If the objection here is that somebody will see your bits, distortion won't help that. When I was a teen, distortion didn't stop me from "enjoying" the scrambled channels after 1AM.
Oh that's nothing. When my family flew to Disney World three years ago, we had to lift my palsied son out of his wheelchair so they could pat him down and pat down the chair, swab it for explosives residue.
The problem is that the market for assistive devices is so used to insurance paying for everything that they've clung to 100% custom solutions that, while operational, don't have to play by any rules of competition or scale.
My son had an $8K system for a while that was based off a Transmeta processor and had a touch screen, built-in CD-ROM, telephone interface, and IR remote. It was also 10 pounds. Baked into the price was about $1200 in software that allowed for the building of pages consisting of graphics tiles that could be read aloud via speech synthesis. Yep, $1200 for the modern equivalent of HyperCard.
There is nothing stopping a person from grabbing an iPad and loading it with the accessibility apps that are pertinent to them (including an app for a tile based speech system - it's already there in the app store). $500 for the iPad. $30 max for the accessibility software. Of course, that will all be an out of pocket expense, but a person will have the cheaper solution instantly rather than go through half a year of Medicare/Medicaid approvals.
One downside of the iPad, though, is that it isn't as compatible with the classroom as a Windows netbook. My son's school loads their software onto his netbook so he can interface with it via touchscreen. That's not possible with the iPad.
I have a son about to turn 2 who knows all that stuff sans iPad/iPhone. He also sings songs, can identify Chewbacca, and comes running like a madman when I whistle the theme from "Shaun the Sheep".
Then there's my other son who is 8 who has cerebral palsy and for years used a medically approved $8000 computer as a communication device. When it crapped out, I decided a netbook would be just fine. Total cost: $350.
We've looked at an iPad for him and might eventually go for one, but his netbook is working well at the moment.
Didn't we already have these discussions a month ago?
There are four camps here:
1. Accessibility will totally fuck with my Web x.0 experience 2. Accessibility will cost me money 3. Accessibility is easy, why not do it? 4. Accessibility is a necessity.
Camps 3 and 4 form an alliance and try to convince camps 1 and 2 that they're bellyaching over nothing. Camps 1 and 2 ally and talk about how small businesses will be sued out of existence.
And the unspoken camp 5, the people that require the accessibility, sit by and hope that people don't shut them out of the conversation by making the means inaccessible.
I recently toyed with an iPad to see if I could use it for quickly publishing articles with photos during an upcoming event. Using a DSLR and the camera connection kit (what we call in netbook/PC parlance an "SD slot"), I was able to get the photos onto the iPad.
But when I was in my CMS editing the articles, I tried to upload my photos. Couldn't. All the "browse" buttons in my CMS interface for selecting files for upload were disabled. Turns out that iPad's Safari implementation just turns that off with no way around it.
So... to use the iPad in the manner I wanted, I would have to:
1. Transfer all photos from SD card to iPad photo albums 2. Launch an app to store photos somewhere other than my web server 3. Launch a browser to create the article 4. Launch a second browser window to get cross-site image references from 3rd party photo hosting service
Or I could go buy a netbook and do everything in one app (a browser), without an extra kit, no interim transfer stage, and reduce it to:
1. Launch a browser to create article and upload images from SD card directly into it.
Why they couldn't enable HTTP uploads from photo albums is beyond me.
Honestly, the only time I feel stress about being a tightwad teetotaler is when people offer to buy me a drink or try to hand me a beer and then express shock that I'm alcohol averse.
But then, I masturbate a lot, so maybe I just relieve stress in other ways.
When my son was first born, diagnosed, operated upon, and signed up for every service imaginable, I questioned whether or not his life was worth the drain not only upon the finances of the state but also upon the lives of those who would support him.
For the longest time, I did not see his survival as a decision that made any sense. It seemed to me it would have been better to let him expire naturally via aspiration (he is unable to swallow) than to perpetuate his imposition upon society.
Part of this was due to my belief at the time that his inability to fully function physically was an indicator that he would be similarly cognitively dysfunctional.
Over the years, that has proven to not be the case. He has, in fact, proven to be extremely intelligent, but getting to that point required his survival and the intervention of several people.
