Mitch Goldstein ran the Angry Paul Rand account on the Twitters. Now, the real Paul Rand (q.v.) would yell at students and suffered no fools; maybe that was his intrinsic personality. But Goldstein found the intrinsic nature of the Twitters altered his.

So why did I close the account? Simple – it became something bad and negative…. I was also starting to get more and more negative comments about what I was saying. I think critique is great. Critique is the cornerstone of improvement for a designer. But you cannot critique in 140-character anonymous tweets on the Internet. That is not critique; it is just negative, pissy soundbites.

What was slowly dawning on me is that Angry Paul Rand was equally guilty of this, too. My snarky aphorisms where just as bad as people telling me how unlike Paul Rand I was, or how full of shit my tweets were, or how elitist and ridiculous I was sounding. I was doing the same thing, but with a lot more followers. Then on September 13th I tweeted “Being a designer is not just a job, it’s a calling.” This is something I truly believe, but I received a tremendous amount of negative commentary from that tweet. I took it personally, and insulted a couple of people right back. To those individuals I am tremendously sorry – it was uncalled for and really not the kind of person I am.

You don’t have to be Andrew Keen to recognize that each medium has his own biases and changes the way you communicate. If you still somehow doubt this, let me ask you something: Have you really never yelled into a cellphone, or never seen anyone do that?

In accessibility. (UPDATED)

Ideologues of the two groups with the worst taste in computing – open-source and Microsoft – assail Apple for its “closed” system. (To these critics, truth and accuracy, like design, are frills: Windows is also closed; Apple isn’t entirely closed; both use open-source software. You can’t actually root or hack every piece of Android code, so it too is functionally a closed system.) Those ideologues have long since lost in the marketplace (also that of ideas). Consumers rightly value a beautiful, stable, safe, pleasant system that just works.

Even if you’re blind.

As of this week, the sole Apple product remotely resembling a computational device that is not accessible to blind people is the iPod Classic, which exists mostly for classical-music lovers with massive libraries of recordings saved in lossless format. The Classic is so old its operating system probably cannot actually be upgraded to include VoiceOver. The second-last holdout in its lineup, Apple TV, is new enough that it can be and was.

As it stands now, every Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad has VoiceOver and other accessibility features built in. (So does Mac OS X Server.) A blind person can use any of those immediately without sighted assistance, with the proviso that iPods and iPhones first have to be synced to iTunes – an admitted weakness, but iTunes is already accessible via VoiceOver, Jaws, and Window-Eyes.

What’s the competition doing?

• Android phones have some accessibility software, some of which you have to download from your carrier’s online store. (But how, if you’re blind and can’t use the phone, let alone the store?) There is no built-in screen reader and Android phones are not accessible out of the box. They aren’t very accessible at all no matter what you do, it is claimed.

• Windows Phone 7 has a few trifling accessibility features but no built-in screen reader. “Keep pushing for accessibility[!]” one desperate critic exhorted.

  Windows Phone 7, we were told, is a “fundamental top-to-bottom rewrite from previous Microsoft mobile operating systems.” […] Microsoft told us it was not technically feasible to build the infrastructure needed to support screen-reading software – no multi-tasking capability, no inter-process communication, and no user-interface focus.

  The biggest software company in the world could not build a screen reader into a brand-new system with no legacy code. (UPDATE [2010.12.14]: At a meeting with blind organizations, “Andy Lees, president of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business, accepted responsibility, saying, ‘We were incompetent on this.’ ”)

• Windows 7 isn’t accessible by default (Narrator notwithstanding), nor was any version of Windows, nor will any version of Windows ever be.

  Some defiant Stockholm-syndrome blinks continue to insist that “Apple isn’t accessible,” having apparently accepted the genteel apartheid of spending money on a computer you can’t use only to spend more money on a screen reader to remedy the issue. (Then the screen reader crashes.) These are the kind of blinks who appear on endless episodes of BBC’s In Touch complaining their iPhone or iPad doesn’t work like Jaws, hence must be broken.

• Is this a systemic problem at Microsoft, a company with a giant accessibility department and a senior vice-president of accessibility? Yes, it is. Even after hosting a not-very-secret Kinect accessibility “roundtable,” you can’t use a Kinect if you’re in a wheelchair. (“Something for Everyone [sic]: Controller-free gaming means full-body play.” Apparently not.) And you can just forget about using the Kinect if you’re a Microsoft employee in an iBot.

(Fun fact! microsoft.com/kinect 404s. This too is emblematic of Microsoft’s design philosophy.)

Only one thing guarantees across-the-board accessibility

A commitment to it and an insistence it happen. Android and Windows have neither. Apple has both.

We can’t crown a winner in the accessibility race. There never was a race; only one company ever showed up at the starting line.

Now try convincing me that your righteous Freedom Zero principle, or handy shell access, or Outlook on your phone, or easy integration with an Exchange server somehow trumps leadership from the top. Bad taste has a cost people with disabilities pay.

