security disability at age 63 when I was using COBRA health insurance at about $7000/year.

I have basically provided my own rehab and general disability support, easily totaling over $15,000 out of pocket. Following legal blindness in 2006 I retrained myself in computer use and began seeking orientation and mobility training (OMT) for navigating with a white canes and crossing streets. After applying to AZ social services, I waited over a year for this critical safety and independence training with only one trainer in the county, who quit from low pay. Eventually, after crying at a local low vision information group, a school special educator gained state certification and provided a few lessons and a $35 cane. I am truly grateful for the trainer who kept me moving forward when I was becoming home bound. Second Sight local rehab and People Who Care provided low vision overviews but covering information I had already learned myself.

Health “Insurance” to Susan: Sorry, you own your disability until Medicare.

At end of COBRA in late 2006, I found it difficult to get response from United Healthcare (in Florida) on continued coverage but expected costs over $10,000. AARP insurance rejected me outright because of the 3 glaucoma meds which they would be forced to cover. My professional organization, IEEE, had just suspended its health insurance offerings. I was surprised to find no possible configuration of insurance for an otherwise fit pre-medicare retiree. Turning to a local broker, I found the only choice, at $3500/year, with Blue Cross of AZ which demanded waiver for related eye condition costs. Note that I would have become eligible for Medicare 2 years after admission to social security disability which turned out to be just after I reached age 65 anyway. Isn’t it ironic that the deterioration of a few body cells at the wrong time can alter one’s retirement resources by so many factors?

Like many people independently “insured”, I but down visiting doctors in expectation that any condition occurring after start of insurance would be considered pre-existing, i.e. subject to rejection or rescission. I was basically only covered for accidents. Ironically, my inability to gain OMT increased my chance of accidents out walking or getting around. Indeed, in 2004, a decorative rock near the Prescott court house sent me to the ER for five stitches at about $1000. Inevitably, disability increases medical costs, even for insured people, if the social context, the physical environment, and safety training are minimal or nil.

One effect of visual disability is the extreme difficulty of getting usable health insurance information. I’m as Internet adept as anybody, with email since 1977, but the Medicare, prescription drug, and health insurance websites and documents are painful to use, requiring hours of work and absorption of information in memory. Now, I’m good at web stuff, but filling outh pages of forms is beyond my ability, hence I resorted to a local broker to do this for me, accepting their offerings and trusting their advice. Note that I do have personal helpers, in-house teenagers, but not up to handling complex medical forms I cannot read to check. I also felt that prescription drug policies were partially hoax as I could not find a way to match 3 standard glaucoma meds with 165 choices all couched in weasel words. A consumer protection action could well be applied to make all policies simple enough that even a visually impaired non-Ph.D. had a chance.

My Personal Feelings

1. The Medicare disability gap, no help for two years, is outrageous. Here is a mature individual adapting their personal life, trying to maintain productivity and independence, seeking but finding only minimal social services, with this gap at the worst possible moment. Who thought of that torture for the permanently disabled?

2. Social services: rehab are available only if you’re working, want to work, veteran, in school, or really poor. Near retired are on your own. I called everywhere to find OMT and get in touch with local low vision education resources. I was willing to pay for a consultant to guide me at a faster pace, but no such person existed. There were none when I needed them, nada, just a waiting list. Eye doctors refer to low vision specialists, located in Phoenix, who pushes exorbitantly expensive optical devices. Instead, being a technologist myself, I attended an accessibility exhibition in L.A., found podcasts and product demos, and, at a cost of nearly $15,000, assembled my own assistive technology regime. I also began writing a blog at http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com to share my experiences with others in the same boat.

   
   Just imagine how hard it’s going to be on both the services and citizens as more baby boomers lose vision and need both mobility and computing re-training? There are standard occupational and educational training programs but the jobs are ill-paid, yielding much better services in coastal cities. How many low vision people, other than me, will you see walking around Prescott, although an estimated 9000 in Yavapai County?
   At this point, the most valuable service I’ve received is that $35 cane and a few lessons at crossing streets that, of course, lack audible signals or driver warnings. I truly believe that white cane is my ticket to the only freedom I can have. There is no viable public transportation, So I’m often using taxis if rides are not available. And notice that the Community Center, within walking distance of my home, has no sidewalk access.

   
   In contrast, before the recession, I was formulating plans to move to Tucson where SOAVI offers regular services comparable to Lighthouse in major cities and welcomed my computing expertise as a volunteer. Retirement-rich Prescott is incredibly service-poor.
   I regret that so few other low vision people in the Prescott area can receive comparable training. I also note that there is no computer training I am aware of nor any exposure to assistive technology comparable to the audio reading, book services, and more available to veterans and students. As a technologist, I found my own resources, and I am proposing such information through courses at OLLI at Yavapai College.

3. How it feels to be a citizen deprived of health insurance “choices”.
   • Not health but rather,
     corporations insurance. They determine the risk pools, not the forces of demographics and society. Some person pushed around the paper to deny me coverage for my pre-existing condition and, at AARP, of any insurance. Managers and policy makers determined that, no matter what else about my health, I would reduce profits in annual exams. I’ve read that about 400,000 health corporation employees spend their working hours paid by premiums to deny insurance to citizens in order to pass profits to shareholders and corporate bosses. This is as evil a form of capitalism as could be imagined with no innovation, public service, or redeeming values, just pure profiteering.

   • Even more insulting, as a “self-pay” I got to fork over for the full rate rather than any reduction negotiated among doctors and insurers. Luckily, I had only year and a half of routine exams for my “pre-existing condition” but lived in fear of a major treatment that could run into $10,000s.

   • I am appalled at state politicians and tax payers who refuse resources to
     our system of social services so starved of trained rehab people that low vision individuals sacrifice safety and independence that probably lead to higher medical costs, e.g. $1000 when I tripped over a decorative rock down town Prescott.

   • I also resent second class status as a citizen who has for nearly 20 years supplemented family members in and out of personal difficulties, but now becoming taxpayers. I was a willing safety net, but there’s no net for me.

   • A visiting friend recently got excited at the national anthem played at the square, but I could find no feeling of national loyalty, only sorrow for myself and the many other disabled people I know who, with great resilience, overcome disability but always end up with less financially and more aggravation and deprivation from lifetime medical services. You own your pre-existing condition, so it goes, but why should the U.S. support a medical industrial complex that profits from exclusion of persons with disabilities.

   • Finally, I know all too many people who remain mired in companies they dislike, submitting to discriminations practices, enslaved due to health insurance.

Recommendations

Abolish the profiteering, paper pushing, intrusive health insurance companies and provide full support for a public option. No country can claim it is “good and great” when its health care system is rotten and wasteful at the core. Why fight terrorism abroad and still facilitate slavery and profiteering from illness and disability in the home system?

Additionally, extend the notion of health support to include the social services, rehab specialists, training centers, and public support that keeps people with disabilities productive and not needing more costly medical services. Just adding 3 more rehab people to the Prescott area would add, what, maybe $300,000 or about one middle-class house or a $1 more taxes. Now, realize that everybody will be disabled eventually and these specialists are even more essential.

Note that the disability I describe is a “social construct” as much as an individual condition. I have rather resiliently responded to my condition with great personal growth while the insurance and social services have constituted far more challenge and distress. I have only faced the full force of this dysfunctional system for about 10 of the 15 years of my progressive disability while many others have a lifetime. I have come out with a sense of service to others exhibited in my blog writing, advocacy in social media, and participation in lifelong learning distance education opportunities at Yavapai College.