Let me add at this point that intervention is a key word. When a family accepts support from government, all illusions of privacy disappear. We have had night nurses in our home for eight years now to provide care in order that my wife and I might remain productive, tax generating members of society. I do not, however, believe the people are getting a fair deal in this. Neither my wife nor I generate enough monthly income to offset my son's collateral expenses.
So how much government compulsion is acceptable?
For the most part, the government's compulsion in regards to my son is financial. The government compels each working citizen to hand over some amount of money and distributes it to a variety of programs, including medical coverage and education. I am unable to, on my own, provide an educational setting with peer interaction, payment for occupational, physical, and speech therapists, equipment acquisition and maintenance costs, and attendant nurses while at school.
What I can and do provide are the things most parents do: food; shelter; support; transport; clothing; activities/experiences; love; guidance.
But why government? Why does government provide so much for my son? And what would I do without those provisions?
First, private insurance knows what the bottom line is: profitability. As such, they cover what they feel is adequate given a diagnosis, but they often provide less than minimum. For example, private insurance will pay for durable equipment (like a suction machine), but does not pay for the supplies required for its use, supplies that need to be refreshed every month. Our state government covers that as a result. Private insurance will not pay for nurses, but without them, he is not able to attend school. Again, state government (the taxpayers) pick up the tab.
I'm not thrilled with the situation at all. But, I'm also glad the option is there.
Second, government has put into place requirements for individual educational support for kids with "special needs" (a warm way of saying disabilities). It is through this system that the need for educational therapeutic support is determined and assigned (physical, occupation, and speech therapists). In my son's case, that support has resulted in his ability to communicate his own thoughts to us, so they are invaluable to me, but probably of little value to the majority of taxpayers.
In the things that I can provide, the government compulsion of facilities access has been key. Mandates for ramps, lifts, elevators, even bathroom stalls, have allowed my son to explore new places and new ideas, furthering his intellectual development (again, hard to quantify the dollar value for the state).
However, beyond access, I've never made a demand of an establishment or considered suing anyone. This is not true for all families with a disabled child. I know many who see litigation as a fast track to wealth.
Is there a limit to the level of compulsion? Aren't there in all things? The ADA is about giving people with disabilities the chance to try, but it needn't go to ridiculous extremes (and here I realize that "ridi
I don't like my subsidy at all, really. I would ideally like to be entirely self-sufficient and provide everything my child needs to survive and thrive. The truth of the matter is that such is not possible.
Whenever I can, I find ways to handle his needs outside the system in order to reduce our dependence (for example, buying a $500 netbook out of pocket instead of having medical assistance buy the $8000 "medically approved" assistive communication device).
But I can't afford to install a wheelchair lift in a public school, so I'm glad the ADA makes that happen. I can't afford or compel a concert hall to provide wheelchair accessible seating, so I'm glad the ADA does that so my kid can see a performance. I can't make Slashdot comments be accessible, but maybe, one day, the ADA will help do that so my son can come in here and call you a dipshit himself.
I've had what seem to me mind blowing conversations over colors before. Well, we can't make that red because what about people who can't see red. You mean like stop signs and traffic lights? Using the color red is an import visual cue borrowed from the real world. To not take advantage of it hinders our ability to communicate to sighted people.
And yet, those conversations can yield some important findings. I oversaw Section 508 compliance in the redesign of my company's website and showed them that on several pages they were using the logos of our various products alone in a form of navigation. They were flags with different combinations of colors, but if you filtered the flags for red, two of them were identical with no other indicator as to which represented what product.
Simple solution: Include the product names in ALT or plain text below the images.
You can still use red wherever you want. The guidelines simply state that you shouldn't rely ONLY on color to communicate important information. That's why forms will often show notices in red and include the * to denote required data.
As a veteran web designer, you should spend some more time actually reading both 508 and WAI and seeing that the requirements aren't that outrageous, especially given the option to present information in a separate but accessible form.
And there have been ongoing efforts to improve the accessibility of AJAX, so there's no need to give that up, either. See WCAG 2.0 for more info.
