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?

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

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!

Webmaster
Jam
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/

Yahoo live showing hard of
Using yahoo live a group of deaf people were
hearing peoplefor the first time. with
able to chat online chatting
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/

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