Fix the system by abolishing private health insurance, acknowledging that this impoverished dogma of capitalism is far worse than any possible replacement that serves all the people. Apply the funds, after retraining insurance paper-pushers, to building a disability friendly society that, like the curb cut, will improve lives for everybody.

Addendum: So now we know, sorry,, the nation cannot afford health insurers!

Many U.S. citizens have lost our innocence about capitalism watching the fiasco of Wall Street bailouts and, now, the role of the medical-industrial-government complex in our personal lives and 1/6 of the national economy. So, it’s now established baseline that acceptable universal health care can be provided for 3% overhead, i.e. Medicare. And, facts vary, but let’s assume premiums carry 20% overhead, including profits to shareholders, bonuses to executives, salaries to underwriters (i.e. those who deny insurance or claims), adjusters who hassle doctors and their administrators over claims, processors who actually do work comparable to the Medicare 3% overhead. Oh, yeah, also lobbying, lawyering, and the usual industry hobnobbing at expensive places. All this, when in many locations there are near monopolies or few competitors. And more along the lobbying vein are the subsidiary think tanks that produce reports to influence legislators.

Can the U.S. economy actually sustain 20% versus 3% overhead costs? Wouldn’t we be nuts to continue such a costly system? Well, not if it were geared toward innovating and modernizing health care records and studies of comparative treatment effectiveness. But that’s not happening, at least for the benefit of the citizenry. No innovation, inhumanc3e denial of services, isn’t this just pure profiteering?

Here’s a counter-proposal if U.S. citizens cannot give up on capitalism in its most appropriate context, as argued by NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman. Knowing 3% overhead is the baseline, allow 5% of premiums for profit private companies. That’s all, covering administration, executive salaries, and dividends. Sorry, insurance industry investors, and I’m probably one somewhere in my diversified portfolio. Profits have been inflated, costs have not been controlled, it’s time for reparations after the war on those with pre-existing conditions. But won’t the health industry go nuts and up their charges? Well, let the insurers and health care providers go to negotiating like other claims, rather than allow the insurers to have the final call. Now, let’s slice off another 1% of premiums into a fund to improve healthcare delivery, doctors’s lives in underserved districts, the social service gap I’ve described. Isn’t that a better trade-offhann corporate bonuses or deniers’s salaries?

Bottom Line: If the for-profit insurers’ cannot even come close to a current public option, i.e. Medicare, the country cannot afford to subsidize their dogmatic capttalism. For those who cannot abide government-run systems, give a private option capped at a reasonable level of 5% overhead, stripped of denial privileges and forced to innovate and streamline to survive.

Contact

August 19 2009
Susan L. gerhart, Ph.D.
http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com
blog “As Your World Changes”, ‘Adjusting to vision loss with class, using technology’
slger123@gmail.com

This post is not directly in the theme of adjusting to vision loss but rather memoir-ish in the wake of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the death of Walter Cronkite. I’ve always wondered how our lives would be different if, just what if, the U.S. had been first instead of Sputnik. I’ll tell my story.

Two burning questions: Why? and What if?

How did Russia come to be first to launch
Sputnik when the space powers were roughly equal?

My knowledge of history, even in my own lifetime, is rather weak, but here’s my take on what happened. See the references below.

1957 was a time of mutual fear between and against two nuclear superpowers. The artificial satellite catalyst was in the works as part of an International Geophysical Year program with a scientific theme. Neither U.S. or Russian government leaders were enthusiastic while war-bred technical tribes were chomping to launch. Mars-minded Von Braun even rolled out a satellite-mounted Redstone missile to the launch pad but got nixed in favor of a Navy Jupiter. Meantime, a Russian technical group managed to design an ultra-simple 180 lb. beeping ball to ride replace a nose cone on monster missiles under test.

News reports shocked first the scientists in the know then informed a confused U.S. public. It was hard to imagine the engineering or purpose of a beeping ball circling the earth, even passing over the U..S. twice without notice before news announcement. With missile fear came the question of whether the satellite could attack, as warned in civil defense pamphlets and school room desk ducking. Apparently, Russian had been working on really big missiles needed for large nuclear payloads that the U.S. had superior technology to miniaturize. Nevertheless, U..S. missile rocketry was faulty and embroiled in military turb battles.

President Eisenhower seemed not to recognize the political whammy of a satellite first launch but rather was more interested in high flying planes and future satellites with reconnaissance capabilities to sort out the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet military forces. With launch of bigger dog carrying Sputnik 2, the American public grew even more scared and impatient. A rushed effort with existing U.S. rocket power failed in public but eventually got up to speed in 1958. Then came the rivalry first man in space and wild-eyed thoughts of progressing rapidly from Earth to the Moon, with Russia setting the pace.

How would our lives be different if America, not Russia, had been first?

And here come the side-effects that changed our lives to this day.

Eisenhower started an Advanced Research Project Agency to execute both catch-up and public assurance projects. Now, remember that the U.S. capability was mostly in place but the Russians made the decision first, not from superiority but rather follow-through. Was the U.S. weakness in public will, leadership, technological prowess, project management, military strategy? Eisenhower had an enormous juggling challenge: secret or public, civilian or military, scientific dominant or engineering demonstrations, private industry or government executed, etc.? Currently, we see a National Science Foundation, NASA, ARPA, and vast military industrial complex created warily during the Sputnik-stimulated space race of the 1950s.

Waves of public education concerns generate institutional opportunities in the belief that the U.S. intellectual and technological weakness had lead to the first satellite defeat and possible future losses in space races. With a sense of investment inn public education infrastructure, U.S. science and technology leaped ahead.
Now, it’s sickening to experience the loss of investment sense in schools.

But look what the whole world got for very little — the Internet, as created and fostered by military and then educational institutions for more than two decades. Would the U.S. have developed the Internet without the Sputnik loss? Who knows, but on balance this seems to have been a great battle to loose at a time when a generally good economy and scary political system forces could let such a technology bloom.

References for History of Sputnik and the Eisenhower era

1. NBC News reporter Jay Barbree 50 years of space reporting. Good account of Sputnik politics on through the moon and downward. Informative news-eye account of space successes and tragedies. Available on Bookshare.
2. the Heavens and the Earth: A political History of the Space Age. Dry but very informative trace of politics, personalities, and technologies.
   Available on Bookshare.

3. Fear of Sputnik: NPR interview with Jay Barbree
4. Online News Hour: Sputnik revisited. Political historians analyze and recall 40 year anniversary of Sputnik.
5. The Sputnik Shock effect on education. One academic’s account.
6. Sputnik, the satellite that inspired generations
7. sputnik, the satellite that started it all
8. Happy birthday, sputnik. Thanks for the Internet. Credit to DARPA hence to Sputnik for Internet development.

Personal account: sputnik Launched My career

Sputnik in the sky of teenage minds

Lions roared across the stage under the traffic light in the center of town. Ferris wheels spun in front of apartment windows in the multi-use dwellings that lined Main Street. The country kids stayed in town after the day’s parade to spend their allowances on the rides, carnival games, food booths, and raffle tickets. It was the first weekend in October, 1957, and the annual Utica Homecoming was in full swing.

My friends Sam, Russ, and Marjorie and I were enjoying bashing in fenders on a donated wrecked car. One of us asked about the sputnik news and we all scanned the skies looking for a light that might be the beeping ball that President Ike and his press people were pooh-poohing. Little did we know what it meant to be teenagers at the beginning of the space age.

