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Autistic Pride Day

2 Jun

This month, on the 18th is something called Autistic Pride Day. It probably won’t make the news, you almost certainly won’t see a large march and you won’t have to put up with hearing z-list celebs talk about their solidarity and respect for the celebrants.

Autistic Pride Day is a day that adult autistics chose to commemorate the fact of their autism and the fact that they were proud to be autistic. It should not be confused with Autism Awareness which is a campaign set up and managed mostly by parents and carers of autistics to highlight what they see as the tragic blight of autism.

Autistics today face an incredible amount of generalisation and pejoratives. I’ve heard other parents of autistics describe their own children as – ‘disappearing down a black hole’, ‘stolen’, ‘missing’, ‘a parents worst nightmare’ and their own family situations described in terms reflecting grief and tragedy.

Once upon a time, homosexuality was considered an illness. In fact it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its official listing of mental illnesses in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders.

1973. Just over 30 years ago. It seems incredible that people really did think that a persons sexual preference was symptomatic of an illness, but they did. Up until that point, gay Americans were subjected to pejoratives and mind-sets very similar to those that autistics face now. The ‘deviance from normality’ was too much for most families so a lot of gays stayed quiet or grew estranged from their families. Autistic people don’t even have the option of staying quiet. Their ‘deviance from the norm’ leads them to ‘stim’ (flap hands, rock, sing to themselves and a massive variety of other ‘deviant’ behaviours). Its obvious to everyone when an autistic is autistic.

The Black man, it was repeatedly claimed, was uniquely fitted for bondage by his primitive psychological organization. For him, mental health was contentment with his subservient lot, while protest was an infallible symptom of derangement. Thus a well-known physician of the ante-bellum South, Dr. Samuel Cartwright of Louisiana, had a psychiatric explanation for runaway slaves. He diagnosed their malady as drapetomania, literally the flight-from-home-madness, ‘as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation.’ Another ailment peculiar to Black people was dysaethesia Aethiopica, sometimes called rascality by overseers, but actually due to ‘ insensibility of nerves’ and ‘hebetude of mind’, explained Dr. Cartwright. Whereas psychologically normal Negroes were faithful and happy –go-lucky, the mentally afflicted ones ‘pay no attention to the rights of property…slight their work…raise disturbances with their overseers.

Scientific racism.

The shocking quote above, demonstrates how people one believed that black people were considered ill. How a Doctor could believe that a person desiring freedom could be construed as an illness is bizarre. But it happened.

Benjamin Rush, MD (1746 – ­1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dean of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania and the “Father of American Psychiatry, “described Negroes as suffering from an affliction called Negritude, which was thought to be a mild form of leprosy. The only cure for the disorder was to become white.

Vanessa Jackson.

If such a hypothesis was even suggested today, the author would be quite rightly hounded out of the medical profession. Its utterly ridiculous. But it happened.

Autistics today face similar situations, similar ill-informed judgments and similar results. A lot of autistics say that growing up they felt forced to try and bury their autism as much as possible to avoid the judgment of family and peers. Would we find a gay teen having to do this acceptable today? Whats the consensus of opinion on Micheal Jacksons continuing quest to make himself white?

In the days leading up to Autistic Pride day, I’m going to try and write something every day about why I feel this is such an important event for Megan and for our whole family. I’m also going to try and link to articles that offer some insight into what its like to be on the receiving end of prejudice. The first article is written by Amanda Baggs and describes how the mainstream autism advocacy movement (by which I mean medics and parents mostly) are participating in the belittling of autistics.

As to what we’ll be doing on Autistic Pride Day, we’re not sure. My wife’s due to give birth to our new baby sometime this month so it may be on or around this very day. But if it isn’t, then we’ll be passing it quietly with Megan. Doing things that she likes to do. We’ll also be thinking of all the autistic adults and children we know and wishing them well and hoping that equality for them comes sooner than it did for gay people or black people.

