Laura Talbot, Laura M. Talbot, and Laura (M.) Talbot-Allan are all the same person. She is a former vice-president for external relations at the University of Waterloo (currently Meg Beckel), after whom an award was named. She’s a former secretary-general of the CRTC. She’s a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. She is listed, in several places, as the principal of Talbotallan (sic) Consulting, which, in that orthography or as Talbot-Allan Consulting, has no discernible telephone listing or Web site.

More interestingly, Laura M. Talbot-Allan is chair of the Accessible Information and Communications Standards Development Committee of the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services. That committee will become important for people with disabilities in the largest province in Canada. It will develop a standard for “information and communications” under the authority of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act – a mouthful of a name and one that is almost always mangled in some way. (It’s the AODA, not the ADA.) [continue with “Who is Laura Talbot-Allan?” →]

Jason Scott runs a Weblog called ASCII at ascii.textfiles.com. Its high-contrast white-on-black appearance makes the page a travail to read for reasons that are commonly discussed but ill-understood. (The page can be made more legible by reading in no-styles mode, or in Opera accessibility mode. These are extreme lengths just to read a personal blog.)

Scott is finishing a documentary about bulletin-board systems and has taken an interest in accessibility. He hasn’t taken much of an interest in allowing me to actually comment on his site, so let me correct a few of his errors here.

• One does not “subtitle” one’s “fucking movie”; one captions it. (You aren’t translating your movie. Subtitles are translations.)

  Captioning is not “easy,” and it takes an experienced captioner using high-end equipment four work days to caption a movie with a 96-minute runtime. (They can caption at most 22 minutes a day, and your two-hour movie is probably made of two 48-minute segments.) You are not an experienced captioner; it will take you longer and your captioning sucks. Send captioning out-of-house; enthusiasm is no substitute for skill.

• Scott’s entire post on audio description meant well but never could get the terminology right. Nor did he actually name the disc with accessible menus, which surely is Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (which I have).

  Scott is foolishly trying to audio-describe his movie by himself. While I am in favour of homebrew captioning under certain circumstances, I don’t see any point in doing audio description yourself. You suck as a writer of description, you don’t have a proper recording studio, you don’t have a plausible narrator, and, at root, you don’t know what you’re doing. Enthusiasm is not only no substitute for skill, it gets in the way with description, where less is certainly more.

• Blind people do not typically have to “rip the DVDs and extract the various titles/parts out of the DVD so they can play stuff without being hung up on menus and special features and Easter eggs and the rest.” Except for unusual cases where a misguided DVD author has disabled the relevant user operation, you can usually just keep hitting Play on your remote and the damned movie will play. You then keep hitting Audio until you hear the description track. While this isn’t true accessibility, it is pragmatic accessibility: You manage to watch the movie.

  Visual menu systems on DVDs, as everywhere, remain inaccessible to a blind person. Your homemade solution will probably not work; it’s tricky bordering on impossible to make self-voicing menus on DVDs. (That’s why there are so few such discs. It isn’t just an unwillingness or an unawareness; it’s fiendishly difficult.)

Globe and Mail journo Mathew Ingram was a capital fellow the one and only time I met him – when we both appeared on a Newsworld talk show in 2003, cohosted by Antonia Zerbisias and the nastiest prick in town, Matthew Fraser (who, within seconds, dismissed my neighbourhood as a drug haven). Ingram has a business interest in the much-unloved Mesh Conference.

Ingram frequently updates his blog, which covers technology issues. “Covers” is a generous description here: Most of the time, all he does is pad out a link to somebody else’s technology blog. [continue with “Mathew Ingram, the least original technology blogger” →]

Or: @ 133† †00 ƒ@r?

Note the bumper sticker damagingly applied to a painted surface. Ethnic stereotype?

This week (on 2008.04.14), I headed over to one of UofT’s newest buildings, the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, only to find it full of engineers, not computer programmers. Co-instructor Jason Foster had invited me along to look at the presentations – poster, brochure, and classic ad-style pitch – for ESC102, the 2008 Praxis II Design Showcase.

In this course, engineering students all wrote their own candidate tasks, which were then winnowed down to six that were randomly assigned to groups of three students.

And the tasks were all about… the TTC. [continue with “The kids are, as they say, all right” →]

The new TTC Web site is supposed to début in “April.” That’s after two rounds of usability testing and an outside accessibility assessment that they probably sent to Ottawa for no objective reason.

Now, what about all the bidders on this contract? I’ve been telling you as much as I know. I had filed an information request to see the actual bid documents. This process takes forever, but I have been given a list of pre-cleared documents I can look at. I didn’t ask for copies of those documents, a needless expense. But this is not a free service. And I believe I am going to have to file an appeal to see certain blocked documents.

I do well more than enough unpaid work. So I’m gonna make you a value proposition: If you want me to pay TTC’s existing fees, schlep up there and paw through 1,511 pages, and file and stickhandle an appeal, then shove some money in my PayPal account. (Use the Micropatronage link.) 15 people putting in 15 bucks each would do it and give me a profit that, while marginal and incommensurate with my expended effort, would actually exist for once.

Look at it coldly, as I am: This is a cheap way for losing bidders to gain intel on their competitors. They’ll still be your competitors tomorrow, you know.

I have till 2008.05.09 to get this thing going. The option is yours.