It’s hard to remember, but the physics and math teachers seemed to gain respect, even rock star status, after Sputnik. However, a nasty principal turned off the TV telecast of Alan Sheppard first manned sub-orbital trip in favor of some stupid test, dampening our connection with the outside world and major events. Well, maybe we did just want to exercise student privilege to barter our way out of one more test.

Early access to computers hooks one kid

I trace my career back to sputnik’s influence on the National science education programs that began to ensure a technologically advanced populace. I attended an NSF-sponsored summer pre-college session. There I met my first computer, an
IBM 650,
which about a dozen students programmed using cards. It was love at first punch for me, I just knew programming was the most delightful intellectual activity. At that time, I had no clue how careers worked, e.g. that there was an engineering field, or what mathematicians did, or how statistical applications were applied in finance or science. coming from that small Ohio town, I was only trying to figure out what was happening at any moment with my peers, books, and opportunities that seemed to propel me ahead.

One key idea rattled around in my head, starting at that very first summer in Carbondale, Illinois. we could write programs that summed a long series of n numbers, using n =100, or n =1000, or n =1000000 if we could actually type in a million numbers to add up. In one loop we could get a total and then print it out. But how could we know it was really the correct answer?

so, I started college with one leg up, whatever that saying means.
I was hooked on computing in 1961, in a way that eliminated alternative career paths in favor of one that would be driven by my inner love of programming. while this was a technical field, my expression of programming has remained as much artistic as utilitarian. This ambiguity has offered a theme for nearly 50 years, but at the cost of many ups and downs as I followed one career opportunity after another, sometimes falling into pits or walking off cliffs.

My college choice, Ohio Wesleyan University, was sparked by an alumnus, principal of the Utica High school, decided by a nice scholarship that supplemented my accountant father’s salary and brought me into contact with a range of east coast and Midwest bred students. I majored in math in those days before computer science or software engineering were named fields. Boy, did I get lucky finding my very own personal computer, an
IBM 1620
that this liberal arts college used for both administration and teaching science and math. It seemed “personal” because it was available to me for hours on end as I taught myself more programming techniques, culminating with a compiler as a senior project.

And the right brand of math made computing interesting

More odd chances for professional development spun off from the sputnik challenge as I tutored high school teachers in the summer as they learned the “new math” and a bit of computing. I loved giving a demo of the 1620, the size of a coffin with a nearby even larger card reader/punch. I showed them games, a few computations, and how to play songs on the line printer — like anchors, Away.

This branch of math, eventually known as discrete structures, was really what I had wanted to study not that dull calculus that dealt with change qualities I didn’t relate to their science underpinnings. Rather I spent hours working out the closed formulas in the appendix of Apostle calc text, like 1+2+…N=N*(N+1)/2, isn’t that cool? as I programmed, I always faced that “is this the correct answer?” dilemma. a course in philosophy of science gave me the inklings of a response, the principle of “induction” and the realization that science wasn’t just a blend of people and ideas I couldn’t fully appreciate, but indeed there were defined concepts like theories and reasoning.

Sometimes it takes decades to know what was important

Meantime, on the political scene, the sputnik shock morphed into Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis. One very serious politically minded upper class student forced our dorm dinner table to listen to sobering words that trickled into our closed campus world from the news on TV and radio. Now, my current reading on the space race tells of roles of cameras launched in satellites or carried on dangerous U2 missions. I really appreciate that a forty-ish aged president and his aides had the energy, wisdom,patience, and world knowledge to bypass a crisis with Russia through Cuba. However, also developing during this time was the massive military-industrial-complex warned by the much older Eisenhower who had generated so many missile,, and defense programs during his term.

My clueless ness about the political forces of the world remained through my active career as I occasionally visited these defense companies and government agencies such as NSA, all seeking the holy grail of program correctness. My innocent love of programming and curiosity about the correctness conundrum were leading to regions of worry about international competition with U.S. and Japan, and backlash against the correctness mission that several times hurt my income while also opening new professional opportunities. I still wonder how much easier programming would be today if the Japanese Fifth Generation project hadn’t succumbed to its national economic failure.

Learning computing before official computer science

Graduate school seemed on my path, but how could I exit gracefully from mathematics?
University of Michigan had a strangely titled program in communication sciences, an eclectic combination of fields that later branched into artificial intelligence, psychology, hardware design, software engineering, and, strangest of all, speech synthesis. the latter field, concentrating on modeling of the human vocal track and units of speech, is actually the technology use most today in my assistive tools.

The programming class was a triumph for me as the major exercise was similar to my undergrad senior project, a translator. In those days, a major university computer ran batches of punched card programs with an ever increasing turn around time as the semester load increased. In this project, we had two tries to get our program to run, with 4 days wait. I checked, double checked, and checked again, hand simulating my code, and indeed got a successful run.

Where would I be without Sputnik?

Who knows, but I believe I was one of those youngsters who, exposed to computing in its purest form, at just the right age, got hooked for a lifetime. The circumstances were traceable to Sputnik after-effects. However, it was my personal curiosity about mathematical induction that took me away from a probably failure as a mathematician to a contributor of some important ideas in computer science. I greatly regret that this central concept got muddled in academic, even international secrecy, squabbles and was deemed too hard for ordinary programmers.

So, that’s one personal reflection on Sputnik as a life-changing event here on earth, leading to a moon I can still pick out in the night sky, but a movie of moon steps I can sometimes amplify by video but most firmly held in my memory and hearing.

Listen to
Audio version of this post and
Sputnik beeps

Do you remember Sputnik? Tell us about it.

Visit our other
blog collecting Sputnik experiences and opinions

The ACB and NFB lawsuit against ASU-Amazon textbook test program is a big deal for discrimination activism and an educational opportunity on accessibility. The detailed complaint explains difficulties of blind student textbook use at ASU and how adoption of the Amazon Kindle trial program will set a bad example.

The textbook program has caught Television public interest reports on journalism student Darrell Shandrow. Comments in Chronicle.com Wired Campus report on the lawsuit have invoked understanding and support mixed with political outrage at ADA accommodations. Related issues on Reading Rights activism on publisher/author control over text-to-speech cloud the issues of accessibility of the Kindle device itself.

The purpose of this post is to inject my own opinion as well as link to some useful resources.
I speak as a former educator who struggled with textbook bulk and price; software engineer with spoken interface development experience;
and research manager with technology transfer background.
Although not a member of either ACB or NFB, I am a
visually impaired avid reader living hours a day with text-to-speech and affectionate owner of many assistive tools described in this blog.
Oh, yeah, also an Arizona resident with some insight into ASU programs and ambitions.

I try to untangle the arguments my own way. Based on my own ignorance of a few years ago, I suspect many sighted people and those in process of losing vision lack understanding of how audio reading works. I provide a recorded demo of myself working the menus of a device for book and news reading to show the comparable capabilities lacking in the Amazon Kindle.
By the way, I’ve never seen, fondled, or considered buying a Kindled.