☜ See also

UPDATE (2010.11.27): Microsoft employee Michael Kaplan says somebody somewhere told him that one time that Apple really isn’t hot shit in accessibility. Why do we even bother trying to talk to these people?

Let’s set aside captioning and focus just on iOS for a moment. My answer is simple: An ignore-tremors mode.

I don’t see how we’re ever going to make a touchscreen accessible to quadriplegics, but if we can install a parallel set of user-interface gestures for blind users, we can install a third set that ignores erratic or repeated motions. Unite these gestures with voice commands and certain existing VoiceOver simplifications (swipe right or left to move from icon to icon, for example) and suddenly people with CP or Parkinson’s can use an iPhone.

If one person at Apple wants this to happen, it will. It’ll never happen for Android or Windows – irrespective of how many people want it, let alone need it.

☜ See also

How many research papers can you read in half a year? Well, I know my answer: 70. Those 600-odd pages of research, plus the contents of ten books, were the sources I summarized for my new project “Gay Money: The Truth About Lesbian & Gay Economics.”

It’s a literature review of apparently every single paper written since the 1990s on the topic of income and earnings of lesbians and gay males. (I couldn’t get my hands on a paper by Escoffier, 1975; if you have it, do pass along a copy.)

This annotated bibliography isn’t simply a list of citations but a guide to what the econometric research tells us about gay money. And the tale that research tells is rather at odds with the mythology of gay marketing. That mythology holds that gays are “affluent,” a “dream market” with oceans of disposable income, in turn because we are “DINKs.”

Though I’ve been following the topic off and on since M.V. Lee Badgett’s Money, Myths, and Change came out in 2001, the catalyst was a ridiculous article in the Globe and Mail (2009.07.03) by Marina Strauss and Tara Perkins. “Looking for gold at the end of the rainbow” was the cringe-inducing hed for this piece, which preposterously proposed an entire new marketing category: Gay wine.

Even an Ontario winery is displaying the rainbow, on a new wine it calls Chardonngay ($1 from every $19.95 bottle sold goes to AIDS research).

“Gay people have better than average taste in wine and they have a lot of disposable income to spend on wines,” says Daniel Lenko, owner of his eponymous winery. “It might look a little bit campy or a little tongue in cheek. But a lot of people are waking up and saying, ‘Hey, these people have been ignored as a potential sale. Let’s get our heads out of the sand and do something about it.’”

The efforts can pay off handsomely. According to the Canadian Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, the GBLT demographic is estimated to have the collective buying power of

…and at this point I don’t need to continue excerpting the article, because it’s all bullshit from there. It is yet another lazy reiteration of gay marketers’ claims.

So I called up Tara Perkins, who astounded me when she claimed she and Strauss had “looked around” for information on gay economics and couldn’t find any. (Independent and verified information, I mean.) Apart from the fact that my own blog entries would have given a reasonable clue, it shocked me to learn that not one but two journos at a leading newspaper would commit an offence equivalent to asking a pharmaceutical company about the side-effects of a new drug or quoting a tobacco conglomerate on how safe cigarettes are.

Even business journalists with a pro-profit bias, as most or all of them have, couldn’t possibly just go right ahead and quote marketing figures as though they were fact. Could they?

Well, they did.

I decided to read all the research on the topic and summarize it in one convenient location so that nobody, not even Strauss or Jenkins, could ever make this mistake again and claim they couldn’t find the truth. (I gave Strauss and Jenkins a scoop [i.e., first crack at covering this project], and they punted.)

You don’t have to be an economist to understand what I wrote. I’m not an economist, and the whole shebang was written for civilians. I may have committed a wee mistake here or there, but on the whole my reporting of the findings is accurate, fair, and just detailed enough to keep you out of trouble.

Wait – did I forget to tell you the truth about gay money?

Here it is, and it’s a shocker: Gay males earn less money than straight males, most research shows, while lesbians earn more than straight women.

And what did you have in mind for wine this evening, gentlemen?

Be a gay man.

I’m in favour of opinions. I have my own. I am more strongly in favour of evidence. It’s coming up more and more in My Field, for example, and has been a staple of discourse on our diverse homosexualist communities since the 1990s. The next time somebody tells you “gays” are a “desirable target market” because “DINKs” have “higher disposable income,” your response should be: Prove it.

They won’t be able to. And the results for lesbians will surprise the hell out of fabulists of gay-male wealth.

M.V. Lee Badgett, Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men:

1. “The average lesbian/bisexual woman in this sample [General Social Survey: National Health and Social Life Survey] earns $21,331 per year (in 1991 [U.S.] dollars), 8% more than the average heterosexual woman, who earns $19,738 per year…. Gay/bisexual men earn $21,258 compared with heterosexual men, who earn $28,680 per year, a 35% difference” (p. 34).