Star Wars III: Superfluous Opinion

1 Jun

It says something about me that I don’t want to think about too much that straight after watching Episode III I wanted to blog my reactions. Does this make me sad for being a web geek or Star Wars geek? Actually, don’t answer that.

The film can be sectioned in three. Section One: Mostly OK. Section Two: So bad it made me want to stab my eyes out. Section Three: Mostly good.

Section one was full of typical Lucas over-reliance on SFX. One scene featured General Grievous’ ship approaching a planet, then landing on the planet, then GG himself leaving the ship and walking off whereupon we switch to another scene. What the hell was the point of this scene?. Some of the effects were really good – the top-down view of the space battle looking toward the planet surface was great – but George, please – use ’em sparingly!

Section two. Oh dear. Has no one told Haydn that he can’t act? This section concentrates on building up the relationship between Anakin and Padme and it…is…dreadful. The writing is just appalling:

ANAKIN: You are so beautiful!

PADME: It’s only because I’m so in love . . .

ANAKIN: No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.

PADME: So love has blinded you?

ANAKIN: Well, that’s not exactly what I meant . . .

PADME: But it’s probably true!

They laugh.

What??? What does that even mean?

Section three is an improvement. This really starts when Sidius kills all the Jedi (from invincible to inept in 5 seconds – so much for the Force). Haydn still can’t act but at least he can glower convincingly. The ending fight between Anakin and Kenobi is really good and some (gasp!) decent acting from Ewan McGregor allows us to feel Kenobi’s pain at maiming his apprentice. Not before some more terrible dialogue though. At the end of the fight Kenobi jumps into firm ground – Anakin moves to come after him:

OBI-WAN: It’s over, Anakin. I have the high ground.

Hmm. If only ever General in the history of warfare had realised that merely being slightly higher than your opponent meant you’d automatically win any fight. Bet they feel silly now.

The creation of Darth Vader was excellent but they should’ve left it when he started doing the patented Darth heavy breathing, as subsequent scenes saw Vader perfecting his Al Jolson routine (Stiff legs, hand waggling) in a vastly amusing manner. Not what you want to see from the Lord of Darkness.

Still a good film just don’t go expecting Shakespeare.

Mercury And Gender

31 May

Autism is mercury poisoning. So says Generation Rescue and a chatroom full of convinced parents. I feel I’ve shown conclusively the fallacy in that position.

Much more ambiguous is the belief that mercury could trigger autism. There does seem to be evidence that increased rates of environmental agents might have led some children to become ill. What is still up in the air for me personally is – is this illness really autism? How many of these children are there? What were the exact circumstances of their onset? Unfortunately, due to the paucity of data on these issues its impossible, or next to impossible, to answer any of them with any degree of accuracy. Not that that seems to have stopped a sizable proportion of hysterics leaping to conclusions. And not that that seems to have stopped the burgeoning autism money-making-machine in the guise of Generation Rescue and David Kirby cashing in on this state of ignorance. Those of us who question are set upon and misrepresented and in the meantime we have to put up with hearing other parents of autistics and various hacks and quacks describe our kids as sub-normal, dead inside, in a black hole, disappeared, missing, part of a plague, part of an epidemic, a parents worst nightmare, a living hell, a disaster and various other niceties. I wonder what members of other minority groups would be happy hearing themselves described in such a way?

Anyway, climbing off my soapbox, it struck me that if mercury (and particularly mercury in vaccines) was such a high causer of autism then where are all the girls?

The gender segregation of autism shows boys are 4 times as likely to be autistic as girls. There are no clear evidential paths that can account for this yet and bearing this in mind, it seems puzzling that mercury could be used as a scapegoat for all incidences of autism as claimed by Generation Rescue and its proponents. Or could it? Does mercury affect boys more than girls?