First, we have to go to the real estate office to buy some land. Hope there's a ramp to get in there.
Second, we have to go visit an architect to draw up the plans. Hope there's a ramp to get in there.
Third, we have visit with suppliers, distributors, decorators, and the like to kit out our space. Hope they all have ramps.
Fourth, we have to take all our money and run it to the bank. Geez, we sure hope there's a ramp for that. We don't want to put $20K in the ATM or through the drive-thru window.
After linking to Google, did you bother actually looking at all the pages in the results? Many of them have nothing to do with business being forced out of business due to ADA requirements.
Got a video on the government website you like? Well, kiss it goodbye, because the odds are that said government agency can't afford to close caption it (close captioning isn't cheap). That means they'll just have to pull it and no one will get to see it.
Except that both 508 and WAI consider a transcript of the audio to be an acceptable means of accessing the content for the deaf. And that same transcript can be screen read by the blind.
Got a sophisticated, sharp looking, complex website? Well, kiss that goodbye too. The Section 508 best paractices standards don't like complex layout because it confuses the text readers. Only now it won't just be a suggestion. It will be mandatory.
Sharp looking sites with complex layouts can be achieved by moving elements around in CSS while maintaining a logical (readable) source content order. As long as a screen reader can get to it, so can just about anyone else.
And don't even THINK about Flash or pretty HTML5 effects! For that matter, don't even think about tables!
Flash and HTML5, we'll see. But there are specific guidelines for building accessible tables, so I'm not sure why you think they'd go away. Many tools these days build accessible tables automatically.
So far, I'm not seeing a very hefty price paid by the non-handicapped.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't buy PCs either.
Slashdot is providing us with opinions? I thought that was the opinion of krou, the submitter.
Honesty will do that.
If the objection here is that somebody will see your bits, distortion won't help that. When I was a teen, distortion didn't stop me from "enjoying" the scrambled channels after 1AM.
Oh that's nothing. When my family flew to Disney World three years ago, we had to lift my palsied son out of his wheelchair so they could pat him down and pat down the chair, swab it for explosives residue.
That was fun.
How can I take seriously a review that constantly misstates the name of the extension? JOMsocial. Not JOOMsocial.
I see the problem a bit differently.
The problem is that the market for assistive devices is so used to insurance paying for everything that they've clung to 100% custom solutions that, while operational, don't have to play by any rules of competition or scale.
My son had an $8K system for a while that was based off a Transmeta processor and had a touch screen, built-in CD-ROM, telephone interface, and IR remote. It was also 10 pounds. Baked into the price was about $1200 in software that allowed for the building of pages consisting of graphics tiles that could be read aloud via speech synthesis. Yep, $1200 for the modern equivalent of HyperCard.
There is nothing stopping a person from grabbing an iPad and loading it with the accessibility apps that are pertinent to them (including an app for a tile based speech system - it's already there in the app store). $500 for the iPad. $30 max for the accessibility software. Of course, that will all be an out of pocket expense, but a person will have the cheaper solution instantly rather than go through half a year of Medicare/Medicaid approvals.
One downside of the iPad, though, is that it isn't as compatible with the classroom as a Windows netbook. My son's school loads their software onto his netbook so he can interface with it via touchscreen. That's not possible with the iPad.
I have a son about to turn 2 who knows all that stuff sans iPad/iPhone. He also sings songs, can identify Chewbacca, and comes running like a madman when I whistle the theme from "Shaun the Sheep".
Then there's my other son who is 8 who has cerebral palsy and for years used a medically approved $8000 computer as a communication device. When it crapped out, I decided a netbook would be just fine. Total cost: $350.
We've looked at an iPad for him and might eventually go for one, but his netbook is working well at the moment.
Didn't we already have these discussions a month ago?
There are four camps here:
1. Accessibility will totally fuck with my Web x.0 experience
2. Accessibility will cost me money
3. Accessibility is easy, why not do it?
4. Accessibility is a necessity.
Camps 3 and 4 form an alliance and try to convince camps 1 and 2 that they're bellyaching over nothing. Camps 1 and 2 ally and talk about how small businesses will be sued out of existence.
