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He started off by explaining from personal experience, how autism affects the way people use the web. Autism is about processing. It’s just a different way of thinking. Most people with autism are affected by changes in sensory input. For example, Jamie sometimes can’t read when there’s a background sound. So having an audio file play when your site loads is not only irritating it’s inaccessible.

Language processing can also be a challenge. When people talk very quickly he often can’t keep up. For example, when web videos cut quickly from scene to scene he finds he gets left behind, he has to rewatch them over and over. This can be stressful.

Following a theme from the previous presentation, Jamie expressed an issue with literal commands. His experience is, early in his life when asked to wash his hands ‘in the toilet’, that’s literally what he did. Subtleties in life and on the web can cause problems. For example, when adding friends in Facebook, the function performed by the site can be different depending on the context. On some pages the functionality is to simply add people who are already registered, on other pages you’re expected to enter their email addresses.

After this initial section the presentation changed format. Seeing as it seemed to have worked in the past, Jamie then struck up an interview dialogue with Henny. She posed questions along with the rest of the audience. The next bit follows that format (with a stream of consciousness thrown in).

Q. You said with video you have to rewind. This would be awful when streaming video (e.g. iPlayer), how can this be made more comfortable?

A. Captioning and transcripts. The BBC now has a nice live text captioning system using HTML5. However, sometimes he uses a screen reader when he gets stressed, Jamie explained. In fact, to help him process information he built his own screen reader using a Mac, the inbuilt VoiceOver and some AppleScript. His reader uses Microformats and embedded semantics. He built it because he uses non-sighted navigation quite often to understand a page, but can find this difficult because the visual and code order of the page are often different. This means unmodified VoiceOver can be difficult to understand. Using AppleScript he gets the website to read in the order he wants. Snow Leopard now has intelligent select so VoiceOver has caught up with what he needs.

Q. Is his screen reader source available?

A. Err… Yes but it’s hacky and built specifically for him.

Jamie is keen to break down assumptions on assistive technology, it’s not just blind people who use screen readers. With this in mind, his opinion is that web designers should not use the title attribute. He’s noticed an obsession with using nice long titles. Often web designers use title and ALT text plus the usual copy all at the same time. Jamie hears all of them. An example of this is the Amazon website. It’s really accessible with all of these attributes, perhaps too accessible.

The discussion moves to VoiceOver and any specific features that make it easier for Jamie to use:

• Detection, one to one representation of movement on the keyboard and movement on the screen, this is new with the Mac gestural track pad.

Of note, screen readers can be too fast for Jamie. Also there are some that try to sound clear and others that go for a human voice. So which does he choose? His answer was enlightening, he chooses a human sound if the page is written in a human voice, this helps his understanding. Concatenative speech engines sound better but are less responsive. Most developers are not even aware that there’s more than one voice. One problem with VoiceOver is it can take too long to read keywords.

Q. Did he create his own presentation design?

Yes. ;)

This week I’ve found myself reading Read/WriteWeb more and more. If you’ve not seen it, they produce thought provoking articles on all sorts including some that analyse the past and offer an academic look at the possible future of the web. In the last few days I’ve been contemplating their posts on “Visualizing Social Software Best Practices: Three Approaches” and “Social Graph & Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee’s Graph is The Next Level“. These posts led me to Tim Berners-Lee’s “Giant Global Graph” and Google’s ‘light-hearted’ “Social Design Best Practices“. I found these good for getting to grips with possibilities for the web’s future direction. What’s interesting is that it all seems to tie together the thought as Tim quotes:

It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important

Anecdotally, blue flavor alluded to this last week after recapping on FOWD with the statement ‘content is still king.’. Well actually Tim abstracts this even further by stating it’s what the content is about that’s important, but both follow similar lines by stating the importance of ‘situation-appropriate’ web access (another quote from Tim’s post).

So after digesting all of that freely available info, who needs to go to conferences like @mediaAjax? We’ll actually I do and I was quite sociable at the after conference gathering, although I didn’t have the moola to attend the event.

• Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

A quick google also brought this up:

• Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community (found here Digg.com: Facebook CIA Ties)
  
• The Facebook.com: Big Brother with a smile

If you dig around there’s enough information there to keep the conspiracy theorists going for a while. Someone makes the valid point – who’s going to be interested in the music you listen to? However we upload more info than that, cross reference it and suddenly we can be profiled on more personal (and important) stuff like political leanings. Again, I don’t care… as long as it’s not used against me *gulp*.

More immediately – my own fear is that we’ll look back in only a couple of years time and wonder where our privacy went. For more on that see: UK Identity Card Scheme, Feature Creep and my personal favourite – Opposition Campaigns. There we go, political leaning, put *that* on your database.

It needs some kind of grouping system. Stuart Dredge is right, personally I have ‘work friends’, ‘Uni friends’, ‘school friends’, ‘relatives’ (that particular group breaks down further), ‘long-lost friends’… the list goes on. It’s not that I want to exclude anyone, the fact is, most people will probably thank me for not wasting their time!

My Facebook2 upgrade would ideally include the following:

• I want a different private space for all of these groups.
• I want to be able to choose which groups get which content, I don’t want to repeat myself, it’s got to make my life simpler, not more complex.
• I want Facebook to make this upgraded application Macintosh-simple to use (so I don’t make stupid mistakes).

From what I’ve read, these upgrades are far easier said than done, Nels Wadycki has written a post mentioning Yahoo360‘s attempts to do just that, but with buggy consequences. Also, read the BBC‘s Rory Cellan-Jones on “Are my online friends for real?” where he uses the example of Stephen Fry getting 20+ friend requests per hour, OK he’s found a way around it, but there’s got to be a better option?

Update 17 July 07: I’ve just this minute started looking at Pownce – it does ‘sets’! I’m off to have a play… :)