Accessible computing

Periodically I write about Free Software (also known as FLOSS or FOSS): this is important in terms of accessibility to all and is closely linked in to openly published standards. From an ethical perspective, an advocacy perspective, and a community perspective I find the free software movement interesting to keep up with and a useful comparison to similar developments in advocacy and society.

I think it's particularly important for people to know a little bit about this at the moment as some worrying as well as some positive changes are taking place which may have a big impact on our use of computers over the coming years.

First of all, let's be bold:

Free software will benefit disabled computer users.
OK at the moment the software isn't up to scratch, but over time free software is likely to be the fastest and most flexible way to respond to the diverse needs of differently disabled people. A more positive (if a bit technical) story is here, but see below why we need to support these developments. I also expect that Linux (the free operating system) in its embedded form running phones, TV decoders and washing machines is also being used for various tools and machines disabled people use.

Free software will benefit the poor.
This is more directly obvious, but it is particularly important if we consider the growing poverty gap and the effect of people not being able to afford computers or the legal software to run on them. Microsoft at the moment is threatening much tougher action against people who copy cds or dvds, download music, or use pirated software. These actions are going to affect a lot of people and cost a lot of money, and it will disbar many poor people who become even more cut off from society. Of course there are projects like the $100 laptop to 'revolutionise the way we educate the world's children', amongst many other benefits.

Free software promotes accessibility.
Despite the fact that it's free, the most important meaning of 'free as in free software' is that it's accessible. For the developer that means you can open it up and see how it works, but it also has other important implications for the rest of us. One important example is the Open Document Format (ODF). This was ratified by the International Standards Organisation as the first international standard for office documents. Many governments and large organisations are transferring to this standard (check the links in my earlier post), and they are transferring largely because of the accessibility features of the software and the opportunities it offers to build effective and appropriate services around them. Other important accessibility developments include systems for archiving and retrieval of information, user involvement and collaboration in the new Web 2.0 (blogs, MySpace, Wikis, photo and file sharing sites, del.icio.us, etc), network and server operation and maintenance, and the posibility of reusing and recycling old hardware more productively amongst others.

Free software is built around a principle of community.
This is very important. Proprietary (non-free) software is owned and marketed for a profit by corporations who primarily want to make money. Most end users of computers just want to get by in life ok, have some fun, avoid too many problems. Quite a few people like to avoid problems by sitting in front of a computer and making themselves busy (or entertained or whatever). After a while you meet others like you and you start to communicate, to work or play together. Out of this has evolved an enormous resource of software and support that is involving more and more people every day. Helping each other out feels good, contributing to something which other people are going to use and appreciate feels good, and many people are able to make a living or at least keep themselves sane by working on free software projects. It is instructive to compare the experiences of these communities to the different sorts of communities we often work with, and they provide some hope (if you're selective).

Free software is the future.
I don't mean that in a grand way, more like I would say that we have to continue as advocates to support disempowered people to speak out and make their lives better... Free software, like advocacy, is something I think it's important to speak out for. It's available now for most of us, and getting easier to use. See the links at the end of this post.

-----

And now the dark side!
Microsoft revolutionised computing with Windows in kind of the same way that Oppenheimer revolutionised war with the atom bomb. Things are certainly different and we have certainly developed a lot, but was it all a good thing in retrospect? I could go on for ages about the history of Microsoft but I won't, just remember the anti-monopoly ruling that was made against them by the European Court (which they pretty much flaunted as far as I can tell, see this Guardian article and just search google for many more examples).

Now Windows Vista is upon us and the situation is getting far worse. I was catching up on a few tech blogs this evening and it looks like there will be some big upsets in store in the near future (you may not even want to run a new computer).

I started on the blog of a moderator for the Ubuntu forums who said there is no escape from Vista, it's going to shake the world. This is complemented by this slightly more readable and comprehensive post which explains it's all about digital rights management (DRM).

Then I was reading various sites about OOXML, Microsoft's competitor standard to Open Document Format, which seems to be designed to confuse people into not using open source while providing a completely inappropriate alternative. Bob Sutor is Vice President, Open Source and Standards, of IBM, a company that has done a lot for open source and revitalised its once flagging business partly as a result. He provides a couple of shocking summary links to information about the impossibility of implementing MS's huge standard and the fact that MS has already released proprietary extensions that will maintain their monopoly.

