Christian Heilmann,, Georgia Tech, Autumn 2008

Hello, I am Chris.

I love the mashup and ethical hacking movement.

Barcamps, Hack Days, Mashups, Crowdsourcing, the

social web.

Things that make me happy.

... but I felt that it all became a bit stale.

We’ve been mashing things up nicely.

Many a photo has been placed on a map!

However, was that really something new?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow_(physician)

HACKER!

John Snow helped the London authorities in 1854 to trace

back the reason of cholera...

...by placing the deaths caused by cholera on a map

and analyze the surroudings.

The answer:

water supply!

Another example comes from advertising.

James Webb Young’s

“A technique for producing ideas”

is a book about coming up with new ideas...

...presented in 1939 and published in 1965.

Amongst other things, he claims this to be about

combining old elements.

Mashups are much more than just a technical feat.

Anything purely technical can be created by computers.

This is why we now have “mashup generators”...

... effectively killing all creativity in the mashup

camp.

Which makes developers that could still move and shake the market get bored and

stop hacking.

This, to some degree happened to me.

{sad kitty}

I was wondering what you could do with the drive of the

mashup community...

...realizing that there is one part of web development that needs a strong, swift kick up

the backside.

Accessibility

For years, I’ve been preaching and begging for

people to consider disabilities when they develop.

The problem was first and foremost a lack of communication.

It is *very* easy to get bad and incomplete information

about web accessibility.

The reason is that it is not sexy...

Publishers don’t really look for new books and people

don’t bookmark and link blog posts.

We will change this tomorrow!

WebmasterJam

Session

People who work with people that need assistive

technology are most of the time not geeks.

They are people people, not computer people.

Geeks on the other hand love everything.

They especially love shiny new technology.

So, there is a camp of people that are annoyed with the web as it doesn’t work the

way it should...

... and on the other hand there are people that are getting bored of it as they

know all about it.

This was the gap to close.

The solution was YouTube.

At Accessibility 2.0 Antonia Hyde showed research results

of how users with learning disabilities have problems

using YouTube.

http://www.slideshare.net/hi.antonia/rich-media-and-web-apps-for-people-with-learning-

disabilities

Shortly before YouTube announced their API to build

your own YouTube Player.

I took the API and Antonia’s findings and built

EasyYouTube.

Screenshot of Easy YouTube

http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk

I put it online and asked for feedback...

The feedback was amazing!

So I did more...

Easy Flickr screenshot

showing donkeys

http://icant.co.uk/easy-flickr/index.php?s=donkeys

I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy

captioning interfaces.

I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy

captioning interfaces.

http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html

Which inspired others to hack their annotations API:

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/youtubeannotations/

And again others to build a whole web app about it:

http://www.tubecaption.com/watch?v=jpCPvHJ6p90&vcId=137

This was going places.

Special needs driving innovation.

We had this before...

What inventions were created because of disabled

users?

The speaker.

OCR Scanning

Remote Controls

All of these were great because they had input from

people who need barriers removed.

Without this input, we build lesser successful solutions.

This is why I organized

Scripting Enabled

On the 19th and 20th of September, around a 100

people listened to 6 speakers...

... speakers with different barriers to the web or

researchers that spoke for people with barriers.

On the second day about 30 hackers took these insights

and built solutions that work around these barriers.

We now have presentations on the barriers faced by the

blind, dyslexic, learning disabled, the impacts of MS

and and and...http://scriptingenabled.org/presentations/

The videos of these talks are now being transcribed and

will be online soon.

We have hacks working around these issues.

Easy Google Maps

Reduce to the max

Easy Audio Books

Stylesheet Selector

Accessible Editing

...http://scriptingenabed.pbwiki.com/

The energy at the event was amazing.

For *nearly 10 hours* we presented and discussed in Q&A sessions on day one.

Hackers didn’t bother with presenting and competing

with their hacks from 4–5pm as intended...

... but instead stayed till 7.30pm and kept hacking until we had to leave the

building!

There was good blog coverage on all kind of

personal and professional (BBC) blogs.

Some companies are right now taking the results and

embedding them in their own systems (audio books).

The video player research is already in use in Yahoo video and I am helping drafting our

API specifications.

There is more happening and available to you:

http://icanhaz.com/twitterwithlang

http://live.yahoo.com/

Using yahoo live a group of deaf people wereable to chat online for the first time.

Yahoo live showing hard of hearing people chatting with

another in sign language.

http://blog.deafread.com/abcohende/2008/02/15/yahoos-live-deaf-chat-room/

Screenshots of uk.video.yahoo.com with and without JavaScript

http://uk.video.yahoo.com/

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

http://dt.in.th/2008–05–18.javascript-karaoke-lyric-scroller.html

Screenshot of the JW Video Player

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player

Screenshot of the JW player with captioning and audio description

showing a scene from Coronation Street.

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player

http://code.google.com/p/google-axsjax/

http://webvisum.com/

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/socialaccessibility/

http://webvisum.com/

What does the future hold?

I’ve come to realize that Scripting Enabled is a great

concept.

I spent about 10 hours of planning and less money than

the plane ticket to here on the event.

As I don’t have the time to run it wherever I want to, I

opened the event up.

Anyone can run their own Scripting Enabled, if they follow these simple rules:

It has to be free

It has to be a mix of information and hacking around accessibility

Everything has to be released as CC or Open Source

Scriptingenabled.org is the source of truth – I want to know about events

Use the social web to store the photos, slides and links

http://scriptingenabled.org/host-your-own-scripting-enabled/

What about it?

Thanks!Chris Heilmann

http://scriptingenabled.org

http://wait-till-i.com