Accessihacking
How I got my mashup
groove back.
Christian Heilmann, BarCamp 4, London, May 2008

The once enticing and
amazing world of mashups
and ethical hacking started to
bore me.

I’ve seen a lot and a lot of
repetition.

Random data on maps.

Seemingly useful data from
other sources next to the one
I was really interested in.

My music with my photos.

... and so on.

It was all a bit like déja vu.

It was all a bit like déja vu.

The problem?

None of this made any
difference to the world
around me or actually my
own life.

Then something cool
happened.

Social
innovatio
n
http://sicamp.org/

Find real world problems and
mix those with the
enthusiasm of ethical
hacking.

Instead of struggling to find
problems to solve, geeks got
them delivered to them.

One entry especially got me
very interested.

I was especially fascinated by
enabled by design.
http://enabled.sicamp.org/

Enabled by design takes
something people are very
fascinated about – product
design – and marries it with a
need of real people.

That made me wonder about
other things that can be done
that way.

Luckily there is a whole new
market flourishing – social
entrepreneurship.

• The catalyst awards
http://ukcatalystawards.org/

It is time not to “scratch the
developer’s itch” but to
tackle real problems with our
hacking kung-foo skills.

So what am I doing?

Reading a lot of emails,
attending conferences and
seeing demands made me
bored of the accessibility
movement in our area.

People that really needed our
help never got to voice their
concerns.

Instead we concentrated on
technical details, following
best practices that never got
tested in the real world and
generally stalled, waiting for
the law to make accessibility
a must.

It is about people.
Not about technology.

We will never build perfect
solutions without input from
people who we want to help.

The biggest problem in
accessibility these days is
online video.

Which is ironic, as it is also an
amazing accessibility
opportunity.

Yahoo live showing hard of
hearing people chatting with
another in sign language.
http://blog.deafread.com/abcohende/2008/02/15/yahoos-live-deaf-chat-room/

At the accessibility 2.0
conference earlier this year
Antonia Hyde showed what a
video player for people with
learning disabilities might
look like.

This was a challenge I loved.

a more
accessible
youtube player
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0-btCTdN8

This is being tested and
ammended after feedback
right now.

The fascinating thing is that I
am getting feedback from
schools that they use it, and
from blind people thanking
me for making it.

I never planned it to be
screen-reader compatible!

I used JavaScript, the
YouTube JS API and some
HTML to hack this system in a
way the developers never
intended.

There were YouTube JS
players before, but they
mimicked the interface with
HTML and CSS instead of
altering it.

Other things I tried to tackle
already:

Timed captioning

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

Twitter in natural language.

http://icanhaz.com/twitterwithlang

My question to you now is:

Am I just being a tree-
hugging freak again or do we
have something cool and
worth pursuing here?

In other words:

Should I organize a hackday
that marries bleeding edge
APIs and technologies and
targets accessibility issues
with them?

Would you be up for that?

Thanks!
Questions?