With an interesting programme and a very exciting list of speakers including Ian Lloyd of Accessify.com and Andy Budd the @Media 2005 event looks like its going to be great.
I won’t be going as the date is far too close for comfort to my wifes due date but everyone who is going has my undying envy! If you feel sorry for me, feel free to buy me a Mac Mini to in some way assuage my disappointment!
A piece in the Telegraph about a new pressure group – the Autism Liberation Front put me in mind with a recent discussion I had with a group of parents of autistic people recently.
This new pressure group is comprised of a group of (I assume) high functioning autistic people. Their motto?
I am not a puzzle, I am a person…..Here we’re silenced. Parents don’t speak for me.
There is an assumption most people make that autism is something akin to an illness i.e. that it is something that should be cureable at some point. This isn’t so. Autism is a condition or syndrome and as such there is no cure. Someone who is autistic will always be autistic.
This is one of the things that is most difficult to accept for parents whose kids have just been diagnosed as on the spectrum but accept it they must. Once you do accept it you become aware of the uniqueness of your child and appreciate the autism that makes them approach life in such a different way. If you cannot accept it then you are doomed to an unhappy life of ‘what ifs…’. As I said above, I recently had a debate with a group of parents who wished that there could be a cure for their childrens autism. They felt that because they had children who were NT (neurotypical) as well as autisitc that a cure would benefit their entire family. My take on it was that it would benefit everyone except their autistic child. How would you feel to be told tomorrow that society would no longer tolerate black people, or gay people or people with blue eyes, or people who were left-handed? What if you were told that there was a cure to make you white/straight/brown-eyed/right-handed? Would you take it because it would be ‘easier’? Of course you wouldn’t. Was Martin Luther King wrong to fight for justice? Emily Pankhurst? Ghandi? Would our lives be better if these people had decided it was too difficult? I even had one person in this debate say that it was right that society should be less accomadating as it would encourage ‘them’ to fit in. Thats the parent of an autistic child speaking.
The sad truth is that a lot of parents of autisitic people cannot see past their own desires for thier child. After all, no-one sets out to have an autistic child. However, these same parents are unable to come to terms with their childs disability. they can’t see that their disability is an integral part of what defines them. In the same way that I am right handed, they are autistic. It doesn’t define them but it is an undeniable part of who they are and to take that away from them is in my opinion simply wrong.
These same parents are also unable to appreciate the difference between cure and intervention. I think that interventions for some kids with autism are totally necessary. An intervention is something that intervenes into the situation without changing the fundemental aspect of who that person is. Megan for example, doesn’t speak and has speech therapy. This is an intervention. We intervene in her lack of ability to communicate. However, this speech therapy does not (cannot) alter the fact that she is autistic and always will be. She will always struggle to see the need for her to vocalise her wants but by giving ehr speech therapy she will be able to vocalise them (we hope) should she need/choose to.
The future for any parent is frightening. What will become of my child? Will they be happy? The future for the parent of a disabled child is terrifying sometimes. Megan may always require help and when Naomi and I die, who will be there for our little girl? Some residential care unit? Surely then I should wish for a cure with all my heart? No. the simple fact of the matter is that the choice is not mine to make. The only person who can make that choice is the autistic person themselves. Autism is such a fundemental part of autistic people that any other choice is tantamount to eugenics after the fact. Some kind of extreme-retro abortion if you like – “we didn’t like you being who you were so we decided to change you”. Well, not me. I love Megan and I genuinely love who she is. Would I have chosen to have an autistic daughter? No. Is our lives as parents harder than that of NT kids? Yes. Would I change Megan, change who she is? No way.
I hope that even those of you who usually come here for my design related postings can read this and appreciate how some disabilities are reinforced mainly by society. I hope you have a better understanding of autism. My own understanding has changed so much since keeping this blog and interacting with Megan after fully accepting who she is, autism and all.
The debate I allude to above ended badly. I was threatened with banning from the forum because I disagreed with the idea of a cure. I was told I was a bully for arguing my points. One parent said that Megans autism probably wasn’t that severe if I didn’t want a cure for it. How unfortunate that these parents are more willing to vent their frustration at their own children rather than at a society thats unwilling (as yet) to accomodate those who think differently.