Untangling the Kindle-ASU-textbook Arguments

1. Text-to-speech (TTS) is the work horse, the engine, for assistive technology (AT) for visually impaired (VI) people. TTS reads content as well as providing a spoken interface for menus, forms, selections, and other user operations. Nothing novel, implemented in dozens of devices on the market, standard expected functionality to support accessibility.
2. Amazon product designers included TTS presumably to provide a talking interface for mobile, hands-full users. TTS could read unlocked books, news, or documents downloaded to the Kindle, but only on Kindle software and rights management platforms. This established TTS as a mainstream commodity functionality, much like a spell checker as expected in any text processor.
3. Book authors reacted that TTS represented a different presentation for which they could not control pricing or distribution. Amazon said, “ok, we’ll flip the default to give publishers control over enabling TTS”. Accessibility activists complained “hey, you just took away an essential attractive feature of the Kindle” and “You authors, don’t you want us to buy your books in a form we can read as immediately as on-screen readers”.
4. More experience with the Kindle revealed that the TTS capability was not implemented to support the spoken interface familiar for VI people in commodity AT devices. See our downloadable demo and referenced tutorials to understand the critical role of spoken interfaces.
5. Bummer. The Kindle that promised to become a main stream accessible reading device was a brick, a paperweight, a boat anchor or door jamb if it weighed enough, just an inert object to someone who could not read the buttons or see menus and other interactions. Useless, cutting off 250,000 books and every other kind of content Amazon could funnel into the Kindle. Well there’s always Victor Reader, Bookport, Icon, and a host of other devices we already own plus services like Bookshare, NFB Newsline, NLS reading services, Audible commercial audios, etc. Disappointed, a step forward missed.
6. Now universities enter the picture with a partnership opportunity to test out the Kindle on textbooks for selected courses, an educational experiment for the next academic year. Rising complaints from students about textbook costs, often $500 per semester, plus chronic dissatisfaction with the packaged all-in-one book has lead to alternative formats, even abandonment, of textbooks in many subjects. Great opportunity here to re-examine educational benefits of a product and distribution system already familiar to tech-greedy students. But would the learning outcomes hold up? Amazon doesn’t say how rigorous this test program would be, but at least there’s be more Kindle-driven classroom feedback.
7. Uh, oh. Those darned blind students can’t use the Kindle. Can universities block them from Kindle trial courses? or let them in, relying on the established accessible material support practices forced by A.D.A.? This messes up the trial because the total population of students unfortunately includes visually impaired and a range of other disabilities. Of course, there could be an economic winner here to reduce accessible material preparation costs, easily as much as the $500 Kindle when all staff and scanning prep time are included. Or even insights might be gained into how Kindle mitigates learning difficulties for some disabilities. Ouch, though conversely, it could be that reading on-screen amplifies learning difficulties students have overcome with print practices. Well, it’s a trial, an experiment, right? But, actually, this taxpayer and researcher asks, what are the parameters and the point of the trial program with several universities? Huh, just asking, can’t find any detail.
8. So the well-lawyered NFB and ACB get together and back a long-time accessibility activist and now ASU student in a lawsuit injunction. Why get so huffy and legal? Outsiders don’t know in detail what mediation or requests have already been suggested and rebuffed but, just guessing, these organizations are probably long on experience and short on patience on accessibility issues and promises. There’s a history of Apple pushing onto universities IPods and ITunes when these devices and services weren’t accessible. Settling with the Massachusetts blind services, Apple finally got out an accessible ITunes. Amazon has a legal record on accessibility as does the LSAT.com registration website. I can well understand the reasoning that a big gorilla like Amazon won’t take time for accessibility if it can avoid doing so, for both profit and ego motives. The lawsuit simply says “Time out! Amazon, you can make the Kindle accessible just like standard practice with AT we already use.” And “ASU and other universities, don’t even think of harming VI students or taking on a tainted experiment that excludes VI students”. What’s the hurry, everybody? The textbook problem won’t be solved next year, the market will always be there, so it’s possible to have a trial that’s fair, responsible, and more informative if accessibility is counted in.
9. Now, even local Phoenix television stations got interested in the story and, wow, what an educational moment! ASU public relations, still not recovered from their Obama honorary degree fiasco, responded with a flat “we have disability services in place. That’s enough!”. But this taxpayer thinks differently. Part of the experiment is rapid delivery of texts and other materials, perhaps challenging or disrupting disability services. And if the Kindle device itself is part of a trial, then what happens with students using alternative, perhaps even superior, technology? Trivia like different pagination in Kindle texts compared with converted texts distributed to VI students might introduce problems. Isn’t this setting up the trial for either (1) obvious bias by exclusion of VI students or (2) additional burden on VI students? Why not just wait until the device is comparable enough that harm is minimized and more is knowable in the long run about learning outcomes and economic models?
10. But, wait, there might be a real technology barrier here. Software engineers know that the cost of repair for a missing requirement goes way up long after design, becoming deadly after deployment. Accessibility was not a requirement for the reader device although it’s a legal requirement in the university marketplace. Oops, this was a blunder. If the design of the Kindle software permits sliding in functionality like calls to the TTS engine, retrofit might not be too bad. But there’s a browser, keyboard, and lots of interactions that could get tricky. Usability is notably difficult to do well without experimentation and iteration. So, this is just one more case study relevant to the many software engineering texts in the Amazon market.
11. Finally, as others have commented, regarding the Chronicle.com forum, railing against A.D.A. as an intrusion on public rights, a sign of backwardness for disabled individuals, and general disregard of human rights is, well, sickening. I wish those detractors a broken leg during a health insurance lapse with a long flight of stairs to the rest room. That’s life, bozos, and we’ll all be disabled in the long run.

What is the listening experience? Hear me show you!

I use the Levelstar Icon to download books from Bookshare.org. My library is currently about 1000 books, complemented by daily doses of news feeds and newspapers. I’ve turned this situation into a demo:

download the 15 minute AYWC-reading-demo.mp3 from http://apodder.org/stumbles/
You’ll hear me narrating book downloads and reading. The demo illustrates both (1) TTS reading books and news and (2) working around menus and lists of books do perform operations commonly shown ona screen. This latter capability is the crux of the Kindle accessibility disagreement.

For more information on this device and interface, the Levelstar.com audio tutorials illustrate the standard practice of supplanting screens with voice-enabled menus. For the record, the operating environment is Linux and the designers of the Icon and its partner product APH BraillePlus are blind. Personally, I think the mainstream product capabilities have a lot to learn and gain from the AT industry it has so far excluded. Perhaps, following the Curb Cuts principle even better, universal designs will emerge from this mess.

Definition: Resilience: : an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change
Miriam Webster

This post assembles some thoughts on resilience in adjusting to vision loss. Sighted readers of this blog will learn more about how to help Vision Losers with their various challenges. Visually impaired readers may glean both encouragement and practical tips to facilitate a reliant approach to vision loss. Three books are referenced: Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards; A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts; and What Blind People Want Sighted People to Know about
Blindness’ by Harry Martin. This post builds on emotional themes from the past 2 years.

Book: Resilience as Articulated by Elizabeth Edwards

Listening to the May 21 Diane Rehm interview with Elizabeth Edwards on her new book got me thinking about the factors that affect my personal resilience regarding vision loss. Let’s forget the modifier “easily” in the above definition but consider success measured in timeframe’s of months and probably other units relative to individuals, such as employment, relationships, or education. The main point is that some people seem more resilient; now, why is that?

Edwards is out there talking about her adversities because she has a limited life span in which she believes her testimonies will positively affect others. That worked for me. Her loss of parents is, of course, common to all of us, in my case, a mother’s 20 year battle with lupus and crippling arthritis while raising three children and helping her own parents. Edwards lost a 16 year old son in an automobile accident, trusting his ability to drive in slightly challenging situations, the feelings I still face with 20 somethings and remember from my own youth. Her unusually unpleasant and public problems with a philandering politician husband while fighting cancer even under the best possible financial basis are not what anyone wants to contemplate. Contrasted with early death, vision loss seems less of an adversity and more like a life alteration.

