I did a lot of driving today. 2.25 hours to Philadelphia and then 2.75 hours back, much thanks to a seemingly tiny accident on the Staten Island Expressway Parking Lot. In any case, I think I realized today that vanity license plates are the true predecessors of the Internet’s domain names.
Both are registered through demi-oligarchic means (the State and the state); both involve using specified letters, numbers and dashes (but no semicolons, colons, or asterisks) to lay claim to a piece of common cultural infrastructure; both are necessarily publicly displayed; both are treasured, admired, and critiqued for their logic, humor, and simplicity; and finally, both belong to a visual history of insignias, coats of arms, and other personalized or customized means of signifying one’s presence in the world.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about website accessibility, but it’s never far from my interests and aspirations. The Disability Rights Commission, a U.K.-based Government-affilated organization just released its Formal Investigation Report on web accessibility. This is from their introduction:
Disabled people must frequently overcome additional obstacles before they can enjoy the full range of information, services, entertainment and social interaction offered by the Web: blind people need sites to provide, for example, text as an alternative to images for translation into audible or legible words by specially designed screenreading devices; partially sighted people may be especially reliant upon large-format text and effective colour contrast; people who are dyslexic or have cognitive impairments may benefit in particular from the use of simpler English or alternative text formats, such as Easy Read, and from the clear and logical layout of an uncluttered website; people whose first language is British Sign Language may also find Plain English indispensable; and people with manual dexterity impairments may need to navigate with a keyboard rather than with a mouse.
Nevertheless, the Web has enormous potential for disabled people. In contrast to other information media, it is, with the benefit of assistive technology1, potentially tolerant of impairment. Inclusive website design makes it easier to use these alternative means of access, without making a site less attractive to unimpaired users. Irresponsible and inconsiderate design, on the other hand, not only puts disabled users at a significant disadvantage but can make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone, whether disabled or not.
And a few of the reports findings are interesting:
1.1 Few (19%) websites comply even with the lowest priority Checkpoints for accessibility.
1.2 All categories of disabled user consider that site designs take insufficient account of their specific needs.
1.3 Blind users, who employ screen readers to access the web, although not alone in being disadvantaged, are particularly disadvantaged by websites whose design does not take full account of their needs.
1.4 Although many of those commissioning websites state that they are alert to the needs of disabled people, there is very little evidence of such awareness being translated into effective usability for disabled people.
And perhaps most interestingly, the organization tested 1000 home pages from across numerous sectors. Only 16 were Level A compliant (this is the 19% noted above), meaning minimally accessible to those with disabilities. 6 home pages were Level AA compliant, which means that sites deliberately worked to assure accessibility. And NO home pages achieved Level AAA (or total) compliance.

I can’t say I’m proud of it but I also can’t, at the same time, say I’m not elated that my daughter was able to co-ordinate her hand and eyes to click on the various eggs in the Chicken Dance Elmo online game. I watched her subtly and artfully move her hand from egg to egg and clicking squarely on each one (pardon the bad metaphor).
What’s the meaning? Well: a. she’s spending too much time on the computer with me (like me); b. she’s got highly advanced hand-eye coordination and a deep understanding of the relationship between three-dimensional movement, human agency and two-dimensional interfaces; c. she somehow connects with the logic of this sweet and goofy game; d. all of the above plus a mixture of plain old growing and learning.

Because (or despite the fact) it’s Passover tonight, I thought I’d post something liberation-relevant: Stanford Professor of Law and all things open technology Lawrence Lessig has made his new book “Free Culture” available for free [link goes directly to PDF] for a limited time on Amazon.com.
Granted this is a 352 page book but, from the excerpt below (from the preface), a potential reader might get the sense that this is an important book, a relevant and current take on the ownership of software, content, and the freedom to create and transmit ideas:
That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of ‘free culture’—not ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’ (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ ; ‘free markets,’ ‘free trade,’ ‘free enterprise,’ ‘free will,’ and ‘free elections.’ A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a ‘permission culture’—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
Happy Passover.