Like their children Megan is diagnosed with severe autism. At age nearly 5, she doesn’t speak, sometimes forgets to use the toilet and still has nappies at night. She doesn’t sleep well and we sometimes have to drug her to get her to sleep if her non-sleep has gone on longer than our ability to stay awake (several days at a time mostly), she has to have 1-to-1 provision at her local school and we had to fight for months to get the LEA to give her a chance at all. She is terrified by certain sounds/smells/colours and only eats a very limited amount of food.
She also sings songs that to me, are the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. She gives the best hugs ever. On the infrequent ocassions she says ‘Daddy’ it still makes me cry because from Megan every single word is precious. She is an expert at figuring out interfaces, loves Teletubbies, gets joy from such disparate things as the cat, Westlife, System of a Down, the covers of my Iain M Banks books, bouncing on anything that will bounce her, playing with her friends at school, being tickled – especially with my beard – under the arms, watching her huge DVD collection (ranges from Teletubbies to Wallace and Gromit to Finding Nemo). Every little victory seems bigger to us. Why would I want to ‘cure’ any of that?
Please read the cure section of neurodiversty.com for a greater understanding of why the word ‘cure’ angers so many autistic people.
The development platform where I work is .NET and as such I’ve started using it with a view to tying as much of our on and offline systems together as possible. For example, I’m working on an app at the moment that will submit an online mortgage application form straight into our customer management database. This would have untold benefits, mainly in terms of data security as the database is offline except for when the connection to the remote server is made and also it means our web server overhead is lessened as we have no need for an online database.
I can see the benefits of .NET and I think its a great idea – one language, one interface over many platforms and all that. However, as seems to increasingly be the case with Microsoft products, they’ve only done 75% of the work. The missing 25% is the same area they neglected with IE – rendering markup. .NET cannot, at the time of writing, produce valid XHTML. Here’s an example bit of code. Lets say I want a form:
How cool is that? No more specifying where and how – all thats done in the behind the scenes code (.NET does seperate functionality very very well it must be said). However, when that gets rendered to the browser it comes out as:
What the…? Try getting that to validate. Why do Microsoft do this? Its like they tempt you in with their brilliant premise (and .NET is functionally superb, lets be in no doubt about that) but then for a company that are supposed to be so pro-web they let you down with bad implemntation.
Now, there are workarounds for this particular scenario but, just like with IE – there shouldn’t have to be! I simply cannot for the life of me understand why Microsoft do this. Its like they purposefully go out to piss off those designers who care about their code. I understand that the 2005 version of Visual Studio will fix XHTML compliancy but surely it would be quicker and easier (and cheaper!) to just do it right the first time! Seriously, how hard can it be?
All in all, a mixed Christmas here. Both Megan and I have had bad colds, mine culminating in a temperature of over 100 degrees last night. It broke (I hope) about 4am but still, it didn’t make for an ideal Xmas. Naomi has also been unwell suffering from a 3 day headache and sickness brought on by a combo of being pregnant and the fact that when Megan wakes up in the night she only wants her Mum. My son Anthony and I were also shocked to hear that yesterday morning my ex’s (Anthony’s Mum) partner had had a heart attack!! They released him the next day with a battery of pills but it was still a bit of a shocker. Of course the most terrible event over Xmas was the ongoing disaster in South East Asia. I’d urge everyone to help as much as they can.
In slightly more upbeat news, Megans Nan bought her a ‘Leapster’ for her Christmas present. We were unsure how much she’d get out of it as its a fairly advanced toy and not one she was used to playing. However, her experiences mastering DVD/VC controls and a PC interface (sort of) have obviously given her a good grounding in the world of interface design! She got straight into it and was soon playing away to her hearts content. Her ability at the games was also pretty jaw dropping, showing us a level of perceptual ability we just didn’t know was there. Sounds a bit silly maybe but it was a real lump-in-the-throat moment. Its very difficult sometimes to see a measure of the progress your child is making, especially when the potential is masked by autism and things like this are a God send.