So, how did Edwards survive?
Well for one thing she finds it helpful to use her public position to talk and inspire others. Another approach is to make a major life change, like having an additional pair of children after the death of one. For her, now, the source of happiness is her start up furniture business where she has a total different framework of expertise, decisions, and colleagues.

I’ve written about energy management in the context of my Vision Loser tenets. Assuming one isn’t the type to just sit around in an adversity like vision loss, it’s interesting to examine what generates or consumes or wastes personal energy. Edwards so clearly expresses her energy rising from her furniture business in both the Diane Rehm interview and her book. I suggest that we introspect for what makes our energy levels ebb and flow, often evident in our -voices. Co-incidentally, our heroine interviewer Diane Rehm exhibits her own resilience for voice loss.

Book: The World’s Greatest Traveler, circa 1840

Jason Roberts’ book ‘A Sense of the World’ was recommended to me by a book club member. In a nutshell, British youth James Holman follows his mysterious vision loss in his early twenties with a lifetime of adventures becoming dubbed ‘The Blind Traveler’. Travel in that time period of the early 1800s is horses, coaches, boats, and feet with no way to make reservations at a motel chain or stop at fast foods at the next intersection. For sure, the travel stories are interesting, especially in Russia and France. And this is against a backdrop at home of inhospitable social treatment of blind individuals.

So, how did this blind man achieve his adventures of traveling 250,000 miles on his own. Actually, the book doesn’t describe much of what must certainly been some trying times, but here are a few factors. First, Holman had already accomplished one career in the British Navy, starting at age 12 and rising to a captain around age 16. His character was formed and he had just plain toiled very hard during his teens while France, Britain, and the U.S. battled politically and commercially. This gave him a status of officer and gentleman throughout his life, making him ever more welcome as he seemed to have accepted his vision loss and developed cheery manners for gaining help from others. Second, he found a really great gig in a philanthropic support for unfortunate naval officers, including rooms near Windsor and a bit of stipend and community. Third, he always stood out with his cane and blindness attracting attention and help. And fourth, he had a mental knack for geography and so the rigors of travel were endurable in the short run because he never seemed totally lost.
. Finally, he had a cute way of tethering himself to the moving carrier for exercise and escape from passivity.

Holman had established status as a paraprofessional who had studied chemistry and medicines at Edinburgh and his father’s pharmacy. In one travel saga, he carefully packed and memorized locations of a variety of medicines, anticipating that nobody could read the label, him from lack of eyesight and others not speaking the label language. This return to his hard won education and training to remain practically valuable to himself and others must have exhibited and facilitated resilience.

This is definitely an enjoyable book with a few additional lessons when reading and thinking about resiliency. Today with all our technology, we might not be able to get ourselves anywhere near the adventures of Holman. Logistically, we might feel obligated to gear up our GPS, WIFI for weather, and download GB of reading materials. Just packing all our adapter cords is a challenge. Moreover, safety is frequently a barrier as we face … And help along the way is often problematic. I am often asked if I need help when I pace around an airport. Sometimes I am trying to sort out the restrooms but often I just want a little exercise, but people sure think I’m lost. Even worse, occasionally people grab my arm and force me to lose balance if it looks like I’m coming too close to a chair or potted plan. Training strangers to be helpful and not hurtful just to carry on with simple travel necessities is a lot harder and more stressful than it might seem. .

What were the technologies for reading and writing in that time period?
Holman made part of his living from writing travel books, indeed invited into the Royal Society as well as battling another jealous and less talented writer. As described, he used a writing device of wires and carbon paper that could be transcribed later and free him from dictating. Now, continuing handwriting when you cannot see what you write is a skill I really admire, as I can barely sign my name!

Book: What Blind People Want Sighted People to Understand about Blindness

I find this self-published book by Floridian Harry Martin interesting in many ways but mainly as a mission I wish I could accomplish in my own life with my confusing states of eyesight and changing skill sets. Martin lost vision in his 30s and took full advantage of services provided for veterans. He doesn’t talk much about technology, but rather emphasizes relationships.

One illustrative discussion is how to tell somebody what you do, and do not, see, especially if they haven’t asked. Sure, this is a painful topic, probably more so for the sighted than the well-adjusted Vision Loser. It’s often difficult to understand how a person cannot see the food on a plate, suffering perhaps an unfortunate confusion among horseradish, mashed potato’s, and roast beef. Yet that person can walk along a contrasting sidewalk with speed and assurance. This consistent ambiguity is a routine stressor for the visually impaired.

Martin describes many aspects of mobility training, including living with a guide dog.
It’s not clear if Martin has any employment history as disabled but bases much of his social experience on community interactions. This author has used his time, energy, and organizational skills to assemble insight from many other blind people to complement his own experience.

I was especially grateful to feel included as a person with considerable residual eyesight but requiring the stamina and adjustments of print disability and mobility limitations. I also find it useful to know the extent and types of training that are available in regimented rehabilitation settings, way out of my league of experience with meager social services.

My Resilience experiences

It wasn’t until listening to Elizabeth Edwards talk about her life and book with the “national treasure” interviewer Diane Rehm that I could put a name on some of my own thinking. Indeed, a therapist tells me, “psychological resilience” is an important and well documented subject, especially related to childhood traumatic experiences. There, a “cookie person”, some one, just one person, taking an interest in a troubled child is often the most significant factor in how well children survive.

My bounces from interviews and books

Looking back 3 years to my “disability declaration day”, I can identify two major factors that moved me ahead. First was fortuitous listening to podcasts by author Susan Krieger on Dr. Moira gunn’s Tech Nation and on KQED Forum. I felt an instant recognition “yeah, vision loss in late career years, but look how she’s turned it into a positive personal and professional experience”. Although Krieger’s vision loss was unexpected and mine was anticipated for more than a dozen years, I got a sense of where I was heading. Krieger’s generous demonstration of her reading and writing equipment also provided me information I had not found available in my own community, and with the authority of her own written words.

The second factor for me was Bookshare.org. As soon as I could legally check the box for print disability, I took the simple authorization form to my optometrist, who faxed it in and within a matter of days I was registered at Bookshare and downloading. As soon as I realized I had loads of books I’d never have to pick up or return to a library outlet, no longer an easy trip for a non-driver, I really felt comforted. Then came a tangle of experiences with technology for reading, first a PC software book reader where I realized it was tough to read in bed with a Toshiba laptop. Then I investigated CD DAISY readers and ran across the APH Bookport on which I have since read hundreds of books. Bookshare’s newspaper outlet via NFB News Line enticed me to buy the Levelstar Icon Mobile Manager which provides hours of email, RSS, podcast, news, bookshare, and, recently, Twitter pleasure. Ironically, I’ve never managed to get paperwork into the NLS government provided service and remain uninspired by DRM and special equipment hassles.

But, oh, those social services

So, my passage into vision loss was relatively easy, illustrating resiliency from my technology fluency which lead to outreach beyond my current network. It’s true that to this day I have received very little help from social services which are directed to people in worse shape than I am, either financially or emotionally, often from aging. The one service that made an enormous difference was long cane training that followed my Identity Cane adoption and reflection on changed realization as a disabled person. This training and $35 device is absolutely essential for safety and mobility and only a supremely ungenerous society could deny its citizens access to safety. However, that’s how smaller, richer communities operate, as I compared with Southern Arizona Visually Impaired services.