Like so many others, I’m very curious about the future fate of Kinja, the weblog guide, which was just released this week in beta.
It’s got a great number of things going for it. With sweet kid gloves, it makes keeping up on weblogs easy. Adding and subtracting weblogs is as simple as clicking a button on your browser or popping the site URL into Kinja’s add form. It’s got a nice albeit slightly cluttered interface. And it’s got the power of the good folks that invented Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Gawker and Gizmodo behind it.
Here’s the problem: I don’t know why I would actually use it on a very regular basis. Yahoo has a great new (also beta version) RSS aggregator built into My Yahoo! that allows new posts to be seen right from your home page without scrolling down and hurting the forefinger. The design of Kinja is nice but it doesn’t allow one to organize the weblogs by category as Jason Kottke pointed out to me; it would be nice if I could organize the blogs I read by “politics,” “technology,” and “bug spray,” for instance. Preferably, there should be a tabbed interface to control these things.
Finally, what is the business model for this site? It’s not clear. But, it’s a great and highly flexible tool for keeping up on a few blogs and it makes checking on new posts actually pleasurable, something My Yahoo! can probably never do.

Almost every day, it appears that more and more people are “doing” yoga. I admire them and I also wonder if it’s just a trend like the other things that are, consciously at least, presumably not fads, like the Atkins and South Beach diets, the taste for war overseas, and the public’s interest in the rise and fall of celebrities.
But here’s Christy Turlington and her friends at Puma launching mahanuala, a newly branded line of loose, yoga-friendly clothing. I don’t want to be sceptical about this, as anyone who risks time away from work to focus on their minds and bodies is doing themselves and those around them good. And there are clothing lines for skateboarders so why not yoga practitioners?
But I always ask myself regarding new things: “Under what sign was this born?” Websites, for instance, were born under the signs of 90s opulence and a revolution in information technology. The Lewinsky scandal was born under the signs of misplaced values and concern about large government (and large government officials). The rebirth of yoga is sadly born under the signs of poor economic outlook, war, and misappropriation of public and private capital.
The questions then are: Is yoga’s rejuvenation a response to externalities beyond our control and a de-rationalization of our modern life? Or is yoga a retreat from the real, a denial of our own violence to ourselves and others, and admission of the poverty of our daily ways and means?

Because so many folks are riding on the high of the next big IPO (that would be Google’s), the language around and about Google is verging on the order of the grotesque. I so dislike the gerund “Googling” or the verb form “to Google.”
But, Google released today a well-timed little toy called Google Web Alerts, which gives Google the right to regularly send you updated online information (links, new sites) about an industry, idea, person, or pumpkin. I’m going to set one up right now; the alert will be named “bubble 2.0.” I’m sorry, but Google just seems to be reaching. They’re other new search tool is personalized searching — but if it doesn’t work on Safari, and it does not, it’s not very personalized for me.

Very often you’ll read an article about how problematic Microsoft is with regard to customer service or usability and very often you’ll say, yes, but.
Yes, but this evening, I wanted to log on to my old Hotmail account and attempt to review an email I’m developing for a client. Granted, this email address has not been used in probably a year and a half. Granted, Microsoft has radically changed its “member services.”
But every time I tried to log in to either Hotmail, MSN, .Net, or Passport (all with different user names and passwords), I’d be sent to this beauty: Microsoft® .NET Passport: Not Supported. The HTML isn’t even supported in the page Title!
It’s a true embarrassment that a company as important as Microsoft has four different services for overlapping (albeit free) products and none of them will allow redundant user access. But more distressingly, none of the services will allow you to intelligently rectify the problem.

The wheels at Apple just keep turning, as Apple today released news of its upcoming Spoken Interface, a pretty spectacular piece of software that allows those with disabilities to interact with an OS X-based computer. It’s impressive, brilliant, prescient, and genuinely humane.

It is indeed the little things in life that count. In looking for the location of a doctor’s office online this evening, I punched in the address into Yahoo! Maps. In the rest of the country, driving directions are all one might need to get from A to B. But, finally, someone figured out that if one lives in New York City, one might want to know which subway line to take to a specific address.
Yahoo! Maps has done it. Surrounding the starred doctor’s office on the map are very clearly labeled subway stops — and relevant distances to the office were only a click away. Not interesting? Using a technology called SmartView, one can also locate specific restaurants, community services, stores, and even ATMs near any specified address. (SmartView is so new that I could find no online documentation for it.)
SmartView does not yet allow one to see multiple locations at the same time, so if I wanted to find a buy a book, find a cafe, and then rob a bank, I’d have to try different radio buttons sequentially. In the coming search engine battles, it’s these seemingly small advances that are going to win the annual wars.
Is SmartView perfected? Not quite. In typing in my own address, I learned that the nearest “tourist spots” include “Two Little Red Hens Cafe,” the “Brooklyn Museum of Art,” and “FG Guido Funeral Home.”