Speaking with my designers hat on it was also fascinating to see how easily Megan navigated using the animation based interface. It all serves to convince me even more than pictures and animation could well form the core means of addressing the needs of perceptually and learning difficulty based users of web sites.
As I talked about recently I’ll be starting a new project next year to provide help to new designers and those designers struggling with making the transition to standards based design. I’ve outlined a syllabus on what I’d like to cover.
I haven’t yet got a complete article list to match the Syllabus but I have made a start:
This is quite rough but it covers all the major areas. I’d be very interested in hearing some feedback and suggestions on the Syllabus and article list. I’ll also be very open to contributions along these themes from others. All that I ask is that they are written for an audience of those totally unfamiliar with the concpets under discussion.
A recent air (no doubt partially influenced by the year end) in the standards community sees a number of influential members of the international design community identifying something amiss in the community. Well, not amiss exactly, but maybe absent.
Molly E. Holzschlag has reported back from Web Design World 2004 on how well the conference went but notes how there are several key areas of concern that need addressing.
Unless you’re among the fortunate (and growing) group of web designers that have never had to build a web site using tables, it seems that it’s been very difficult for all of us to begin thinking outside of them. Having worked with tables for layout for the majority of my web career, it’s proving to be quite difficult to get past thinking in such restrictive terms. I’m wondering what ideas other folks might have in terms of breaking out of the tabular approach from a mental standpoint. There’s no doubt that when we get past this barrier, and are armed with a fair amount of CSS knowledge, that we can do much more progressive work.
This is a direct quote regarding the use of tables for layout but the whole article is riddled with concerns about a number of key concepts of modern web design.
Over on Derek Featherstone’s A Box of Chocolates in a recent article on the wider subject, Derek says;
There are still a lot of developers out there that don’t know how to build sites any other way than with font tags, spacer gifs and multiple nested tables. Why? Two reasons: they don’t know any other way (after all, these old methods are what they grew up with – it is what they know, just as we know web standards and would have a difficult time going back to old school methods), and there aren’t enough good resources on doing things the “right†way.
So we seem to have a situation wherein the small minority of designers are on board re: web standards/accessibility/usability/branding/etc and the sites they are producing reflect this ethos. By contrast there is a sizeable majority who, for whatever reason (quite probably the reason Derek Featherstone gives – a lack of resources) are doing things the old fashioned way. This, in my opinion, is one of those times when retro ain’t so good.
All this is to say that I’ve decided to go some way to redressing the balance and start producing a series of articles about all things web design that are aimed at the new or inexperienced designer. The articles will be bundled together under the (tentative) title ‘Project: New’ and will be available online and as PDF/DOC downloads. I’m thinking of doing approx 5 in depth articles every month to complete a syllabus of work. I’m aiming to start at the very very bottom and keep things simple to start with. Giving a good grounding in not only web standards but also looking at developing an eye for design, using good tools, sourcing quality imagery, dealing with clients nd understanding the medium in which web designers work.
My next step is to produce a syllabus which I’ll post for discussion when its done.
Web accessibility: one of the big topics in web design circles this year. If you’ve been living on Mars with Elvis for the last 18 months or so then web accessibility is the process of ensuring a website is accessible to users with a disability. In the UK, it is the law that business websites must be accessible.
I wrote an article awhile ago on my feelings that web accessibility wasn’t truly inclusive. There are big pushes within the design community to work on the easy side of web accessibility (providing accessible content to those with a physical or sensory disabiity such as Motor Neurone Disease or blindness) but there is little input about the more challenging side of web accessibility (providing accessible content to users with a learning or perceptual disability such as autism).
At first glance it might appear to be a simple impossibility. After all you cannot make someone understand. It might also seem totally idealistic – we should just accept that those users with a learning/perceptual disabilty cannot be effectively catered to and stop trying to force the issue.
Firstly, to some extent, I agree. It is simply impossible as far as I know to make someone with profound brain damage understand beyond their potential. However, what we must realise is that just as not all physical disabilities mean the same solution, not all learning/perceptual disabilities have to be excluded due to their overall pigeonholing. Autism is not the same as brain damage. Downs Syndrome is not the same as Dyslexia. It is not logical or necessary to ignore accessibility for all people with learning disabilities because some of the people that definition encompasses are profoundly mentally handicapped beyond the ability to comprehend.