For me, the greatest lesson in resilience in all of the above is that the individual must find a way to move ahead, action to couner the sense of loss, and immersion into the process of change. One goal of this blog is to display how well technology can provide that momentum and a range of partial solutions. This should motivate all of us to reach out to baby boomers who are technologically adept but not yet exposed to assistive technology. Note that the traditional low vision services and medical professions do a poor job, continuing to push optical solutions when audio is more appropriate.

I often read on MDSupport.orgabout the extensive and ongoing treatments for wet macular degeneration that delay and mitigate the effects of MD. I wish more people were aware of, and starting to practice use of, assistive technologies before what must be exhausting bouts of treatment. I’m convinced that medical insurance battles and the ups and downs of continued series of injections would have sapped my resiliency.

Now, there are also the daily bouts that require bouncing back. The hardest slaps for me are where I feel “professional betrayal”, like computing websites that really suck at accessibility. I also feel a twinge of demoralization when I am driven through a major intersection that I fear to cross walking because it lacks warning signals and is frequented by drivers saving a few seconds on there way to nowhere. Lack of public transportation and a richly designed community center reachable only by driving sadden me at poor public planning. But that’s another purpose of this blog, to do whatever I can to explain, illustrate with my own experience, and persistently nudge and complain. I never realized how much effort and precious energy went into activism, especially if it’s not a natural part of one’s personality.

I realize I’ve complained about lack of social service that are unevenly distributed across the U.S. Were I residing near a larger city I’d be attending more daily living classes and would have received far earlier mobility training. For me, this isn’t asking for government handouts but rather bemoaning the lack of trained personnel available to hundreds of thousands of people off the rehab grid, still active but needing different training. I simply cannot imagine what it’s like to be resilient without technology. Even ten years ago, I would have been unable to escape community limitations via technology.

Yet, I keep returning to my deepest appreciation for a $35 white stick and a few lessons from a part-time mobility trainer. Amazingly to me, the cane provides an altered sense of body location and control that in fact is a different sense of sight. Moreover, unfolding the cane causes my mind to click into independent but disabled mode, thinking every moment about what I cannot see. Also, reluctantly, I feel that I am now a symbol of both need and resilience.

Book Links

All books are available to members on Bookshare.org.
Note: I link to Amazon as an easy way to buy these books. But please do not buy the Kindle reader until
Amazon and universities stop discriminating against blind students. The issue here is that the Kindle has not been fully equipped with text to speech in its menus and operations so that all students have equal access to text books. Even then students who cannot physically hold and manipulate buttons will be left out.

1. Elizabeth Edwards ‘Resilience: Reflections on Dealing with Life’s Adversities ‘
2. Jason Roberts ‘A sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became the World’s greatest Traveler’ and
   NPR ‘Tales of a Blind Traveler’ review

3. Harry Martin ‘What Blind People Want Sighted People to Know About Blindness

Related Posts from ‘As Your World Changes’

1. 
   5 Tenets for Adjusting to Vision loss
   

2. 
   Memory, Identity, and Comedy: Conversations with author Susan Krieger
   

3. 
   What’s a print-disabled reader to do? Bookshare!
   

4. 
   Grabbing my Identity Cane to Join the Culture of Disability
   

5. 
   The Pleasures of Audio Reading
   

6. 
   Aren’t we Vision Losers lucky?
   

7. 
   Resources, support, and reality check for macular degenerates
   

8. 
   Consolidating links in Prescott Arizona about vision loss
   

This post takes a tour by screen reader of the new U.S. government web sites
whitehouse.gov,
recovery.gov, and
data.gov.
Using recorded sessions, I analyze my techniques and problems. Sighted readers will experience some of the confusions and frustrations of a visually impaired person trying to learn the interaction and structure patterns of these website’s. Visually impaired users may glean some ways to avoid pitfalls and determine the value of these government information resources for their purposes. I complain about absence of headings, careless links, and tricky interactions beyond my capabilities although I appreciate the effort to provide high quality government information.

Why is “Hear Me Stumble” useful?

I’ve tried this practice several times in the past year with a mixture of consternation and learning. Basically I record myself using a website to the best of my abilities, talking to myself as I go. The results are useful in several ways:

1. A historical snapshot of the website under study, the tools I’m using, and my skills is now recorded for posterity.
2. I use the recordings to diagnose my own deficiencies and document changes in my own web practice.
3. With increasing confidence in my knowledge of the field of accessibility, I try to explain deficiencies in terms that website designers can understand to improve their designs and implementations Ditto, tool developers such as screen readers and browsers.
4. The recordings also describe ways of testing that could and should be used before website release to improve the experience for visually impaired users and to meet statutory requirements.

   .

Yes, if you listen to these recordings, you’ll hear a good bit of frustration with my own mistakes as well as some depressing practice, indeed perhaps malpractice, on the part of website designers. In the case of the .gov websites, we’re watching the expanded use of the Internet for citizen interaction so appropriate corrections of certain problems could have a highly amplified effect across the population of U.S. citizens. Fortuitously, if we apply the ‘curb cuts’ principle, fixing certain problems will likely make the websites better for everybody, disabled or not, and we’re all disabled in the long run. Furthermore, the current websites are exhibiting trends using social media beyond the knowledge of many of my generation, the baby boomers and beyond. In effect, many of the populace who need data available from U.S. government websites are those least likely to be able to benefit.

A big caveat here is that these websites are “young” and experimental, sort of like new drivers proud of their licenses and wheels but not fully understanding the rules of the road. Anxious to get their acts in gear, these drivers are sadly vulnerable to mistakes that might make unfortunate hood ornaments out of senior citizens, ignoring limits of other vehicles and pedestrians using the same roads in different ways. Continuous partial attention dictates websites that change every few seconds, seeking to hook users into feeds and social web practices. This is the most important time in the evolution of these websites to instill good sense, modesty, empathy, etc. as well as correcting patterns known to be detrimental, if not outright illegal. Ok, end of lectures I’ve given many times to teenagers, especially as I become more wary as a non-driver in a cell phone and vehicular world.

An audio tour of WhiteHouse.gov

First, go to http://apodder.org/stumbles to retrieve the two recordings in MP3 format, a total of around 60 minutes.

On May 29, 2009, President Obama and government officials released a cyber security policy statement that I sought to find on the website. The main events described in the recordings were:

1. I took a “headings tour” of the website, trying to build a mental outline of sections and subsections wherever I heard like “Briefing Room heading 2″. This heading outline seems improved over my January explorations, but perhaps I’m only more familiar. Here is how whitehouse.gov looks to the WebAim WAVE analyzer. Notes: this link will show the current version of the web page not what I say on May 29. Also this is the established accessibility tool, not the newly announced Google W A V E.
2. I was thrown off by the slide show at the top of the page. Once I hit the cybersecurity story, the next time I traverse this section the story was about the Supreme Court nominee. Earlier, I had stumbled over the 1-2-3-4 series of boxes but not connected them with the slide show. This time, a fairly good eyesight day, I could see the images were changing.
3. So, listening to the recording, I ask myself, why I didn’t use the search box I found at level 2. Well, some introspection revealed I have been tricked too many times by website searches that bury what I really want in favor of getting me to products or just plain showing irrelevant material. I did try the search for “cybersecurity” the next day and indeed find the relevant references, but cannot determine whether the search would have yielded good results immediately after the announcement. I also found some silly references in the additional results about some conversations with the press secretary. Next time I will try the search, correcting my behavior.
4. Several times I ran across uninformative links like “Read this post” and “Learn more”. Since I often traverse a page by link, reading one of these links is annoying. I must read backwards through the text to find the subject of the link, muttering to myself “learn more about —- what?”. This is symptomatic of a website design that hasn’t been tested with a screen reader by a member of the web site team. Ok, maybe these web designers like to hear “learn more” repeated six times in a row, but, come on, why not rewrite the text to attach the link to something meaningful and distinctive.