It’s difficult to find a lot of data on this but everything I’ve found so far indicates the gender plays no role in mercury poisoning. For example, an eMedicine study into the Minamata Bay incident (a factory discharged inorganic mercury into the water), researchers concluded:

Sex: No gender predisposition has been identified clearly.

David A Olson, MD, Consulting Staff, Department of Neurology, Dekalb Medical Center.

And from a separate article in the HSE:

n the U.S.: The 1998 annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ toxic exposure surveillance system noted 4,039 exposures to mercury. Of these, 1,039 were in children younger than 6 years, and 1,385 were older than 19 years. Overall, 68 patients were reported to have moderate effects, 12 patients had major effects, and 3 patients died as a result of mercury exposure. There is no scientific evidence that demonstrates any difference in outcome following exposure to mercury that is attributable to gender.

Barry Diner, MD, Barry Brenner, MD, PhD.

That’s all I can find. There may be more but if there is I couldn’t find it. Seems pretty clear cut though – there’s no gender favouring from mercury. And bearing that in mind, how do we account for all the autistic boys? Where are all the girls?

Who’s Site Is It Anyway?

31 May

There’s been an uptake in 3rd party apps interacting with websites in ways previously unthought of this year. Two of the biggest known are the Google Content Rewriter and now, Greasemonkey.

What both these things do is alter aspects of a website. The onus in each of these caes is slightly different. Google does it mostly, it seems, for Google whilst Greasemonkey does it for users. The end result is the same however – sites are altered.

This for me throws up lots of interesting questions about sites and the various aspects that can be ‘owned’ and who the various people are that ‘own’ these aspects.

At its most basic level a web page is comprised of three things: markup, design elements and content. Greasemonkey and Google can alter all three of these things. The question then is: should they be allowed to do so? Who ‘owns’ the site?

I take the view that all aspects of my site are owned by me but that by explicitly allowing others to access the content and the design then they have at least a part ownership in that aspect of the page(s). Once its downloaded to their browser then they should be able to alter is as they see fit to suit their needs. In this respect I have less of an issue with Greasemonkey than I do with Google. Greasemonkey is to help users. Google’s little tool is to help Google – they can make money from my content.

You’ve probably noted that in the above paragraph that I didn’t include markup in my list of what I personally find acceptable to alter. This is because I don’t find it acceptable for anything other than me to alter the code used on my site. Changing my code can have implications for how the site does/doesn’t work on the most basic of levels. For example, I use semantic code as I think its important. I use various bits of Javascript to do various things (the comments form spell checker for example) and whilst I can appreciate that users might want to have more control I don’t think that altering my code is acceptable.

At some point there has to be an element of trust. I don’t serve ads, I don’t track anyone with cookies or sessions (except in as much as I do for the comment form details). I don’t use hidden frames and I don’t think users have the right to alter the most basic building block of how I choose to serve content.

I serve content in two formats – markup and RSS. Those, to me, are your options as a user. I think a mutually respectful relationship where I trust you not to make unwanted changes to the functionality of my site and you trust me not to flood you with spam or other ads is important.

Dean Edwards recently wrote a script to disale Greasemonkey.

…GreaseMonkey broke my site. I didn’t realise what the problem was at first. I use a JavaScript syntax highlighter to make code on this site look slightly less boring. It uses some regular expressions and a little bit of DOM scripting. After installing GreaseMonkey I noticed that some of my code samples were completely broken in Firefox.

I entirely agree with Dean here. OK, he’s talking about design elements which I don’t have such an issue with but the fact remains that this Greasemonkey script is interfering in coded elements of the page Dean published. That to me is not acceptable. I find it as annoying as I do Google’s attempt to rewite my content – even if it is much more benign in intent.

There are also a few scripts here that apparently totally disable Greasemonkey. I don’t think anyone really wants that but I can sympathise with site owners wanting their sites to be presented as they intended them.

As a point of note, I installed the script to disable Google rewriting my content straight away. I’m still wavering as to whether or not to install a Greasemonkey killer. I’d be very interested in others opinions on this.

