Is it time to take mashups and use them to solve real issues?
This is my presentation given at the BarCamp4 at Gcap in London, talking about my recent move to start doing more mashups again and what lead to it.
My mashup and accessibility fatigue
In a nutshell I have to say that I was getting tired of ethical hacking and mashups. Far too many people just create mashups for the sake of putting some information together or prove a technical concept but I just couldn’t see the use of what was produced. We create a lot of ideas, prototypes, proofs of concept, celebrate them as being cool and then never re-visit or turn them into projects.
I was also bored with the accessibility movement on the web. Instead of concentrating on solutions for people we ran in circles demanding technical solutions or implementation of standards that don’t make much sense in the real world. It was much more important to be compliant with something than to really deliver for the people who needed us to remove barriers for them. It is all about demanding things to be done rather than doing them. And I felt that I wasted my time trying to get something done in this surrounding.
Boost #1: The social innovation camp
That changed drastically when I was a judge at the Social Innovation Camp. The concept of the camp was brilliant: allow people who have real world problems to draft up an idea how modern technology like web sites and social networks could help solving or at least making these problems smaller. The entries were massive and ranged from simple things like sharing sites (rent a drill instead of buying one and let it collect dust) to personal growth/learning monitoring systems.
Boost #2: Enabled by design
The project that stood out the most for me was Enabled by design which is a showcase site for people with disabilities showing the world what problems they have fulfilling certain day to day tasks (say cutting food) and what tools are available to overcome these problems.
The second idea of enabled by design is that it should become a place where product designers and production companies could get information about what products are needed and then can start designing and producing those in more appealing ways. Most assistive technology and products are ugly, and they don’t have to be – actually that makes the person who just had to start to use them to fulfill tasks previously easy for them feel even worse. People get as excited about product design as we get about APIs and mashing things up – both of these great amounts of energies could be targeted to solve real-life needs of real people.
Boost #3 – Ability 2.0 conference and accessihacking YouTube
With my mindset of giving the accessibility world a swift kick up the backside I gave my talk Fencing-in the habitat at the Accessibility2.0 conference pointing out the useless energy we waste on technical solutions built to satisfy ourselves rather than making a difference for the end user.
One of the other talks that day was Antonia Hyde talking about the issues users with learning disabilities are facing on the web, especially in regards to online video. Well, I thought to myself, as YouTube has an API, and I’ve been playing around with it already, why not have a go at an accessible YouTube player. I’ve created a prototype and sent that out to Antonia and some other accessibility contacts and the feedback was awesome.
What confused me most was that I got feedback from schools and blind people thanking me for the player and finally being able to use YouTube. I liked that a lot – realizing that I helped far more people than I thought by tackling something I hadn’t tried before – thinking in detail about the needs of people with learning disabilities!
The player is going strong and I am now writing documentation for the 2.0 version which will feature a search, playlists created by bookmarking in del.icio.us and more features like zoom.
Question: What about the future?
Am I weird (don’t answer that out of context) or is there something in there? Are there more developers out there who are stuck in a rut mashing up data without ever really making a difference with it, or do I care to go there just because I have so much exposure to this world?
I am imagining (and already started) planning an event for exactly that – social and accessible hacking of currently used internet services. We could have a hackday weekend with spokespeople from different agencies explaining the issues that people with disabilities have to use for example flickr, youtube, last FM and so on and a bunch of hackers to have a go at building alternative interfaces based on the APIs of these companies. I would also like to get people from these companies there to learn about the hacks and maybe take on some of the learnings and put them in the live systems.
The question is: would that be something you want?
Tags: accessibility, api, barcamp, barcamp4london, event, hacking, mashups, youtube
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Sounds like a great idea! Go for it!
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm
This is exactly what’s needed and something that was talked about in the corridors during @Media this year: using mashups to help people with disabilities access services and information that is arguably of more value to them and others.
Take for example Dopplr, the travel website that allows you to share information about places you’ve visited. How useful is that to someone who needs information about wheelchair friendly hotels, places and attractions?
Mashups offer huge potential for users with disabilities. I really hope an event around social and accessible hacking of currently used internet services gets off the ground. I’d be there like a shot but most importantly I think it would be a great way to bring users and creators into the same room. This is one thing that is really missing in accessibility right now – the opportunity for people with disabilities to talk to designers and developers and tell them what they want rather than the web design community guessing at what people want, maybe user testing and then releasing stuff out into the wild.
