New year’s resolution for 2008: Every blind person with an interest in technology should vow never to reiterate these lies.

PDFs are inaccessible. I can’t use PDFs.

This is, in fact, the official policy of Australia, at least according to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. (What that means is it is the fervent, irrational, readily-disproved belief of Bruce Maguire; the HREOC took his dictation.)

It’s true that, in the past, PDFs were inaccessible because the file format had no structural features and screen readers (inter alia) could not read PDFs. At some level, none of that is true anymore. We don’t have a finished PDF accessibility spec, but text-and-graphics PDFs, including multicolumn and tabular documents, can be and are accessible. (“I’ve never received a PDF I could read” is a different complaint from “I can’t read any PDFs.”)

If you’re using an old screen reader, you have to upgrade. We invented an entire new technology for you. Of course you have to improve your technology to work with what didn’t exist before. Of course that’s unfair if you’re poor. But, most of the time, you made a conscious choice to work on a platform that forces you to pay money for accessibility.

Word and RTF are accessible.

The Microsoft Word file format is a secret on a par with the recipe for Coca-Cola. You can hack and reverse-engineer your way around it, but what you get is Pepsi, not real Coke. The file format isn’t published. Microsoft owns it; that means they own your data. RTF is only partially published.

So yes, because you made a conscious choice to use a platform where “document” was redefined to mean “Microsoft Word document,” you might find it more convenient to receive an MS Word file. Your screen reader would have been very heavily customized, behind the scenes and at immense effort, just so it barely functions with Word documents. You can call that accessible if you want. You’d be wrong, though; all you really mean is “convenient for me,” which isn’t the same thing.

“Apple” is inaccessible.

That’s typically how the complaint is expressed: “Blind people can’t use Apple.” If you’re too stupid to distinguish a product from a company, please take your white cane and go somewhere else.

Mac OS 8 and 9 were half-assedly accessible using the ancient screen reader known as OutSpoken. OS X – it’s two words, and the second word is pronounced “ten” – was almost completely inaccessible to the blind user until 10.4, when suddenly you got a full screen reader for free. Yes, free.

“Apple” isn’t as good as Jaws.

And here, “Apple” means VoiceOver, the built-in screen reader. Of course it isn’t as good as today’s version of Jaws (8 or 9). Does anyone even remember Version 1.0 of Jaws? Is it installed on anyone’s computer? Are there any computers still in use that can run it? No, right? Because that’s the standard of comparison: VoiceOver under OS X 10.4 was a V1.0 product. By the same token, VoiceOver under OS X 10.5 is a V2.0 product and is much improved. (Try this under Jaws: Reboot your computer off DVD to upgrade your operating system. Plug in a Braille display. Does it work immediately with no configuration at all? It does for us.)

Also, behind the scenes (and without much documentation), VoiceOver was continuously improved with each release of a system update or new software (like iTunes).

Lots and lots of blind people use nothing but Macs all day, and many more use both Mac and Windows. You may not know these people, but we didn’t ask you that. (Why not listen to the podcast put out by two VoiceOver users?)

Coming up: Cherished lies of the deaf.

The least legible, but clearly the best, ½ fraction of the decade.

Four phases of the side destination sign on an Orion VII.

The bus tells you where it’s going only a quarter of the time. The front sign breaks the same information into three phases, telling you where the bus is going only a third of the time (updated example below).

I’ve seen this before (with signs alternating destination with I’M A NEW BUS or, inexplicably, THE FUTURE IS HERE), but the cost in information content is too high. Tell me where the bus is going, please. (Did you know there is actual research on how to use these “variable-message” signs properly?)

What exactly is a “SEN/STU,” and isn’t there a ¢ symbol?

A couple of weeks ago, the fire academy (not its full name) held its annual open house. I am now old enough to say I go to this event every year. As the academy is located on the outskirts of the Free City of Leslieville, I actually ride past it some 200 times a year, and I often stand by the sidelines watching and photographing their training runs, which are somewhat old hat now, actually. (I was also riding by when the sitting prime minister visited one day. Even a casual observer like me could tell they hadn’t really secured the area.)

Knowing that the show always closes well before the stated ending time, I got there nice and early and found I was pretty much the only single unaccompanied adult on the grounds; everybody else were parents and kids. And I was like: What are you waiting for, a singing telegram? It’s wall-to-wall firemens and you can crawl all over the equipment!

Here I am of course using the obscure Blaine and Antoine–ism firemens, pronounced with an ultra-long final vowel: “firemehhhnz.” And as I do every year, I asked the most senior guy I could find (it’s always guys) if X was still the only openly gay fireman on the force. This guy had never heard of him, but figured they had the same proportion of homosexualists as any other sphere of society. Yeah, and they’re all lesbians! I said. In retrospect, I’m not sure that X is still a fireman, and he certainly has been out of the public eye recently (not-riding-atop-a-fire-engine-in-the-Pride-parade kind of thing), so I will act as though he’s a civilian now and redact his name. But, you know, if you need a tall blond fireman in perfect shape, he’s your man. Or his husband’s.

I made sure to be given a tour of every single apparatus available, except the old yellow (hence North York) pumper they use for training. I took pictures. I toured the hazmat truck (fascinating, though everything was in hermetically sealed bags), a new $1.2 million ærial truck and a slightly less new one, and a few engines and ladder trucks.

