gopher

Yesterday on the Kojo Namdi Show (local DC area NPR program, kinda the analogue of the Brian Lehrer Show in New York City) they were talking about making websites accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 mandates that all websites for the federal government be accessible to people with disabilities. Compliance is quite poor and most government websites are still not accessible to people with disabilities. This included until recently the Section 508 website itself. One of the panelists on the show was Paul D'Addario, vice president of the Northern Virginia Chapter of the American Council for the Blind, and a blind person himself. He was asked why more websites (government and non government) are not user friendly for screen readers used by the blind. He said:

Well, I'm going to pretend that I can get into the minds of those who construct websites, which is not fair, but I will say -- in some cases, it's ignorance. They simply don't know that their website isn't accessible, and, however, sometimes, simply informing someone that their website isn't working solves the trick. Other times, they simply don't know what they're doing wrong.

I more or less have shifted to working on websites for a living. Mostly on the back end, and not usually the front end where most of the challenges are for providing accessibility to different sorts of users (I will get into what I mean by that in a minute), but I have written almost all of the interface presentation and business logic for my own personal website and I do actually think about this sort of thing because I think it is interesting. When I was learning CSS, the standard in styling languages for the web, I noticed there were provisions for aural style sheets. This provides a method for websites to specify the presentation styling for a website for the blind. I did some research and found that the de facto standard screen reader is called Jaws and costs about $800, and I couldn't find any free developer tools to test my website for compliance. So while my website isn't very important, and hardly gets any sighted users, much less blind ones, I did make an effort to research the problem.

Part of what makes the problem much more difficult is the way in which the Web has evolved. In the early days of the Web, when the Internet was still quite new to the general public, the Web had a structured meaning. Pages were defined in terms of things that anybody can easily understand and relate to like paragraphs, lists, and links. At about the same time there was something called gopher which had a similar purpose and functionality to the web at that time. The Web in the end came to dominate. Browser manufacturers added new syntax to HTML, the document language of the web. This was mostly styling information that made sense only for a web browser, or possibly even a particular browser. Today most websites are constructed not only of paragraphs and lists, but also of divs and spans. What the hell is a div or a span? Well it depends on the intent of the web designer as it turns out and it is hard for a human being to determine and probably impossible for a computer to figure it out. The devices that we use to read the web have splintered into a thousand different varieties, and if you are using a popular one, like the iPhone, or Internet Explorer, then you will probably get a pretty good experience. If you are using a less popular one, like lynx or a web browser and Jaws, then you may be left out in the cold.

We can't and shouldn't go back to the old days of the web. There are positive aspects to the way the web has evolved over the years, and there are a number of applications for it that just weren't possible in The Beginning. Though I do think that because of the browser manufacturers and their retarded presentation elements, and more recently because of the phone manufacturers and their need to corner the market, we are going about the design of the web in entirely the wrong way. Web developers, such as myself should be able to concentrate on semantic content of their website. The articles, paragraphs, lists, links, etc, and browser manufacturers should be creating an experience for their users that makes it easy for them to access that information and adjust the presentation for their own needs. I am not even the best person to write the presentation styling for my website so that it will work on an iPhone, Apple knows more about that device than I ever will. If websites were more semantic driven, rather than visually oriented, and if browsers gave more control to end users instead of web developers, then it would be much easier to create devices and software (like Jaws) for people with disabilities, such as blindness.

Twitter I think is a good example of a website that can be easily broken down into meaning. It's a relatively simple service, messages posted by people not exceeding 140 characters, and easily accessible by computer programs via an API. I suspect it may already be easily usable using Jaws with one program or another, and if it isn't, it would be easy to write one. Facebook, on the other hand, while a huge financial success for its investors, is a bit of a design nightmare. There is an API, but it is more for developers to write ill-considered and insecure applications for the “Facebook Platform” (read as: the Facebook Website), rather than for making the content accessible for different types of users. I get frustrated in that they change the interface every few months and I can't remember where anything is anymore, and I am relatively tech-savvy.

I am not sure how I feel about the rise of “apps”. On the one hand they put users right in the hands of developers so people can use programs that Apple or Google haven't even thought to include on their phones (assuming of course the developers software doesn't compete with Apple's interests in the case of the iPhone). On the other hand, it means that developers are designing for a specific device, making it much easier for these apps to become obsolete when the next big thing comes along and touch isn't such a hot commodity anymore, and that will happen.

So where does that leave gopher? Well nowhere, nobody is using it anymore. IE took support out a while ago, and the next big release of Firefox will do the same thing for Mozilla. Most programs do not even recognize gopher URLs so that you can click on them, although they do usually recognize ftp which isn't much used anymore either. It does have a few remaining fans of the retro computing ilk, and I find it sort of interesting because unlike the web which has evolved over time, gopher hasn't changed. It is frozen in a time when the Internet was less presentation centric. I suspect if more information was available via gopher it would be dead simple to write a Jaws friendly client. Had history worked out differently and gopher had taken over and evolved and the web remained static, I suspect I would be sitting here writing the exact same thing here, with the names reversed, because all of this is driven more by economics and human behavior than it is by good design.

As a little project I decided to create a gopher version of my website, not because people will look at it, but because I thought it would be interesting to render most of the content on my website in a different way and see how good the back end design of my website was. Does it adapt well to a different interface? Some stuff I think works well. Other stuff has issues. Well you can decide for yourself:

• gopher://gopher.wdlabs.com

Assuming, of course your browser even supports it.

aeroplane

The server at the eating establishment where I had lunch today was new and totally ill-equipped to deal with the complexity of my order. When the order finally got through, he noticed that the total was $9.11 and there was a picture of an aeroplane on my frequent flyer credit card. Slightly disturbing, I suppose, if you place any stock in coincidences, but not nearly so much as my annoying coworker/cubical neighbor coming over and talking to me about social dynamics when I wish he'd stop pestering me and get the hell out of my cube. How about them social dynamics? I am a little too diplomatic to put it like that. At the same time as I am annoyed by his presence I wonder if his mastery of social dynamics is sufficient for him to realize I can't stand him. He then tried to explain to me the exact cause of schizophrenia and that people are completely and irreparably unchangeable at the age of 11 (I would estimate more like five, but whatever). Even though I still want him to get the hell out of my hair I somehow feel the need to explain to him that while certain factors seem to contribute to the condition, the exact cause of schizophrenia is the subject of much scholarly debate, and it is difficult to predict with certainty who will suffer from it. I also think that assuming people are doomed to be themselves for the rest of their lives is somewhat pessimistic, while at the same time I sort of believe there is a degree of truth to it. He doesn't want to hear it, he knew someone who had schizophrenia and he's read lots of books. I don't tell him that my girlfriend is a psyche nurse, because that doesn't really make me more of an authority on the subject but at least I understand the difference between data and an anecdote, and at least he isn't Kimbot.