I believe that it is definitley possible to apply a series of design principles to provide accessible content to this user group but we first have to admit that we are working under some stern limitations.
One of those limitations is the WCAG. Its my contention that by and large the guidelines give precedence to accomodating users with a physical/sensory disability and this precedence is by and large carried through by designers who have (quite rightly) started learning how to make a page accessible. An example is how Flash is percieved. Going by WCAG 1.0, Flash is not accessible at all. Macromedia have worked hard to give Flash the ability to pass Section 508 (the US law covering accessibility) but the truth is that accessibility using Flash is pretty much reliant on what software configuration the end user has installed. Thats not to knock Macromedia – something is better than nothing – but accessiblity as laid down by the WCAG 1.0 can’t truly be said to have been met when content is displayed in Flash.
A closer examination of the full WCAG 1.0 checklist reveals (in my interpretation) a few checkpoints that either support or hinder the ability to provide accessible content to users with a learning/perceptual disability.
For:
14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.
12.3 Divide large blocks of information into more manageable groups where natural and appropriate.
14.2 Supplement text with graphic or auditory presentations where they will facilitate comprehension of the page.
Against:
3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists, use markup rather than images to convey information.
7.3 Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages.
Its important to explain why I feel the ‘againsts’ are harmful to the idea of providing accessible content to users with a learning/perceptual disability. Firstly, checkpoints 14.2 and 3.1 seem to me to contradict each other to some degree. Overriding that though is my belief that pictoral and animated content can be integral to providing accessible content to users with a learning/perceptual disability.
What we do as designers is provide (hopefully) an interface to content. Something that helps someone to use the content and that stays out of the way when not needed. Obviously thats not all we do but thats one of the basic tenets of web design. Therefore we share certain core design goals with other non-web interface designers such as multimedia designers who design DVD menu’s or the designers who design TV screen layouts for news programs (there’s a lot more on the screen these days than just a talking head reading an autocue). I’m not pretending these examples work in the exact same way as the interface to a web site but they all share common goals (how to get a user to the content that they want to get to and how to present it to them once they have found it) and therefore maybe they share (or should share) certain methods.
My 4 year old daughter is a big fan of the kids TV show Bear in the Big Blue House (its the sniffing!) and so we bought her a few DVD’s. One of the things I find fascinating (I should explain that my daughter is severley autistic) is how she uses the interface of the DVD to get to the content. Autistic people indulge heavily in ‘rewind moments’ during which a few second burst of the DVD (or videotape) is watched, rewound, watched, rewound and so on and so on. This behaviour can go on for hours sometimes. Megan has become an adept at manipulating the interface of her Bear DVD’s to get at the content she wants to rewind (usually the sniffing!).
Two things are very striking about how this has affected her interface browsing habits. Firstly, she only seems to find it necessary to deliberate at the junctures where there are text-only options to base decisions on. When she drills down to the scene choices, which are represented by either little animated snippets of the scene or still pictures she makes the decision instantly and confidently. Over time she has learnt the text-only options by rote so the deliberation process is considerably lessened.
Secondly, she has learnt to transfer these decision making skills where pictoral and animation menu’s are presented to her to other DVD’s. On DVD’s where there are no pictoral or animatory menu options she doesn’t learn the interface as easily or quickly.
It would be a mistake to infer the behaviour of a whole group of people based solely on one persons experiences but that doesn’t negate the fact that there does seem to be something to the idea that pictoral or animatory interfaces can aid the speed and confidence of browsing. Its something that I intend to follow up as much as possible.
The difficulty is/will be attempting to meet these needs whilst still adhering to web and accessibility standards. I hope to be able to bring some ideas to fruition in this respect too.
One of the concepts that Megan has difficulty with is communication. She doesn’t speak much at all and most of what she does say is echolalic. This obviously presents quite a lot of difficulties when attempting to engage with Megan both at (to a lesser extent) home and more particularly at school.