2. “[T]he census findings match the GSS findings quite closely. The… study compared people in married and unmarried opposite-sex couples with people in same-sex couples. They found that men in same-sex couples earned from 13% to 31% less than men in married couples, depending on where they lived. Women in same-sex relationships who worked full-time, on the other hand, had no statistically significant difference in earnings compared to married women who worked full-time.” Other analyses show “a 30%–32% wage penalty for unmarried gay/bisexual men, while unmarried lesbian/bisexual women earn 17%–23% more than married heterosexual women” (p. 36).

3. Gays and lesbians have children – sometimes at rates not significantly different from straight people. (Full references are in the book. I may later cross-reference links.)

   Survey & question	Lesbians	Hetero women	Gay males	Hetero males
   Yankelovich
   [Have] children in household	32%	36	15	28
   [Respondents are] parents	67	72	27	60
   Voter exit poll
   Children in household	31	37	22½	32½
   GSS/NHSLS	28	—	14	—

   Also, in the 1990 U.S. Census, 20% of lesbian couples and 5% of gay-male couples had children vs. 57% of (hetero) married couples. In Canada: “About 15% of the 15,200 female same-sex couples were living with children, compared with only 3% of male same-sex couples.” Gay parenting seems considerably less common in Canada, but it is hardly nonexistent

And of course now we have even fresher evidence. “Gay Affluence Questioned Using Census 2000 Data”:

Men in same-sex couples typically earn less than other American married men, according to a newly released Urban Institute analysis of Census 2000 data…. But the institute’s analysis found the income gap lowered or closed entirely when it looked at states with laws that protect workers from employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. It is currently legal to fire someone based solely on their sexual orientation in 36 states. “These data suggest that when the fear of job-related discrimination is lifted, gay men perform on par or better than other American men in the workplace,” said David M. Smith, communications director and senior strategist of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, who commissioned the Institute’s study.

The data are online:

1. Income of gay men lags behind that of men partnered with women
2. Workplace protection linked to higher earnings for less-educated gay men

I’ve known only two conspicuous-consumer gay men. The rest of us are just making a living.

(Originally published 2003.07.07; updated here 2010.11.15.)

Actual copy published by the Times:

You can collapse the Ribbon, sure—but what a pain to have to keep doing that! When collapsed, you still see the names of the tabs (one each for Layout, Tables, Review and so on) — but, maddeningly, you can’t click a tab to open it. You have to manually open the ribbon and *then* click the tab you want.

In Word, I do all my writing in Draft view — a scrolling, endless page. (Why bother with having to scroll past big empty white margins and phony page breaks when you’re editing on the screen?) But in Word 2011, the spacing of characters in Draft view is so broken, it’s almost unbearable to use. Letters literally crash into each other; it’s very ugly.

Macros are back, which is great. Finally, I thought, I can automate the series of search-and-replace operations that are necessary to prepare my weekly column for use in plain-text e-mail (turning curly quotes into straight ones, for example).

His last complaint concerns conversion to US-ASCII. But his previous two grafs use nospace-emdash-nospace (em dash being of course outside the US-ASCII repertoire), then space-emdash-space, then asterisk instead of markup for emphasis.

Does David Pogue have bigger problems here?

Meanwhile, I can convert text to US-ASCII in one keystroke.

Just in the last month:

• A bus driver threatened me. (“Are you a supervisor?” “What’s it to you?” Later: “You looking for a fight?” “Do you understand this is being recorded?”) I forced a reluctant pair of ticket collectors to call a supervisor. The driver and those collectors bonded in the booth while we waited, though one of the collectors did take time out of his busy day to pick a fight with a female passenger before my very eyes. (The driver was a big, strong young Italian male. Is that ethnic stereotyping or simple psychographics? I say the latter. He struck me as the kind of guy who’s built like a brick shithouse because it might come in handy sometime.)

• A streetcar driver refused my first three hollered requests that he press yellow and call down the constables after another passenger threatened me and blocked my way up to the driver to complain. (That’s the second time this same passenger has done that.) Then he tried to lay the standard TTC guilt trip on me: Are you sure you want me to call it in? Because then all these passengers would be terribly inconvenienced. (Even supervisors will float this one.) The other passenger left the vehicle, which gave the driver a chance to try out a variation of the same line.

The lesson is the TTC really does not want to be bothered by threats among passengers. (Knock yourselves out!) Nor is the TTC observably interested in policing the volatility and anger of hotheaded operators. (Not only do they have a union, they conspire while waiting for a supervisor to show up.)

Meanwhile, if you so much as toss half a paper transfer at the feet of a bus driver, Bob Kinnear labels that an “assault” and uses it in a propaganda campaign about how TTC operators are the sole victims of misdeed.

You may be thinking: The fact it happened to me proves it’s my fault. Do you want a safe transit system or not? Safe for whom, exactly?