I’b be happy to help promote this via RNIB and via my my own blog.
June 2nd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Also see most things that mySociety.org has been doing for the last 4 years or so:
FixMyStreet.com
PlanningAlerts.com
GroupsNearYou.com
WriteToThem.com
June 2nd, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Great food for thought, as someone with an interest in accessibility and a minimal understanding of (yet marginal interest in) uber-geekiness I believe this is something people and the accessibility movement have been waiting for.
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:59 am
Totally, as someone who’s built web services that would enable someone else to build accessible versions of applications on top of that platform and consistently been disappointed by the lack of desire in people to actually build them, I’d love to see an effort towards actually solving the problems and not just building tools so others could solve them.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
Yes Christian, that would be brilliant!
I do think it is possible to make things easier for people with learning disabilities and other disabled or marginalised groups, with a bit of collective thinking and doing. So, focusing on offering up real or practical solutions could be really beneficial for us all. It would be very interesting to see what would come out of this event.
And of course it could really complement the work that is being done around standards and guidelines.
Re: the player. It’s great that it’s benefiting more than one group! This is something I find many times and it’s good to see.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 am
Hi Christian,
Interestingly, one thing that mySociety.org doesn’t seem to be doing is a ChicagoCrime.org -style crime map mashup. Do you know of anyone that is?
Tim
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
hi christian
first off, thanks again on behalf of the organizers for helping to judge social innovation camp.
accessihacking – yes! an excellent concept. i would definitely support a hack-event around that.
i’ve also been a tad cheesed off with mashups-for-the-sake-of-it and tried to write up why: The Unbearable Lightness of Mashups.
when will it be possible to have a look at your accessible youtube hack? i’ve got some contacts in the learning disabilities scene who would be very interested.
dan
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
@dan, the current release version is available here and the build is visible here
Feedback please on the other blog post.
In terms of using and hosting, it is best to wait till the build is ready. Antonia Hyde is helping me with the testing and the final will be fully template driven and comes with docs :)
June 4th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hi Chris,
that’s very appealing ideas and concepts you expose here, indeed. I’ll do my best to spread the word here in France (I’ve just posted up a short summary of your point of view on my blog — that’s a start, already!).
From my own experience, people tend to be shy about computers. Timesavers as simple and straight-forward as shortcuts, or menu customization, in desktop apps, are simply ignored by most mainstream users, it seems. It’s like they take things for granted, and do their best to adapt their practice to the computer, and not the other way around. I’m hopeful, though, that if they knew they have the right and ability to bend the thing to meet their needs, and moreover, to demand improvement wherever it’s needed, things would be different. Talented guys like you would have better-defined goals, and people like all the other ones, including me, would have more user-friendly software to deal with.
Nothing on par with the kind of stuff you tackle, but on a very humble basis, I ‘hack’ some websites myself by applying user style sheets via Stylish (a Firefox extension) where beneficial, like for underlining links on Wikipedia. Surprisingly, there are very few tips&tricks of the like, that I could find by (lazily, admittedly) searching on the web. Some great user styles are available here and there, but I’m probably the only person I know of who ever heard about Stylish, let alone the user style concept. It’s a shame, as I believe such basic tricks deliver genuine improvement, with a tiny piece of self-investment.
What you intend to do can not produce anything but goodness and more general well-being, so go for it, Chris! I’m looking forward to seeing the hackday idea come to a prosperous life.
Cheers,
Olivier
June 5th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Hi Christian.
This sounds like a great idea! I’d certainly be up for something like this. I think the work you have done in this area already with the YouTube captioning and accessible player is fantastic – the word certainly needs to be spread on the concept!
To second what Henny has said already, we can promote through the RNIB and I’m in the process of setting up a personal blog which I can also promote through.
Cheers!
Andy.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I’ve been lobbying for a time here in France about this idea that for instance checkboxing “can be used without JS” isn’t nearly sufficient, and I want to have accessible JS, because it simply produces HTML and as such should produce useable/accessible stuff.
And this is where I put my money, too. All the projects who tell me “hey, this works on lynx”, I just pat them on the back and tell them it’s only step one. Step 2 (and I try to help them come up with solutions, of course) is: make it accessible with JS turned on.
The real world is this: people have mainstream browsers and don’t even know what JS is, all the more not knowing how one disables it. Same goes for Flash and other technologies, by the way.
So (to make a long story short) yes, this would be interesting, yeah. In the UK, I suppose?