In summary, visually impaired users must come to terms with a slideshow that regularly changes the content of the page without any evident alert (that I could detect). The heading structure helps traverse the page but isn’t entirely intuitive. Link texts are annoyingly un informative and should be changed if the white house web designers want better usability. This web user will give the search box a try earlier next time, recognizing the inevitable need to sort through results but hoping for the most important and relevant content to be highlighted.

An audio tour of recovery.gov and data.gov

Sorry, I just have to rant here. Neither page has significant headings. So, how am I supposed to know what’s on the page without reading line by line? Find my way to the action parts of the page? Ever regain respect for an agency that doesn’t know the mantra — It’s the headings, stupid!!!”. Is this HTML malpractice?

Whoops, I’m mixing metaphors. Is this reckless driving? driving without a license? Certainly, there’s no certification of 508 or other stamp of approval, just wishful reassurance that “we’re trying on accessibility, really” and “we’re a new website, don’t expect too much”. But, hey, this citizen says, why not pay attention to the dozens of websites that and even you tube videos that advocate headings. What about running your pages through validator’s and getting clean reports from nationally recognized accessibility gurus, like WebAim WAVE report on recovery.gov and WebAim WAVE report on data.gov accessibility.

Comments on recovery.gov

I did not have a specific task here, so just wandered around.

1. The text size adjustment option bemuses me. My browser does that for me. Reading the increase or decrease text size labels are tedious if the page reads from the top. More problematic, is that the text size graphics and buttons are off the displayed section of the page in my browser in some circumstances. In other words, someone who needs them might well not see them off to the far right.
2. Those pie charts and graphs in the slide show look interesting but they go too fast for me to zoom or magnify. Sigh. This website, indeed the whole U.S. government if its going to work this way, needs a chart explainer or some gentler way of providing data. The timeline is so cool, too bad I cannot use it. I can see it scroll by but how do I read it?
3. A popup tries to notify exit from recovery.gov. In my browser setup, I have no speech notice, just a box hanging on the screen with a Close button if I can find it. In the recording this threw me off. Why is such a notice needed, anyway?
4. PDF documents may be standard with a free reader, but they are not pleasant for visually impaired users. I personally almost always crumble a PDF into its TXT form if it’s worth reading for transport to a mobile reader. Actually, I did not encounter any PDF format files to download and try but I’m sure they are there somewhere.
5. Note: I just discovered more “Learn more” links on the News page. See above.

Comments on data.gov

This page is mainly a large search form. Now, I’m a veteran web and data searcher, but this one got me.

1. The text is flat without headings. A heading for each part of the complex form would make the difference between usability and frustration. Turn those section titles into headings, please, please.
2. Components of the form appear not to be labeled properly, if at all. Nothing new here, just good practice for a decade or so, and really important for a person with a screen reader to know what a form field is doing there.
3. I got hung up in an unfamiliar, and perhaps nonstandard, kind of form. A list of agencies with check boxes is encompassed in a scroll window. This wasn’t apparent to my screen reader so I heard a lot of naked “check box” phrases unless I used line up and down. Since I didn’t know what I was in, I could not find the search button. Looking again the next day, I found the button, decoded that I needed to get out of edit into browse mode to finish the search. I declare this just plain tricky. The technical problem is many agencies that could be represented in a list except that multiple selection from a list is also hard., although standard.
4. Ok, so if I did get a search performed, how usable are the search results? I did not find an easy way to jump to the search results, nor to navigate through them.

Uh, oh, this is an unhappy camper! How do other technologists feel?

Yep, I really don’t feel very comfortable or welcome at these web sites, despite my tax dollars at work. Granted the websites are juvenile in stages of development and that much work has gone into creating the back ends to deliver the data to the web pages. It’s really exciting that citizens may become data analysts, exploring trends and comparing communities, in the spirit of Jon Udell’s blog on ’strategies for Internet Citizens’. It is also admirable that so many semi-commercial and open source software products are being tried, albeit without a strong accessibility requirement.

But still, so many sensible, well known rules seem to have been broken that it’s hard for me to believe that accessibility is high enough priority I can feel better about future improvements. Consistently using headings is so simple, it’s sad to see the trade-off of a standard accessibility practice with the greater glitz of scripted slide shows which further mess up accessibility.

I’m just plain disappointed in the Obama administration’s approach to web design.
And I’m not alone, e.g.
Webaxe podcast analyzing recovery.gov and
Jim Thatcher’s analysis of whitehouse.gov,
developers of accessible interactive components,
critique of recovery.gov platform software

. There are people around the country making a living from building accessible websites. There are training programs, such as John Slatan Access U and WebAim Training. Why isn’t this expertise being used in the premiere U.S. websites?

Does feedback matter and how is it solicited and used? Will these websites improve?
For a broader perspective on transparency, currency, and other qualities, check out
Grading the White House from Washington Post, which needs an accessibility panelist.

This post updates and illustrates ‘As Your World changes’ post on whitehouse.gov from January. Rationale for my headings rant is post on “Let’s all use our headings!”. And here is the uplifting message of the curb cuts principle.

For repeating results, I was using NVDA screen reader from NVAccess, version 0.6, Firefox version 3.0.x, Windows XP, Neospeech Paul voice, and PlexTalk Plus as audio recorder. See WebAim tutorial on NVDA accessibility testing describes some of the NVDA operations.

This post expands my response to an interesting
Reading in the Dark Survey
Sighted readers will learn from the survey how established services provide reading materials to be used with assistive technology. Vision Losers may find new tools and encouragement to maintain and expand their reading lives.

Survey Requesting feedback: thoughts on audio formats and personal reading styles?

Kestrell says:

… hoping to write an article on audio books and multiple literacies but, as far as I can find, there are no available sources discussing the topic of audio formats and literacy, let alone how such literacy may reflect a wide spectrum of reading preferences and personal styles.

Thus, I am hoping some of my friends who read audio format books will be willing to leave some comments here about their own reading of audio format books/podcasts. Feel free to post this in other places.

Some general questions:
Do you read audio format books?
Do you prefer special libraries or do you read more free or commercially-available audiobooks and podcasts?
What is your favorite device or devices for reading?
Do elements such as DRM and other security measures which dictate what device you can read on influence your choices?
Do you agree with David Rose–one of the few people who has written academic writings about audio formats and reading–that reading through listening is slower than reading visually?
How many audiobooks do you read in a week (this can include podcasts, etc.)?
Do you ever get the feeling form others that audiobooks and audio formats are still considered to be not quote real unquote books, or that reading audiobooks requires less literacy skills (in other words, do you feel there is a cultural prejudice toward reading audiobooks)?
anything else you want to say about reading through listening?