The Flash RSS Reader

30 May

A few people have expressed curiosity in it so I thought I’d run through how its done. At this stage its really very simple but I have plans to extend its operation to automate more of the running of it.

Macromedia first introduced the ability for the SWF format to parse XML data back in the days of Flash 5 (2000? 2001?). It was pretty basic was pretty shoddily implemented as well. It was never quite resolved whether it was an issue with the actual actionscript events or the Flash Player failing to parse these events (my money was on the latter) but suffice it to say, whilst it was great to be able to introduce another area of flexibility to SWF, it wasn’t until the release of Flash MX and the version 7 player that SWF/XML integration became a more reliable process.

It was around that time that Actionscript Guru, Sam Wan released his RSSDataFactory object which made coding the integration of RSS feeds very easy. He claims it only works with RSS 0.92 but it works fine with RSS 2.0 also.

So, I turned to this RSS object to handle the laborious work of processing the RSS. It was originally built to handle just one feed so I had a few tasks to make it operational for multiple feeds. I also had the thorny issue of the infamous Flash Sandbox to negotiate. More on that later.

Customising the RSSDataFactory is a doddle. First of all I simply inserted another keyframe and moved the DataFactory code to the second keyframe and applied a universal stop(); action to all keyframes. So, now I had two frames to play in I could put all my top level links in frame one and the parsed RSS feeds would display on frame two. Easy.

In frame one then I simply listed all the feeds I was going to be utilising as buttons and coded them appropriately.

Now you may notice at this stage that I’m not calling the feed directly. This is due to the pernicious influence of the Flash Sandbox. The Sandbox is a security measure. It doesn’t allow movies or scripts from servers on domains other than the one the SWF exists on to be accessed directly from the SWF. So what we have to do is build a sort of proxy – a script that _can_ access remote files and, as this proxy script exists on our domain, we can access anything it returns. Problem solved. Now you can see why calling remote XML files is pointless – nothing would be returned due to the Sandbox – so instead I call the proxy script. And because I have multiple feeds, I append a name/value pair (....php?feed=1) to each separate button. I can then detect these in my proxy script and hence return the desired script:

Now we turn our attention to this proxy script (which I called ‘antisandbox.php’). What we’re doing here is detecting the incoming value of the variable ‘feed’ fetching the appropriate RSS feed and opening it up for our SWF to process.

There are a few ways to do this, notably using readfile() but they are mostly (and again, notably readfile()) badly insecure. The way to securely get the feeds is to use (in PHP anyway) CURL. CURL opens a decent, protocoled connection to the remote RSS script. Its syntactically very like using a session in that you initialise it, use it then close it:

I should really have used switch to do the evaluation of the feed variable as its quicker. Probably will implement that soon.

So now we’ve got our data, we have to parse it in. Thankfully all this is done in Sam’s excellent Factory. All I had to do was pass it the value of the proxy script with the right name/value pair.

The last line of this script

rssObj.parseFeed(_root.theFeed, this, "receiveRSSObject");

calls the SWF variable I set in the previous frame that specified which value to send to the proxy script (and thus which RSS feed to fetch).

These are quite interesting:

In fame two I built a movieclip template. This template contains an empty dynamic text holder and an empty URL variable. When the RSS feed comes in, depending on how many posts each author specified their feeds help, each one of these posts would duplicate the movieclip and send the title of each post in the feed and the correct permanent link to these posts. It also spaces out each newly generated movieclip below the previously generated one.

My last problem was the ‘back’ button. Going back a frame in Flash doesn’t affect whats in the frame you’ve just left so I had to clear these newly generated movieclips, clear theFeed and reset the whole shebang everytime someone clicked the ‘back’ button.

Note I simply hide the ‘old’ buttons off stage – this speeds up regeneration if a user wants to revisit a certain feed in the same session.