-----

There's a lot more than that, but the key thing as advocates or nurses or social workers or whoever you are reading my blog is that open source really is accessible and nice, and is destined to become rapidly more so over the next few years.

This is a very interesting time because many IT industry specialists are saying that the free software movement is now a viable alternative to Microsoft based set-ups, and now Microsoft, by releasing Vista in such a controlled and expensive form, could well be shooting themselves in the foot and helping us to move more quickly along the path to freedom and collaboration.

I personally have been using almost entirely free software for almost two years now. I have an old computer (2001) running very happily and playing DVDs much better than Windows ever managed as well as being able to do almost everything else I want. I've also got various other advantages from even my marginal involvement in the community, and I've paid them back in kind here and there.

The following open source software works and is free and easily if you have a broadband connection (and you can get hold of it in other ways if you need to), so make a start soon:

Ubuntu Linux - alternative to Windows, works similarly, community driven and beginner friendly

OpenOffice.org - word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database, drawing, etc - more than an alternative to MS Office

Firefox - faster, more secure, community-driven web browser
Thunderbird - the email client from the same developers

There are literally thousands of programs, and many more in development. These are the main needs and you can start using some of them straight away - and do check out the Ubuntu Live CD...

A new web resource for advocacy?

So at about 8 o'clock last night I wrote about my wish to explore social networking and content management systems, and at about 11 o'clock some guy I met at a party said he thought Joomla was the best option out there, he liked my ideas, and he could offer some free space to start to try them out on... Maybe it's a good time for wishes...

I've spent a bit of time exploring Joomla today, and it has just won the Packt Open Source CMS Award (click on logo for link) as well as winning the UK LinuxWorld Best Linux/Open Source Project for the second year running. I was aware of the two runners up, Drupal and Plone, and I've also been looking at some of the also rans, most notably MediaWiki (a different type of CMS really, so not in the running). So far most of my attention has been on MediaWiki and Plone, although I knew Drupal needed to be looked into more carefully. Various examples of what I'm interested in include the townx blog (using Drupal, more than just a blog), Wikipedia of course (using MediaWiki), Schoolforge-UK (also MediaWiki), the Ubuntu Wiki (based on the MoinMoinWiki), the Free Software Foundation website (based on Plone again) and finally the Sheffield Social Forum Wiki which gives a good idea of how a community can be organised through a wiki.

I must say that so far I like the aesthetics of Plone and MediaWiki best, and I look forward to being shown that this can be emulated successfully in Joomla. I also think that it will be important for lots of people to be able to contribute to page content easily and quickly - and to feel like they want to! (like a wiki). [Edit 1/1/07 - looks like this shouldn't be a problem.]

First I need to get together some kind of spec for a website and start discussing this with people, and we'll see if Joomla can deliver...

Watch this space.

Things to do in 2007

Experience shows me I shouldn't be writing this - I usually do best when I sit down and write something spontaneously. I also want this blog to be pretty spontaneous - I'm not writing carefully thought out essays, just thought-provoking thoughts...

Anyway, there are a few things that I began writing and never finished, and a few things that I want to write about, and a few related things I want to do, and before I go out tonight I think I'm going to jot some of them down here.

1. Get a job. More about that later (any offers gratefully received).


2. Get some funding for Advocacy Action. It has loads of potential, but with no funding it's not going to achieve much.

But I want to focus on things for the blog here, so


3. I want to write something about risk management. I've started twice already but each time it's got too serious for a blog post. So I should work on a risk management policy, and blog about that perhaps. Something for the resources section of the Advocacy Action website.


4. I also want to work on an Engagement Protocol, hopefully for all the advocacy projects in Wakefield although maybe they would each have to negotiate individual agreements with the Council and PCT. I will probably blog about engagement protocols, their use and value, and the difference between them and things like quality standards. This will hopefully help me to get my head around what I want to include in the protocol I write.


5. I want to do a survey of advocacy related videos on YouTube and Google Video. I've found a couple of interesting ones, but most of the results you get from searching are related to political advocacy, and some of the others are quite dire. I need to set aside a day sometime for doing this.


