Accessihacking - How I Got My Mashup Groove Back

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

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

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

Random data on maps.

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

My music with my photos.

... and so on.

It was all a bit like déja vu.

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?

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Accessihacking - How I Got My Mashup Groove Back

by Christian Heilmann on May 31, 2008

Accessibility

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Accessihacking - How I Got My Mashup Groove Back — Presentation Transcript