And the unspoken camp 5, the people that require the accessibility, sit by and hope that people don't shut them out of the conversation by making the means inaccessible.
Mozilla pays $3K for critical security bugs.
http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html
Also applies to:
Heavy metal
Professional wrestling
Reality TV
Cosplay
I recently toyed with an iPad to see if I could use it for quickly publishing articles with photos during an upcoming event. Using a DSLR and the camera connection kit (what we call in netbook/PC parlance an "SD slot"), I was able to get the photos onto the iPad.
But when I was in my CMS editing the articles, I tried to upload my photos. Couldn't. All the "browse" buttons in my CMS interface for selecting files for upload were disabled. Turns out that iPad's Safari implementation just turns that off with no way around it.
So... to use the iPad in the manner I wanted, I would have to:
1. Transfer all photos from SD card to iPad photo albums
2. Launch an app to store photos somewhere other than my web server
3. Launch a browser to create the article
4. Launch a second browser window to get cross-site image references from 3rd party photo hosting service
Or I could go buy a netbook and do everything in one app (a browser), without an extra kit, no interim transfer stage, and reduce it to:
1. Launch a browser to create article and upload images from SD card directly into it.
Why they couldn't enable HTTP uploads from photo albums is beyond me.
Honestly, the only time I feel stress about being a tightwad teetotaler is when people offer to buy me a drink or try to hand me a beer and then express shock that I'm alcohol averse.
But then, I masturbate a lot, so maybe I just relieve stress in other ways.
I'm curious how something being based on Joomla makes it definitely not accessible.
Classic objectivism.
Prone to error if you are Prince, Prince Charles, Freddie Prinze Jr. or any member of royalty in a line of ascension.
copyright violation != theft
Ha ha! Stole it! Wait... what? You still have it? Crap.
Which of the greatest works of architecture would be illegal?
Those are interesting questions.
When my son was first born, diagnosed, operated upon, and signed up for every service imaginable, I questioned whether or not his life was worth the drain not only upon the finances of the state but also upon the lives of those who would support him.
For the longest time, I did not see his survival as a decision that made any sense. It seemed to me it would have been better to let him expire naturally via aspiration (he is unable to swallow) than to perpetuate his imposition upon society.
Part of this was due to my belief at the time that his inability to fully function physically was an indicator that he would be similarly cognitively dysfunctional.
Over the years, that has proven to not be the case. He has, in fact, proven to be extremely intelligent, but getting to that point required his survival and the intervention of several people.
Let me add at this point that intervention is a key word. When a family accepts support from government, all illusions of privacy disappear. We have had night nurses in our home for eight years now to provide care in order that my wife and I might remain productive, tax generating members of society. I do not, however, believe the people are getting a fair deal in this. Neither my wife nor I generate enough monthly income to offset my son's collateral expenses.
So how much government compulsion is acceptable?
For the most part, the government's compulsion in regards to my son is financial. The government compels each working citizen to hand over some amount of money and distributes it to a variety of programs, including medical coverage and education. I am unable to, on my own, provide an educational setting with peer interaction, payment for occupational, physical, and speech therapists, equipment acquisition and maintenance costs, and attendant nurses while at school.
What I can and do provide are the things most parents do: food; shelter; support; transport; clothing; activities/experiences; love; guidance.
But why government? Why does government provide so much for my son? And what would I do without those provisions?
First, private insurance knows what the bottom line is: profitability. As such, they cover what they feel is adequate given a diagnosis, but they often provide less than minimum. For example, private insurance will pay for durable equipment (like a suction machine), but does not pay for the supplies required for its use, supplies that need to be refreshed every month. Our state government covers that as a result. Private insurance will not pay for nurses, but without them, he is not able to attend school. Again, state government (the taxpayers) pick up the tab.
I'm not thrilled with the situation at all. But, I'm also glad the option is there.
Second, government has put into place requirements for individual educational support for kids with "special needs" (a warm way of saying disabilities). It is through this system that the need for educational therapeutic support is determined and assigned (physical, occupation, and speech therapists). In my son's case, that support has resulted in his ability to communicate his own thoughts to us, so they are invaluable to me, but probably of little value to the majority of taxpayers.
