Thoughts on RNIB Techshare 2009

The Royal National Institute of the Blind Techshare 2009 conference has now come to a close. It was great being in London, meeting many respected colleagues in person for the first time and having the privilege to witness some compelling presentations on the future of accessibility.

With representatives in attendance spanning such organizations as Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Dolphin, HumanWare, Opera and AbilityNet, the program offered a wide range of topical interests. Most of the intrigue tended to center around the future of mobile technology among people with disabilities, particularly the responsibility of designers and service providers to accommodate user expectations.

What follows are some general notes and observations taken during my time at Techshare:

• Richard Schwerdtfeger, Distinguished Engineer, Accessibility Strategy and Architecture of IBM, started off the keynote by discussing the “windows of vulnerability” that emerge when technology advances — a paradigm that goes as far back as 1991, when the graphic desktop began to replace DOS prompters.
• Mr. Schwerdtfeger had a great slide demonstrating the shift to Web 2.0: static vs. rich content, page reloads vs. asynchronous delivery, tab/click through navigation vs. contemporary CSS/JS structures. He also mentioned that scripted solutions are often incorrectly blamed for inaccessibility, where the lack of interoperable HTML should be considered the culprit.
• Cynthia Waddell, Executive Director and Law, Policy and Technology Subject Matter Expert, International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI), spoke about the ongoing compliance and legal challenges facing the technology sector. (You might know her from the HiSoftware Cynthia Says accessibility portal.)
• An interpretation of accessibility conflicting with business interests can be found in Amazon’s Kindle 2 product, which provides text-to-speech functionality for users with ALS. The US Authors’ Guild is trying to prohibit this feature, citing a loss of royalties from what may be interpreted as a “reading” of copyrighted material.
• Windows 7 has a new accessibility framework, with UIA replacing MSAA. Features include improved keyboard/magnifier controls, increased platform compatibility and predictive text in six languages.
• In the area of mobile technology, Veronika Jermolina of AbilityNet provided learnings gleaned among users with disabilities. Her research provided some intriguing results. Device size was the most important consideration, with the biggest barriers proving to be retail knowledge, ergonomics and surprise costs.
• A common theme among all presentations: technological workarounds often come at the expense of accessibility, and testing among authentic users is not as prevalent as it should be.
• Henny Swan’s presentation on the intrinsic accessibility of the mobile Web was my favorite session. She discussed the crossover from MWBP to WCAG, mentioned the provision of W3C widgets to aid development and emphasized the importance of declaring CSS media types. She also made a strong case for the use of Opera’s Mini emulators to test how a site’s presentation layer hooks screen readers into content.
• As the geolocation features of mobile technology become more advanced (and hopefully more accessible), I wonder what impact this will have on the IYP industry. I know from my experience working with Yellowbook and Google that the area of localized search offers no shortage of usability and business challenges.
• Ugo Vallauri from Computer Aid discussed the financial constraints of accessibility, specifically the prohibitive cost of assistive technology for the everyday consumers. This is critically acute in underdeveloped areas of the world, where I would imagine the challenge of providing medical care to be comparatively high. Computer Aid, then, refurbishes and installs technology hardware in countries where they are most needed.
• Vallauri endorsed the free open source NVDA screen reader for public use. Interesting, NVDA is the screen reader used to run IBM:alphaWorks’ Virtual User Interface for the Blind in buffer passthrough mode.
• It’s nearly impossible to attend a conference anymore without some mention of social media. Brian Hartgen gave a session on the use of Twitter and Facebook for people relying on screen readers. It stands to reason that Twitter would be a more adaptable use case, being primarily textual, rather than Facebook with its reliance on photos and video images.
• The Twitter website itself is reasonably accessible, although alternatives exist to better integrate with screen readers and email programs. Examples include TwInbox, TwitBox, McTwit and Accessible Twitter.

During the Thursday sessions, Anikto presented on the use of virtual worlds (such as Second Life) among people with disabilities. The audience was smaller than expected but very appreciative; I’m always encouraged when discussions of emerging technologies are not immediately ridiculed in a public forum.

As mentioned before in this space, I think there is great educational and altruistic potential for the community use of virtual enterprise platforms. That said, it is up to technologists (and the organizations that subsidize them) to ensure that prototypes continue to be endorsed, authenticated, iteratively tested and then distributed.

I’ll provide the presentation deck with all slide notes within the next day or so. In the meantime, you can read the nice writeup I received in the BBC Ouch! blog for people with disabilities.

(If you would like to see this presentation Stateside, I have submitted the topic for inclusion in February’s Interaction10 conference in Savannah, GA. Go post a comment and let the great folks at IxDA know you want to learn more!)