This Vision Loser’s Response

Audio formats and services

I read almost exclusively using TTS on mobile readers from DAISY format books and newspapers. I find synthetic speech more flexible and faster than narrated content. For me, human narrators are more distracting than listening “through” the voice into the author’s words. I also liberally bookmark points I can re-read by sentence, paragraph, or page.

Bookshare is my primary source of books and newspapers downloaded onto the Levelstar Icon PDA. I usually transfer books to the APH BookPort and PlexTalk Pocket for reading in bed and on the go, respectively. My news streams are expanded with dozens of RSS feeds of blogs, articles, and podcasts from news, magazines, organizations, and individuals. Recently, twitter supplies a steady stream of links to worthy and interesting articles, followed on either the Icon or browser in Accessible Twitter.

I never seem to follow through with NLS or Audible or other services with DRM and setups. I find the Bookshare DRM just right and respect it fully but could not imagine paying for an electronic book I could not pass on to others. I’m about to try Overdrive at my local library. I’ve been lax about signing up for NLS now that Icon provides download. No excuses, I should diversify my services.

I try to repay authors of shared scanned books with referrals to book clubs and friends, e.g. I’ve several now hooked on Winspear’s “Macy Dobbs” series.

Reading quality and quantity

I belong to two book clubs that meet monthly as well as taking lifelong learning classes at the community college. Book club members know that my ready book supply is limited and take this into consideration when selecting books. My compact with myself is that I buy selected books not on Bookshare and scan and submit them. I hope to catch up submitted already scanned books soon. Conversely, I can often preview a book before selection and make recommendations on topics that interest book club members, e.g. Jill B. Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight”. I often annoy an avid reader friend by finishing a book while she is #40 on the local library waiting list. This happens with NYTimes best sellers and Diane Rehm show reader reviews. No, I don’t feel askance looks from other readers but rather the normal responses to an aging female geek.

At any one time, I usually have a dozen books “open” on the Bookport and PlexTalk as I switch among club and course selections, fiction favorites, and heavy nonfiction. However, I usually finish 2 or 3 books a week, reading at night, with another 120 RSS feeds incoming dozens of articles daily. I believe my reading productivity is higher than before vision loss due to expedient technology delivery of content and my natural habits of skimming and reading nonlinearly. Indeed, reading by listening forces focus and concentration in a good sense and, even better, performed in just about any physical setting, posture, or other ambient conditions.
Overall, I am exquisitely satisfied with my reading by listening mode. I have more content, better affordable devices, and breadth of stimulating interests to forge a suitable reading life.

Reading wishes and wants

I do have several frustrations. (1) Books with tables of data lose me as a jumble of numbers unless the text describes the data profile. (2) While I have great access through Bookshare and NFB NewsLine to national newspapers and magazines, my state and local papers use content management systems difficult to read either online or by RSS feed. (3) Google Book Search refuses to equalize my research with others by displaying only images of pages.

For demographics, I’m 66 years old, lost last sliver of reading vision three years ago from myopic degeneration, and was only struggling a few months before settling into Bookshare. As a technologist first exposed to DECTalk in the 1980s, I appreciate TTS as a fantastically under-rated technology. However, others of my generation often respond with what I’ve dubbed “Synthetic voice shock” that scares them away from my reading devices and sources. I’d like to see more gentle introductions from AT vendors and the few rehab services available to retired vision losers. Finally, it would be great to totally obliterate the line between assistive and mainstream technology to expand the market and also enable sighted people to read as well as some of us.

References and Notes on Audio Reading

1. Relevant previous posts from ‘As Your World Changes’
   • ‘What’s a print disabled reader to do? Bookshare! on using the Bookshare.org service for individual and U.s. special education organizations. Personally, I walked out of the retinal specialist office with my legally blind designation, filled out the Bookshare form, got it signed by my OD, and entered a book filled world I could not have imagined, the perfect cure for disability depression. Thanks, Jim F. eta al.
   • ‘Does twitter make me fitter? or fritter?” describes my entry into using twitter on the Icon and Accessible Twitter.com. Twitter has its own book community including major publishers like OReilly and authors on tech topics. Accessibility gurus post helpful links and tips that help me prioritize and expand my reading. Yes, I’m fitter but I still fritter a little.
   • Synthetic Voice Shock Reverberates Across the Divides characterizes a problem for those losing vision in later life. I am working on a training package that might help the ease the transition into audio reading using TTS.
   • ‘Literacy lost and Found: Keystrokes, pie charts, and Einstein’ bemoans my loss of ability to read data.
   • ‘Seeing Through Google Book Search’ expresses my dismay that the research library growing within Google is inaccessible to me. I recently suspended a talk on a seminal 1975 paper I co-authored because I could not read the comments, critiques, or follow up work often displayed in paragraphs on big blobs of white page images.

     Interview with Susan Gerhart on Jon Udell’s itConversations series where I try to explain ‘from seeing to hearing’

2. Audio reading technology
   • LevelStar Icon Mobile Manager and Docking Station is my day-long companion for mail, RSS, twitter, and news. The link to Bookshare Newsstand and book collection sold me on the device. Bookshare can be searched by title, author, or recent additions, and I even hit my 100 limit last month. Newspapers download rapidly and are easy to read — get them before the industry collapses. The book shelf manager and reader are adequate but I prefer to upload in batches to the PC then download to Bookport. The Icon is my main RSS client for over 100 feeds of news, blogs, and podcasts.
   • Sadly, the American Printing House for the Blind is no longer able to maintain or distribute the Bookport due to manufacturing problems. However, some units are still around at blindness used equipment sites. The voice is snappy and it’s easy to browse through pages and leave simple bookmarks. Here is where I have probably dozens of DAISY files started, like a huge pile of books opened and waiting for my return. My biggest problem with this little black box is that my pet dog snags the ear buds as his toy. No other reader comes close to the comfort and joy of the Bookport, which awaits a successor at APH.
   • Demo of PlexTalk Pocket provides a TTS reader in a very small and comfortable package. However, this new product breaks on some books and is awkward managing files. The recording capabilities are awesome, providing great recording directly from a computer and voice memos. With a large SD card, this is also a good accessible MP3 player for podcasts.
3. Article supporting Writers’ Guild in Kindle dispute illustrates the issues of copyright and author compensation. I personally would favor a micro payment system rather than my personal referral activism. However, in a society where a visually impaired person can be denied health insurance, where 70% unemployment is common, where web site accessibility is routinely ignored, it’s wonderful that readers have opportunities for both pleasure and keeping up with fellow book worshipers.
4. Setting up podcast, blog, and news feeds is tricky sometimes and tedious. Here is my my OPML feeds for importing into other RSS readers or editing in a NotePad.

5. Here’s another technology question. Could DAISY standard format, well supported in our assistive reading devices become a format suitable for distributing the promised data from recovery.gov?
   Here is a interview with DAISY founder George Kerscher on XML progress.

6. Another physiological question is what’s going on in my brain as I switch primarily to audio mode? Are there exercises that can make that switch over more comfortable and accelerated than just picking up devices and training oneself? I’m delving into Blogs on ‘brain plasticity’
7. (WARNING PDF) Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Reader – an essay by Mark Willis asks whether audio reading can cope with the critical thinking required in a complex and sometimes self-contradictory doctrine like Thomas Kuhn’s “Scientific Revolutions”. This would be a great experiment for psychology or self. Let’s also not forget the resources of Book Club Reading Lists to help determine what we missed in a reading or may have gained through audio mental processing.

Audio reading of this blog post