There was exactly one wymmynz present. And you’re the only female firefighter here today, I told her as she sat in the ærial platform. Well, yes, she said. A colony only ever has one queen.

Most of the firemens were somewhat dishevelled and not-exactly-low-bodyfat guys in middle age. Except this fella. Funny, you don’t look Irish, I told him. No, I am definitely not Irish, he said.

He totally knew what was up, by the way. [continue with: Hot firemens action, 2007 →]

Presented here for easier linking.

Clark’s Law states that the more expensive an online system is, the worse its output is.

Canonical example: Vignette.

Instead of doing something that pays, I attended the TTC meeting today (the first in months – a previous meeting was cancelled after the budget crunch). I learned some interesting facts.

• The internal budget allocation for the new Web site (per se) is $375,000, an order of magnitude that matches the estimate I had given several potential bidders (“Bid the true cost up to $300,000”). (Yes, I advised several. Some of that advice consisted of “You guys suck, so don’t waste everybody’s time putting in a bid.”)

• However, that is almost the smallest item in the agenda of online improvements. The full list:

  • Building their own geographic information system (using GPS and suchlike): $1,500,000 and worth every penny
  • Next-train arrival information: $330,000
  • Next-bus arrival: $5,200,000 (!)
  • Internet trip planning: $2,300,000
  • Notification of disrupted service (to announce what – a wildcat strike?): $1,100,000 (!)
  • E-commerce (buy your Metropass onliné, then get it lost in the mail): $1,200,000
  • Wheel-Trans trip booking (much more important than they think it is): $550,000

  The total cost is $12,555,000. Unlike my esteemed colleague Steve Munro, I don’t think any of that is wasted money.

• I am not clear why trip planning is sextuple the cost of the Web redesign. I offer the same warning all over again: The trip-planning application will be put together by outside-vendor assholes using tables for layout and JavaScript that only works in IE6.

  TTC’s documents keep insisting (inexplicably, in grey Arial type): “Use a proven/established product!” – but all the examples they show are awful and wouldn’t pass the first five checkpoints of WCAG. (One item from the TTC erroneously claims a new Web site will be “WCAG3”-compliant. There is no such site in existence and there still won’t be.)

  Trip planning is the tail that threatens to wag the dog. Clark’s Law states that the more expensive an online system is, the worse its output is. They’ll buy a two-million-dollar system, get smoke blown up their arses by the vendor, then, when the thing completely borks, they’ll deploy it anyway, and it’ll have to be presented as an iframe in the new standards-compliant Web site, thereby destroying its standards compliance.

  In essence, there will be several kinds of TTC Web site – the normal one, the trip planner for noncripples, and the Wheel-Trans trip planner.

  If I’m called to any meeting, here is advance notice of some of the questions I will pose to any and all trip-planner vendors:

  • How well does it work in Opera? You know the answer because you tested it, right?
  • I only use iCab. It understands HTML, CSS, and ECMAscript, but you’ve never heard of it. What can’t I do in your application using iCab?
  • Prove to me I can do everything I want in your application using Safari, a Braille display, no speakers or headphones, and no monitor.
  • Unplug the mouse and do a demo of a planned trip from here to my house.

• This business of disruption notification will apparently use the tiny bottom line of the OneStop display screens that nobody likes. (It should take over the whole screen.) Oh, and the TTC’s simulation can’t even get the font right. (What incorrect font do you think they use?)

• One of the illustrated examples of existing next-bus-arrival systems is Danish (the øs give it away). A mockup of a TTC “bus terminal” display appears to have been typed out using Arial, the spacebar, and the hyphen key.

• Whenever Adam Giambrone claims wall tiles are “expensive,” remind him they have a $1.5 million budget set aside for ’08 just for “system cleanliness/appearance,” explicitly including tile replacement. (Is it more expensive to replace tiles than to replace “artificial stone”? Can you prove that?)

• This was another meeting filled with phenomenally awful PowerPoints and printed slides. How many presentation sins do these people commit? All of them.

  I am possibly the only critic of Tufte, but by God is he ever needed here. Were it permissible to present to staff copies of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, I would. I am merely a good presenter, but my shit is gangbusters compared to theirs, and they’ve got a billion bucks behind them. Inexcusable – but not incomprehensible, given the primitive, user-hostile tools they use (two words: “Windows NT”) and their visual illiteracy left unremediated by training.

• There were two items concerning signage in the correspondence file, following up, without stating as much, from the TTC Type & Tile Tour. That’s apart from the two items from me, of course. And I have now filed a complaint about John Martz’s getting a cease-and-desist letter for doing something an advertiser later paid to do.

Today I schlepped down to the Reference Library for the inaugural Literary Café. Katherine Barber, editrix of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (q.v.), and prolific Canadiana documenter John Robert Colombo gave short presentations. There followed Q&A from host Tina Srebotnjak and the audience, where I was the second-youngest person in attendance.

Barber was sounding as mediævalist as ever and looked very much more so in a red gown of the sort I would associate with Christmas choral performances, which may be another place she wears it.

I didn’t take many notes of what the erudite and garrulous, though initially nervous, Colombo actually said; not a lot of it was about Canadian English, one of my things. [continue with: Barber–Colombo →]

After complaining that every issue of Monocle is replete with copy errors that should never be found in a quality magazine and also complaining that I have better things to do than correct them, I thought I would limit my review of the October issue to nothing but the copy errors. Tkae thta Tlyer Brüle!