6. I want to add some films to these online video sites. A friend of mine is interested in doing some video work with me, and I feel that the advocacy community should start making use of some of the opportunities offered by these Web 2.0 sites.


7. I did suggest at the NAN conference last November that one way of helping such a dispersed organisation get moving would be to develop more of a web presence. I will look at the various social networking sites like Ning and Elgg and the sort of 'community-based project management' sites like Basecamp from 37signals (and many others). Then I will try to work out how these resources could be used to support and develop our advocacy community. I need to do this by the end of January for the next NAN meeting.

Running out of time now, so more creatively...


8. I'm going to be a podcast host, all being well. I've had the invitation, it may end up being NSFW, but I may let people know if it happens.


9. I've got to finish off my posts about visctrix sometime.


10. I'm going to read Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (review, download electronic copy). I got it just after it came out in paperback in 2001 and never got around to reading it. I may even read Negri's The Savage Anomaly and develop my knowledge of Spinoza's ethics which I borrow from.

At the end of the day though, just keep coming back to the blog to see what's going on.

Internet Explorer still not working

N.B. Now fixed, 20 December. Thanks to Christine - see comments.

I wrote a post some time back about the benefits of Firefox (a far better way of browsing the web).

I am shocked and disappointed to find that this new blog, based on a new standard Blogger template, doesn't display properly in either IE6 or the new IE7.

The banner at the top is orange, the title Advocacy Blog is a link, and the photo of lichen from Moel Siabod should neatly fill up just the subtitle row with the text showing up neatly on top of it (no white background).

IE just doesn't work.

Now I think Blogger must have some responsibility for this - I'd expect them with their expertise to be able to create templates that work in IE.

On the other hand all web designers know that IE is notoriously difficult to make pages work in, especially if you're interested in accessibility and standards compliance.

So to all you IE users, please switch to Firefox so you can see this post in the way that it's intended. (Feedback from any Safari (Mac) users would also be welcome here.)

Spam Shakespeare

If we sat a load of spammers in front of computers, gave them drip-feeds and catheters so they had no need to go anywhere, eventually, the story goes, they would spam us all with Shakespeare (if we haven't all ripped out our internet connections in terror before then...)

Actually sometimes I find we're not so far from that already. I get quite a lot of spam that appears to be made up of sentences gleaned from various web pages and then cut up and reorganised. I don't know which websites they use, some seem quite literary, some pretty trashy, some boringly technical, presumably none too high profile.

I remember the first time I got one I thought it was very strange and interesting. It was very short, had no links or images, and I spent a while wondering whether it came from a real person or was an attempt to get me to confirm my email address. In the end I waited, and sure enough more started to come in. Now I don't usually bother looking at them, but this one today reminded me of that first moment... There are too many of these really, and I've deleted a lot, but take any bit on its own and see if you can make any sense of it, it's quite an amusing distraction (these lot would have enjoyed it at least).

Together firmly mandates outcome determined upcoming wishes problem. Cia, married, arrested escapes kills. Handles seventytwo, traffic while consumes sixteen.

Playing isnt, fun, debut earlier.

Again, illuminate job guides talking printed. Zealot generally turn down speaking those? Join book club australia categories arts childrens literature.

Moonraker bernard lee spoof cut cast crew bondrobert.

Locate outside must mind when assessing benefits proposed affect.

Defying, sounded, cool drag solid progressed slow fake hookey.

The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK

I often encourage people to use more ethical Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, of FLOSS - including Libre) , and they ask me for more information.

I usually direct people to the OpenOffice.org website, and especially to the newsletter there (on Blogger). Most people mainly use computers for familiar office functions, and OpenOffice.org is a free community-developed alternative that offers many advantages to expensive proprietary solutions. The newsletter keeps track of developments and particularly of big migration successes.

There's also the Mozilla corporation, developers of Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email client), and news sites like Slashdot ('news for nerds, stuff that matters' - you have been warned).

