Left Brain Right Brain

I posted here recently that Dean had made comment on the IE blog that they would soon be addressing once and for all what the new version of IE (IE7) would do in terms of supporting web standards, in particular CSS 2 and XHTML 1.0.

There’s been nothing explicitly said so far but there have been one or two just-below-the-surface mutterings in slightly related postings.

Today, for example, Dean made a post about the new Netscape beta and paid particular attention to its ability to switch rendering engines which he thinks is a good thing.

Here’s his closing statement:

I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. I’m happy to see another browser built on top of the IE platform to go along with NetCaptor, Maxthon,

Now, is it just me being over-paranoid or does the phrase I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. sound worrying in relation to what a new IE might do to anyone else? It read to me like a warning shot that this dual-rendering ability was going to absolve the IE team from making their rendering engine conform to web standards. At the very least its a disappointing solution on Netscapes part to cater for a browser that doesn’t work very well. At worst it could be the excuse the IE team need to not fix the IE rendering engine.

Or am I being overly paranoid here?

There exists a group called CAN (Cure Autism Now) whose primary aim must be fairly self evident from their name!

They’ve recently started a section on their site where parents can upload images of their autistic kids with a little bit of text attached. here’s a sample.

Aaron is the light of our life, we are so lucky to have him.

Huh? They are lucky to have him? Then why do they want to ‘cure’ him? Seems a more accurate statement would’ve been:

‘We are lucky to have him’ so we want you to donate money to CAN so we can help make sure people like him aren’t born in future.

I’d rather see parents channelling their efforts into raising awareness and tolerance. Not this. This, to me, verges on eugenics.

First, take note, this isn’t about a method for how autistics learn but more about the differences in the difficulty of learning for both NT and autistic people.

Michelle Dawson recently pointed me to a thread where a discussion was taking place on the nature of ‘learnability’ (is that even a word?). And an NT parent asked Michelle for advice on how to help her child who was self-harming. As part of her incredibly helpful answer she linked to an essay on autistics.org on how autistics aquire (and maintain) skills. Its a truly fascinating piece of writing and an insight on how hard autistics fight to try and conform to how the general public feels they should behave.

Some autistic people…. have to do things like decide to look at something, see a garble of shapes, start differentiating individual shapes, focus in on one of the shapes, figure out that the shape is a Thing, figure out what the Thing is, and figure out what the Thing does. And that’s all just to get to the bare minimum of what NTs do automatically, and it’s leaving out things like differentiating one sense from another and doing this in a non-passive setting.

As Megan’s parents we’re aware of how hard she finds certain things but we also felt, as most NT’s do, that once a skill is learnt it stays learnt. Thats why when Megan forgets to use the toilet sometimes its frustrating for us – but we forget about how difficult it is for Megan to keep up the semblance of normality that even beginnig to make such a decision entails.

Back to Michelle’s post, she says:

Most autistics are very, very patient. We will communicate a basic need ten, twelve times. This may happen over a long span of time, as the basic need we are trying to communicate gets more and more pressing and becomes complicated by more recent difficulties. At some point, we will blow up…….This then becomes the *one* behaviour everyone notices (and also the one behaviour a behaviour analyst will analyze). Then everyone looks for what happened just right before this unacceptable and unexpected (where on earth did that come from??) behaviour. Then they decide what the kid wants, or what he means, according to the one and only behaviour they have noticed. They then work to have the child communicate appropriately what they have decided the child was communicating at the point the child blew up.

We are sometimes guilty of this – you can sometimes see the frustration on Megans face as she tries to let us know what it is she wants and its the singe most helpless feeling in the world to see your child trying to tell you something important to her and you not being able to decipher it. Sometimes we have to end up guessing and its wrong a lot of the time and Megans has a tantrum borne out of pure frustration. Its our biggest wish for Megan that we or her could find a way to each other so we can meet her needs better. She has speech therapy and is beginning to use a pictoral timetable at school and to a lesser extent at home but other than that – its guesswork.

So, thats our holy grail. Its also a large part of the reason why I started listening to autistics in these matters as oppose to ‘experts’.

At the end of last month, Martin was wondering what happened to old designs:

What also happens to all the great designs that last just a while before their owner get an itchy mouse finger and decides to redesign. Some of these sites deserve to be seen a little more than they are. There are some sites that seem to have changed everytime I go back – and yes they are more often than not an improvement. But what happens to the old design?

Its a good question. And so, in that spirit I’m going to release an old design into the wild. The site I designed it for suffered from that most pernicious of designer problems: never really getting round to it.

The design is live here for you to have a look at and decide if its something you fancy. I ain’t going to make anyone jump through hoops for it – email me and the first person to get through gets it. One proviso: No hate sites or sites that promote intolerance can be used with this design. If I check on what you’ve done with it and there’s a hate site up there I’ll feel obliged to tell you to make the design available for someone else to use. Anything else (including porn, blogs, adult humour, whatever) is fine by me. Its valid XHTML, CSS and passes A/508 compliance. Integrated style sheet switcher included but I’m afraid I’ve misplaced all my PSD’s – the main image is from stock.xchng though so you’ll have no trouble mocking it up again.