In the things that I can provide, the government compulsion of facilities access has been key. Mandates for ramps, lifts, elevators, even bathroom stalls, have allowed my son to explore new places and new ideas, furthering his intellectual development (again, hard to quantify the dollar value for the state).
However, beyond access, I've never made a demand of an establishment or considered suing anyone. This is not true for all families with a disabled child. I know many who see litigation as a fast track to wealth.
Is there a limit to the level of compulsion? Aren't there in all things? The ADA is about giving people with disabilities the chance to try, but it needn't go to ridiculous extremes (and here I realize that "ridi
Wow, that was an awful translation.
I don't like my subsidy at all, really. I would ideally like to be entirely self-sufficient and provide everything my child needs to survive and thrive. The truth of the matter is that such is not possible.
Whenever I can, I find ways to handle his needs outside the system in order to reduce our dependence (for example, buying a $500 netbook out of pocket instead of having medical assistance buy the $8000 "medically approved" assistive communication device).
But I can't afford to install a wheelchair lift in a public school, so I'm glad the ADA makes that happen. I can't afford or compel a concert hall to provide wheelchair accessible seating, so I'm glad the ADA does that so my kid can see a performance. I can't make Slashdot comments be accessible, but maybe, one day, the ADA will help do that so my son can come in here and call you a dipshit himself.
I've had what seem to me mind blowing conversations over colors before. Well, we can't make that red because what about people who can't see red. You mean like stop signs and traffic lights? Using the color red is an import visual cue borrowed from the real world. To not take advantage of it hinders our ability to communicate to sighted people.
And yet, those conversations can yield some important findings. I oversaw Section 508 compliance in the redesign of my company's website and showed them that on several pages they were using the logos of our various products alone in a form of navigation. They were flags with different combinations of colors, but if you filtered the flags for red, two of them were identical with no other indicator as to which represented what product.
Simple solution: Include the product names in ALT or plain text below the images.
You can still use red wherever you want. The guidelines simply state that you shouldn't rely ONLY on color to communicate important information. That's why forms will often show notices in red and include the * to denote required data.
As a veteran web designer, you should spend some more time actually reading both 508 and WAI and seeing that the requirements aren't that outrageous, especially given the option to present information in a separate but accessible form.
And there have been ongoing efforts to improve the accessibility of AJAX, so there's no need to give that up, either. See WCAG 2.0 for more info.
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/future.shtml
Excellent idea!
First, we have to go to the real estate office to buy some land. Hope there's a ramp to get in there.
Second, we have to go visit an architect to draw up the plans. Hope there's a ramp to get in there.
Third, we have visit with suppliers, distributors, decorators, and the like to kit out our space. Hope they all have ramps.
Fourth, we have to take all our money and run it to the bank. Geez, we sure hope there's a ramp for that. We don't want to put $20K in the ATM or through the drive-thru window.
They have no right to do so.
If recourse to do so is granted by law (in this case, the ADA), isn't that technically a right to do so?
After linking to Google, did you bother actually looking at all the pages in the results? Many of them have nothing to do with business being forced out of business due to ADA requirements.
Got a video on the government website you like? Well, kiss it goodbye, because the odds are that said government agency can't afford to close caption it (close captioning isn't cheap). That means they'll just have to pull it and no one will get to see it.
Except that both 508 and WAI consider a transcript of the audio to be an acceptable means of accessing the content for the deaf. And that same transcript can be screen read by the blind.
Got a sophisticated, sharp looking, complex website? Well, kiss that goodbye too. The Section 508 best paractices standards don't like complex layout because it confuses the text readers. Only now it won't just be a suggestion. It will be mandatory.
Sharp looking sites with complex layouts can be achieved by moving elements around in CSS while maintaining a logical (readable) source content order. As long as a screen reader can get to it, so can just about anyone else.
And don't even THINK about Flash or pretty HTML5 effects! For that matter, don't even think about tables!
Flash and HTML5, we'll see. But there are specific guidelines for building accessible tables, so I'm not sure why you think they'd go away. Many tools these days build accessible tables automatically.
So far, I'm not seeing a very hefty price paid by the non-handicapped.