In fact from Slashdot I found this link from the Computer Business Review Online, The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK. It may be dry reading for the uninitiated, but I think it is an interesting and quite accurate investigation of some important developments. Returning readers may have picked up my commitment to FOSS and know that this blog is produced entirely on FOSS. Despite the fact that Linux has just celebrated it's fifteen birthday however (today - happy birthday!) people are not very familiar with using it on home or office computers.

There is a good feeling of the beginnings of a big change though. Over all these years of steadily developing FOSS, including the operating systems that make it all work (like Linux), it seems the big private players have been merely tweaking and adding minor aesthetic enhancements to their sofware (and then of course charging a fortune for upgrades). It hasn't been all that difficult for the FOSS developers to catch up then (this isn't true in the games arena). Now more and more organisations and individuals are realising that the transition to FOSS isn't all that big a leap. This article explores the current state of use of FOSS, and the voluntary sector should take note.

Linux for human beings

This weekend I upgraded to the latest verion of Ubuntu Linux. This was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, mainly because it was so easy, and secondly because things immediately worked even better. Little things like being able to watch videos and listen again to radio programmes on the BBC, and getting the most up-to-date version of OpenOffice.org.

Of course Linux is a free and more ethical alternative to MS Windows, and getting more and more attractive to ordinary computer users. I've been using it for a year now and I'm a happy penguin...

To see what all the fuss is about, click here:

Best viewed in Firefox

Of course Firefox is one of the best web browsers. And Internet Explorer is one of the worst. The reasons?

• Firefox is standards compliant, IE is not
  
• Firefox is less vulnerable to security issues
  
• Firefox has tabbed browsing and integrated search
• and many other reasons (link 1, link 2)

Anyone trying to create standards compliant web sites knows the problems of IE particularly well - because they have to add extra code to make sure the pages display properly in IE.

Anyway, this blog isn't properly standards compliant, but it also hits a problem with IE. The sidebar for some reason ends up right at the bottom of the page. I've tried fiddling with this, and I know it worked once (so I've done something to break it). At the moment I can't fix it though, so if anyone has any suggestions I'd be grateful. [Update 16/12/06]

But basically,

:-)

Google good...?

This is a kind of interesting article on The Register, The worse Google gets, the more money it makes?

In a way you need to know some of the history. I'm hardly qualified to provide this, but what I understand is that Google were originally a smart couple of guys who developed a radically improved way of searching the web as a research project. They put their service online and it gained huge popularity. They also had another brainwave: to fund their service through tageted advertisements based on your search and the results. Google has now become very rich, and has developed a whole range of other innovative services along the way. The article picks up on this history and talks about some of the problems that beset the search engine now - and why Google might be happy about this.

Another important part of the story is that Google made lots of very principled ethical statements about their company, their services, and the way they worked. In many ways they appeared the ethical opposite of Microsoft just at the time when people were beginning to recognise the depths of the problems with Microsoft and its monopolistic practices and shoddy goods (and realising that we'd been quite successfully conned into believing that MS software was still high quality).

Google was going to bring a new democracy to the net, a democracy perhaps better than any of our governments provided because it would be a true people's democracy. There's something worrying me about this idea, although I wish there wasn't. Anyway this democratic vision has been challenged on a number of fronts: the scanning of people's computers and their emails to generate targeted ads on their webpages and emails; the censorship thing in China; the dispute with the previous owners of Gmail.co.uk, and I'm sure there are more examples. There are some people who claim that Google is just turning into another big bad bully, trying to out-microsoft Microsoft. The link above touches on some of these issues too.

It also seems to me, and I don't know if I read this somewhere or inferred it, that the top results in Google searches are self-sustaining. We search for something, usually just try the top few sites, and then put links on to what we've found. The more links to a site the better its rating in Google, the higher the site is the more likely you are to create a link to it. This potentially stifles creativity and innovation because the smaller and less well-know sites are less likely to be highly rated.

Getting back on to the more positive, I do think the apparently person focused approach of Google is interesting. Most people say its a great place to work - lots of freedom and creativity and different ways of working (although I bet they still work ridiculously long hours). People used to think Microsoft did this, with all their plush offices and employee benefits, but some high profile desertions to Google suggest they're winning on this front too.

