Accessihacking

How I got my mashup groove back.

Christian Heilmann, BarCamp 4, London, May 2008

The once enticing and amazing world of mashups

and ethical hacking started to bore me.

I’ve seen a lot and a lot of repetition.

Random data on maps.

Seemingly useful data from other sources next to the one

I was really interested in.

My music with my photos.

... and so on.

It was all a bit like déja vu.

It was all a bit like déja vu.

The problem?

None of this made any difference to the world

around me or actually my own life.

Then something cool happened.

Social innovatio

n

http://sicamp.org/

Find real world problems and mix those with the

enthusiasm of ethical hacking.

Instead of struggling to find problems to solve, geeks got

them delivered to them.

One entry especially got me very interested.

I was especially fascinated by enabled by design.

http://enabled.sicamp.org/

Enabled by design takes something people are very fascinated about – product

design – and marries it with a need of real people.

That made me wonder about other things that can be done

that way.

Luckily there is a whole new market flourishing – social

entrepreneurship.

• The catalyst awards

http://ukcatalystawards.org/

It is time not to “scratch the developer’s itch” but to

tackle real problems with our hacking kung-foo skills.

So what am I doing?

Reading a lot of emails, attending conferences and seeing demands made me bored of the accessibility

movement in our area.

People that really needed our help never got to voice their

concerns.

Instead we concentrated on technical details, following

best practices that never got tested in the real world and

generally stalled, waiting for the law to make accessibility

a must.

It is about people.

Not about technology.

We will never build perfect solutions without input from people who we want to help.

The biggest problem in accessibility these days is

online video.

Which is ironic, as it is also an amazing accessibility

opportunity.

Yahoo live showing hard of hearing people chatting with

another in sign language.

http://blog.deafread.com/abcohende/2008/02/15/yahoos-live-deaf-chat-room/

At the accessibility 2.0 conference earlier this year

Antonia Hyde showed what a video player for people with

learning disabilities might look like.

This was a challenge I loved.

a more accessible

youtube player

http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0-btCTdN8

This is being tested and ammended after feedback

right now.

The fascinating thing is that I am getting feedback from

schools that they use it, and from blind people thanking

me for making it.

I never planned it to be screen-reader compatible!

I used JavaScript, the YouTube JS API and some

HTML to hack this system in a way the developers never

intended.

There were YouTube JS players before, but they

mimicked the interface with HTML and CSS instead of

altering it.

Other things I tried to tackle already:

Timed captioning

http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html

Twitter in natural language.

http://icanhaz.com/twitterwithlang

My question to you now is:

Am I just being a tree-hugging freak again or do we

have something cool and worth pursuing here?

In other words:

Should I organize a hackday that marries bleeding edge APIs and technologies and targets accessibility issues

with them?

Would you be up for that?

Thanks!Questions?