Megan has been attending her local primary mainstream school now for nearly a full term and yesterday Naomi and I went for a meeting with her SaLT, the SENCO and her case worker from the Autism Outreach Team. The purpose of this meeting was to get Megan onto the next stage. At the moment the school still consider her to be in a ‘honeymoon’ period where she’s given a lot of space to aclimatise to her new environment – a nursery/pre-school is a very loud, bright and well-lit environment and Megan in common with a lot of autistic people doesn’t always cope with these things very well as autistic people are not able to process sensory input in the same way as those of us who aren’t autistic. To them, certain sounds and colours actually physically hurt.
Anyway, its obvious she’s fairly well settled and is confident in her environment so we all needed to meet up to think of how we move Megan into a more traditional scholastic environment e.g. she starts to be told there are things that must be done at certain times of the school day.
How to approach this is tricky. As Megan doesn’t speak, talking to her doesn’t always yield good results and time for someone with damaged sensory equipment is a very difficult concept to grasp. Saying ‘in 5 mins its time for a drink’ to Megan means nothing. However, if we say ‘it’ll be time for a drink when we’ve read all the words on the last page of this book’ then its an easier comparison to grasp. This is nothing to do with intellegence and all to do with perceptual ability.
So what the school are going to do is start a pictoral timetable. Basically, the AOT worker and Megans speech therapist have been around taking photos of all the different things in the classroom – the toys, the wendy-house, the class register, one of the toilets etc. These will be used to demonstrate to Megan what the next thing will be. This will give her time to prepare for the change. Its a great idea and is a sort of ‘cut down’ version of PECS which is a more comprehensive pictoral communication system. Why aren’t we just using PECS? Megan’s SaLT doesn’t think Megan needs that. There’s no doubt she knows the words, she just doesn’t know how to use them as communication tools – this system will help with that and Naomi and I will be backing its use up by implementing a similar scheme at home.
Following on from my post about accreditation for UK web designers, I decided to take a look around at some of the big name web design associations on the web with a view to getting their views and seeing if they would be interested in taking this forward.
I should explain at this point that I have heard of the Associations discussed before but had not, up till this point visited their web sites.
I have to say I was truly alarmed at what I found. Of the three sites I visited before giving up in horror, not one of them would be fit to be the public face of the sort of accreditation scheme I’d envisaged. Lets take them in the order I visited them.
First I went to the International Webmasters Association site.
Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? Yes
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.
Bad enough but the design. White text on a jet black background, a javascript driven image map as the sole source of navigation – and this was just the home page! Once inside it got marginally better, at least the main content was black text on a light background. However, any evidence of a style was totally missing.
Next please.
So I went to the International Association of Web Masters and Designers.
Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? Yes, but with warnings.
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.
This is terrible. Seriously. Just awful. It looks more like a big spammy affiliate site than an association for web professionals. They’ve even put a Javascript right-click ban on the site, although why they think anyone would be interested in stealing their source I cannot imagine.
Lastly I tried the British Web Design and Marketing Association. Surely we Brits would do the job right?
Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? No.
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.
Not only does it not do the job right, it is probably the worst of all 3 I could stand to look at. Squashed and haphazardly resized images, a terrible scatter-gun approach to layout and a bewildering yellow header scheme for the navigation that barely contrasted against the white links.
Its fair to say at this point that I was aghast. Each of these organisations have mission statements that claim to hold dear the pursuit of excellence and ethics in web design and are incredibly easy to find using very obvious keyphrases (‘web design news’, ‘web assocations’ are two examples) in a wide variety of engines. I’m very worried that these web sites are what the public see as the face of web design professionals.
Take any basic list of important things to consider when designing and building a web page and these three Associations have totally ignored it. Basic structure, colour theory, branding, usability, style, accessibility, CONTENT (unless you like endless offers of training courses), navigation – all missing.
I’m left with a sense of urgency that we as a profession need to do something about this. More than ever I’m convinced that the people who are best able to represent us are ourselves, not some Association that clearly doesn’t care about or doesn’t know how to represent us. How we start going about that is another matter. After seeing that little lot, I’m really hoping people out there have a lot of ideas.
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