And thats it for now. I will be extending this to make my life easier. For now, if I want to add a new feed I have to edit the FLA and ‘antisandbox.php’ which is a bit of a pain. What I hope to do is write a plug-in for WordPress that will create an XML file from a link category in the WordPress database architecture. I can then use this XML file to auto generate the feed list in frame 1. The second half of this plug in will drag these details from the database and execute them in ‘antisandbox.php’.

One Month, Three Redesigns

28 May

Well, almost.

As I said in the recent past, the last redesign before this one was created during a bad down spiral – I was very tired and in bad physical shape. Above all else this new redesign I hope is a bit more upbeat.

Its a fairly comprehensive overhaul. I took the opportunity to upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1 and had a think about ways to add value to the site and make it easier for people to find what they need. To that end I’ve totally re-jigged the archives to offer breakdown by date and subject. I’ve also added a (controversial!) Flash RSS Parser that I modified a fair bit from Sam Wan’s RSS Factory. I’m an old-skool Actionscripter so this suited me fine. I’ve also used sIFR for the first time. It was a bit of a fiddle getting the sizes right and its still a bit weird in IE but it works.

Also added is a sidebar of links to relevant articles in the manner of John’s side salad feature. I’ve been daringly naughty here and used a transparent PNG as the div background for this area and (gasp!) used ‘the bad code’ to get it to work in IE – but never fear, all the IE specific code is in a separate CSS file called in conditionally.

For commenter’s I’ve added a spell-checker which isn’t quite functional yet but it just needs a minor tweak from my host works really well.

The big change of course is the fixed | fixed | streeeeetch layout which I have to be honest was a bit intimidating at first but its incredibly liberating – the amount of CSS resizing hacks have plummeted just by utilising this style of layout.

As to the design, I wanted something friendly (hence the vector styles and nice curvy typeface – Vag in case you were wondering). However, I didn’t want to shy away from the fact autism == difference, hence the (overly literal?) stickmen family.

I’m happy with it overall. It feels much more complete and unified than either of my past two designs. It also feels much more ‘mine’. I learnt a lot doing it and thats the biggest payback I guess.

Stats:

  • IE5.* support dropped
  • 800px width support dropped

Chelation: Dangerous & Experimental

27 May

DMPSBackfire.com is a site set up and maintained by Jana Nestlerode after her life was ‘derailed by a single injection of DMPS’.

What I have learned is that DMPS is not approved by the FDA. It is considered an experimental drug. I have found no evidence of the existence of appropriate clinical trials by which practitioners can be guided in its safe use.

Which is worrying enough. But…

The discovery that was most disturbing to me was that some physicians and others were misleading (either through ignorance or contrivance) patients about the safety and efficacy of this drug. I am alarmed at the proliferation of health care providers who are enrolling patients in what amounts to experimental medicine without obtaining their informed consent.

The Dr Buttars of this world are using it on people most unable to give informed consent: autistic children. The parents of these children often claim that autistics are bad excretors of mercury. If this is true (and I don’t know if it is or it isn’t) then it seems that using Chelators can actually make the problem worse:

It takes properly functioning excretory systems to then move the chelator-bound metal out of the body. So in order to get the heavy metals out of your body, you have to dislodge them from their present locations, and MOVE them so that your liver and kidneys can excrete them. Whenever you move a heavy metal, you risk increasing the damage it does to your body. Anywhere along the way, the chelator can lose its grip and drop the metal. If the excretory systems are not functioning well, you’ll be unable to excrete all the metal the chelator has mobilized. In either case, you’ll just do more damage.

This is serious stuff. Deadly serious. There are over 30 reports on DMPSBackfire.com – this is one of them:

I had had EDTA chelation to bring down high levels of lead when my doctor noticed that my mercury levels were going up. He gave me an infusion of 250mg of DMPS, and I immediately got sick. It felt like it was ripping open my insides, including my bones. I was really sick, had bloody stools, my hair color darkened and looked awful. I could hardly move for three months.