Another people-focused approach of Google is to support voluntary open source projects, both financially and in their wider working practices (although not as much as they should, and I believe they still retain trade secrets, patents and copyrights - and defend them).

One people-focused thing that most observers leave out of discussions about individual companies or services though, is that although access to computers and the internet is growing, there are still huge numbers of people who are simply excluded from participating in net culture or benefitting from web-based services. And many of the people who do have web access lack basic knowledge to enable them to navigate and use it effectively). I think any company worth its ethics must take responsibility for this too.

At the moment, while many people are benefitting positively from Google, it is still getting inexorably caught up in the cash trap. There is now so much money invested in Google, not just the giant company itself but all the other companies and individuals that syndicate their services like search boxes, and also all the advertisers ploughing revenues into the system, not to mention all the organisations for whom Google falls somehow into their business plans. This is why Google is silting up, and why it likes the mud.

This is just a microcosm of the current economic situation though. Everything seems to be getting silted up with bureaucracy and business plans and cash. I'm not sure if I'd choose the word democratic (although it's not a bad word), but if we are to try to go in this direction we need to recognise that this cash trap we're getting ourselves into is really damaging society, not to mention the environment, and freedom and democracy require breaking out of the trap.

This can't be done quickly. Like it or not, Google is trapped in the current economic system, and we don't want it to suddenly become so principled that it cancells all its advertising and goes bust. They really do seem to need to put their ethics where their search engine is and ensure that their results focus on high quality and relevance rather than advertising potential, and they really need to respond more directly to the problem of all the people who can't access computers effectively today. Then when they've made some progress against these hurdles they should look at the wider issues.

Of course this blog is powered by Google. I constantly use Google services at the moment (although I need them to support Linux more). I'd be interested to hear about more ethical alternatives (in fact various competitor blogs are good examples, and I will swap over sometime, but I'm stuck here for a bit now I've just started). I'm even listed quite high in Google searches despite the fact that my sites are so small and new and obscure.

Finally, I was delighted to find out today that if you search for "incorporeal transformations" deleuze on Google Canada, this blog is the top result!

Thank you Google, I love you
;-)

Welcome to the mental health hotline...

Mental Health Hotline (MP3)

File under humour.

Thank you to the Mental Nurse for this, and for adding me to their blogroll...

;-)

The sorry state of charity websites

It's not difficult. I had some spare time recently (my employers ran out of money to pay me!) and I learnt web design. I didn't intend to do this, I only meant to add some content to a structure that a volunteer had already created for me.

In the end I started almost from scratch in order to ensure ease of use and editing, adherence to web standards, and accessibility. It only took me a month to create a website for Advocacy Action. This is W3C compliant. It is Hermish approved. It does use open licensing. All pages on it validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Standards compliance helps almost everyone, especially people with disabilities, but everyone else too. You can check any site for standards compliance very easily if you go to the official validation page and enter the URL from the address bar. The first thing that is needed is a DTD.

I am shocked at the number of advocacy project websites that don't have this simple basic beginning. To see what I mean, right click on any page and then choose 'View Source' from the menu. Right at the top you should see something like this:

    PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

If you don't see this, the web designer has made no effort at all to make the site standards compliant. It automatically fails, and it automatically fails to give your browser the information it needs to help end users see what you want them to see.

If you have a website, check it, and sort it out - for the sake of the people you really want to read it.

If you want to learn how to do this yourself, learn CSS and read some articles at A List Apart, and other places like this, or here. Use colour resources like VisiBone's Color Lab. Dive into Accessibility or use the RNIB's resources.

And keep your site up to date. Create relevant links to other advocacy projects. Share links (the best way of making your site easy to find is to have links from other sites). Be part of the community.

Email me if you want any more info.: blogger[@]visctrix[.]net

Google cheat sheet

Here's a useful little 2-sided pdf that tells you all about google services and how to use them:

http://www.feedsforme.com/google/

Did you know you could use Google as a calculator? Google also own and run Blogger, the Picasa photo organiser, the Froogle shopping service and many other things.

Why free standards matter

I sent a link to this blog article to someone last week and I'd forgotten it already so I'll post it now that I've found it again.

Good reasons to use Firefox, Open Office and other free and open software, from a man who knows...

Why free standards matter