At that point I decided to get my amalgams out. I had a lot – 15 or 16. They did it in two weeks and I had another infusion of 250mg of DMPS right after that. I got much worse. My whole endocrine system went haywire. All of my extremities went numb. I felt awful, had stomach ulcers, liver damage, insomnia… the list goes on. I felt and looked 40 years older.

I went to another doctor and he said to keep doing the DMPS, that I had to push through to feel better. I had six more infusions with him, and he did neural therapy on my stomach and spine. I kept getting worse. I felt about ready to die, so I guess it didn’t matter. In addition to all of the headaches, gastrointestinal and endocrine problems and pain, I’m now hypothroid, have lesions in my colon, and a tumor on my liver. DMPS really devastated my life. Before DMPS I used to run 4-5 miles a day. Now walking short distances wears me out. DMPS has made my life hell. Today I am a vegetable trying to get my body working again.

I ask you – knowing this is a possible outcome and knowing that if your child is autistic and less able to tell you they are in discomfort or pain, is this really something you want to risk (the ‘P’ in DMPS stands for ‘Propane’ by the way)? The FDA in America certainly don’t – they won’t approve DMPS. Even if we assume the worst – that mercury is causing autism (and you should know by now I don’t believe this) – is being autistic worse than being in extreme pain or worse, being dead?

Chelation may cause many severe side effects, including severe kidney damage, reduction of the body’s ability to make new blood cells in the bone marrow, dangerously low blood pressure, fast heart rate, dangerously low calcium levels in the blood, increased risk of bleeding or blood clots (including interference with the effects of the blood-thinning drug warfarin [Coumadin]), immune reactions, abnormal heart rhythms, allergic reactions, blood sugar imbalances and convulsions. There have been reports of headache, fatigue, fever, nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal upset, excessive thirst, sweating (diaphoresis), low white blood cell counts and low levels of blood platelets. People using chelation have had severe reactions in which they have stopped breathing. Death has been reported, although it is not clear if chelation therapy was the direct cause.

Harvard Medical Schools

New Design: Update

27 May

I threatened promised a redesign of this blog and thats whats coming. I’m not ready to launch just yet but I’m not far off. In fact I’m not far off the ‘90% finished ennui‘ stage.

I’m quite pleased with how its turning out so far and, most importantly its allowed me to learn and implement some new skills and revisit some old ones in a new way. A few things the new design will carry:

  • An actual colour scheme instead of brown sludge
  • At least one stretchy column (an idea I nearly ditched after I found out Andy Clarke had launched with it. Then I thought ‘what the hell – its a good system, who cares if its been done?’)
  • A vastly improved Archive system
  • Some Flash – not necessarily sIFR – that I think is functionally very good
  • No support for IE5.* as it only makes up 0.7% of my audience

I’ve toyed with Dean’s IE7 but must admit I’m having a few issues with it – its not running very well in combination with WordPress I think and I’m still mulling over sIFR which I’ve had limited success with in the past but these are side issues. Essentially things are progressing nicely.

Megan’s First All Dayer

26 May

Its been a turbulent few days for Megan lately. First of all, one of her LSA (Learning Support Assistants) has been off sick most of the week and she’s definitely noticed the change. Its made her uneasy and her more challenging behaviour (pinching/scratching/biting) is resurfacing. We’re not overly concerned about that as it’ll settle down. It’s not meant as naughtiness – its a way of communication for Meg. A bad way obviously but its not meant personally.

Also, preparations for the imminent new arrival (due in less than 4 weeks!) have started to impact on Megans cherished routine. For a start she’s going to have to share a bedroom with her older brother when he comes over at weekends and the bunk-beds went up today. She’s aslo noticed that Mummy is so big now that she can’t play as well as she used to. However, she’s obviously excited at seeing her new sibling and has taken to hugging and kissing Naomi’s tummy.

The biggst change today though is that for the very first time she’ll be at school all day. She usually has a session in the morning then comes home for lunch and then returns in the afternoon but today its her first all-dayer.

Its been prompted by her growing interest in the social aspects of school. Autistics are famously reclusive but over the last couple of months Megan has gone from being happy to be alone to really wanting to participate in what the other kids are doing. I took her to school the other day and had a genuine lump-in-the-throat moment – two of the other little girls grabbed her hands and the three of them started playing ring-a-ring-a-roses. Obviously, Megan didn’t sing along but neither did she just wander off. She maintained good eye contact with her friends and found the whole thing (especially the falling over!) highly amusing. Its the first time I’ve seen Megan want to engage with other kids. That’ll be one of those memories you take to the grave with you.

At the moment I’m at work waiting to hear from Naomi how it all went. My hearts in my mouth a little bit but I’m sure it’ll have gone OK. This school and these educators really have worked their socks off to get Megan to this point and I’m really glad that the efforts we’re putting in at home in not judging her autism in a negative way and always including her in everything are paying off – we have a mostly happy and confident little girl and thats good enough for us.

Accessibility – Know Your Audience?

26 May

Read the recent ‘A Conceptual Framework for Accessibility Tools to Benefit Users with Cognitive Disabilities‘ report from WebAIM, its clear that there’s one overriding concern that has to be addressed before we can successfuly design websites for users with cognitive disabilities. We need to know our audience.

As web designers we (I hope!) perform extensive usability testing with differing Scenarios. I wonder how much of that testing concentrates on accessibility? When we develop our Personas do we cater for our markets and forget that some in these markets are disabled? Some even are cognitively disabled. I’m willing to bet that we don’t. In fact I’m willing to bet that lots of web designers don’t even build Scenarios let alone build Personas representing disabled members of the target markets to move through those Scenarios.

Its easier for the majority of web designers to not bother. And for some web designers who make the laudable decision to make their sites accessible, there’s a belief that simply adhering to Priority 1 (A) of the WCAG means they’ve done all they need to. I know I’m guilty of this on occassion.

However laudable and useful doing this is or isn’t, its still not addressing the key point – we, as web designers, don’t make enough effort to know this sub-group of our audience. We read articles telling us to validate to WCAG standards and we do it but that should not absolve us from getting to know our audience better. The use of Personas and Scenarios has given us a massively useful way of getting to know key users but they are based on aspects of ourselves or people that we know as well as aset of marketing data. The last time you built a set of Personas how many of them had Downs Syndrome? How many were wheelchair bound? I’ll be honest – I have the advantage of having an autistic daughter and thus have an insight into that condition and ways in which I can account for that group of users but 9 times out of 10 my Personas are based solely on marketing data – ages, gender, income, likes, political beliefs, religious beliefs.

Why is this? We’ve all taken on board the figures – the disabled community have a vast amount of spending power – but can we really say we feel comfortable at knowing how we meet these users needs. No, we can’t. Why? Because we don’t know them. Our liberal upbringings state that we need to see the people, not the disability and for all aspects of social interaction I totally agree. But when it comes to building something that works then we need to see the people and the disability. We need to be curious – how does someone with Downs Syndrome percieve an icon? How does someone with Dyslexia read content? What thought processes lead an autistic to make a choice from navigation options?

We won’t know until we ask. Its not rude to ask. Its not rude to be curious. Its rude to assume. I’m not suggesting that you patronisingly go out and befriend everyone you can find with some kind of cognitive disability but what I am suggesting is next time you go to the effort of building Personas for usability testing, try and include someone with autism, or someone with ADD, or a generic learning difficulty. And don’t make the disability an appendage, make it what it is – an integral part of who that person is. If you need (as I do) to learn more about cognitive disabilities then don’t research it on the internet, don’t chat to people on a forum – include these people in your focus groups, get to know them and your Personas will become more accurate as a result.

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