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Accessibility and the Web: Underlining the First Two “Ws”

8/07/2006

The history of information technology has always had a bias towards Western languages, and particularly towards English, making it less accessible to those living in other parts of the globe. One of the earliest, most commendable and still ongoing efforts to counter this west-centricity was the formation of the Unicode Consortium, the goal of which is to ensure that the character sets of all modern (and even many no longer spoken) languages can be understood by computers everywhere. (You can read an appreciation of the Unicode Consortium and its work here.)

For those with disabilities, of course, there can be a second layer of challenge to accessing the Web, and all that it can offer, requiring special tools in order to make equal opportunities available to all. As ever with technology, however, new layers of technology continue to be built on top of old ones to accomplish other and/or more sophisticated tasks, requiring that the same type of effort must often be replicated at each successive layer of technology or abstraction. Historically, that has meant that those with accessibility issues often find that just as they begin to achieve a meaningful degree of access to one plateau of technology, the next generation of products reaches the market. Unless existing tools are upgraded or new tools are created, they will at best be relegated to less state of the art platforms, and at worst risk being abandoned as those tools and platforms are no longer supported.

So it is with linguistic accessibility, as not only the Web becomes more truly World-Wide, but the devices able to access it proliferate as well. And some of those tools are (at present) ill equipped to provide equal access to all. For those with disabilities (such as less than perfect vision), the small screens of mobile devices present special challenges: not only can less text be displayed, but the size of that text may also be reduced and the screens may be difficult to navigate. At the same time, experts estimate that the mobile devices may be the primary means of accessing the Web in Third World countries in the future. So where would this leave the visually disable.

Briefly Noted: The Web and the Battlefield

8/05/2006

Like everything else in the world, military command and control has come to the Web. But with that transition come as many challenges as opportunities, as demonstrated by an article by Brian Robinson at Beltway-based Federal Computer Week's FCW.com, titled DOD arms soldiers, allies with information.

The story focuses on the goals and conclusions of the latest in a series of multi-national testbeds (Multinational Experiment 4 (MNE4)) intended to augment international military collaboration on the battlefield. Success in this type of military collaboration, as with other ventures that rely on the participation of multiple parties, involves a high dependency on standards. One lesson of MNE4, as summarized by MNE4 Technical Lead Maj. Pete Carrabba is this:

Open standards are essential for us to develop our own standards and applications. Proprietary products force us into long-term contracts and provide no flexibility for us to develop according to our needs.

FTC Reverses Itself, Blasts Rambus for Creating Unlawful Monopoly

8/02/2006

In what can only be called a stunning development in a high profile standards case, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unanimously reversed the earlier decision of one of its own Administrative Law Judges and ruled that semiconductor technology company Rambus, Inc. had "unlawfully monopolized the markets for four computer memory technologies that have been incorporated into industry standards for dynamic random access memory," or DRAM. The FTC will deliberate further before announcing the penalties to be levied against Rambus.

The FTC decision is only the latest in the series of dramatic reversals that has typified the course of a web of cases filed by Rambus against DRAM manufacturers; by the same manufacturers against Rambus; by antitrust regulators against Rambus; and by the same regulators against the same DRAM manufacturers, charging them with a price fixing conspiracy against Rambus.

This decision is very welcome to me on a personal level as well for two reasons: first, the decision is a vitally important ratification by the FTC of the need to enforce rules of trust in standard setting. And second, because I filed a pro bono "friend of the court" brief on behalf of 12 standard setting organizations (including both consortia and accredited organizations) in support of this outcome. The membership of those organizations totals over 8,600 companies, government agencies and universities, and encompasses a broad range of technologies. I've just received a phone call from lead FTC Complaint Counsel Geoffrey Oliver thanking me and the standard setting organizations in whose name the brief was filed for helping the Commissioners reach this decision, as well as welcoming any suggestions on the penalties that the Commission should impose.

Mass. IT Funding Bond Dies; Romney Seeks to Recall Legislature

8/02/2006

The Massachusetts IT funding proposal that Peter Quinn resigned in part to protect died on Monday when the State Senate failed to approve it before the 2005-2006 legislative session ended. However, Massachusetts Governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is seeking to recall the legislature for the purpose of pushing the funding through.

The funding bill calls for a total of $400 million in new borrowings, $250 million of which would be allocated to IT projects. The remainder of the bond would have funded a variety of other projects. Unfortunately, while the bill cleared the Massachusetts House late Monday night, it failed to achieve approval by Senate. Had the bond been approved, the State's IT department would have been eligible to receive additional Federal matching funds.

According to an article by Catherine Williams at MHT

The Massachusetts Information Technology Division reported earlier it was relying on the money to fund existing IT projects such as an integrated criminal justice system and plugging network security gaps....The money was also planned to fund upgrades to the state's child support enforcement system and the construction of a second data center for electronically storing state records, according to the department. New projects slotted for 2007 include replacing the state's aging tax collection and unemployment insurance systems. The bond would also fund systems to streamline payment collection for state fees....The last state information technology bond was passed in July 2002 for $197 million.

The failure of the bill to pass is not only a severe setback for the state's IT departments, but poignant as well, in light of the resignation of State CIO Peter Quinn in early June of this year. In his Christmas eve memo to his staff announcing his intention to resign, Quinn wrote as follows:

I have become a lightning rod with regard to any IT initiative. Even the smallest initiatives are being mitigated or stopped by some of the most unlikely and often uninformed parties. The last thing I can let happen is my presence be the major contributing factor in marginalizing the good work of ITD and the entire IT community.

Quinn frequently mentioned the prospects for the bond then before the legislature when explaining his concerns. Unfortunately, his resignation appears not to have been sufficient to speed the passage of a bill that was delayed by a number of slow-moving bills that were ahead of it in the legislative queue, including the landmark universal health bill passed by Massachusetts earlier this year.

Openness, ODF and Accessibility

7/29/2006

On July 27, the OASIS announced that the first draft update of ODF (version 1.1) has been posted for public comment. This draft is more than usually significant, since it seeks to make it easier for those that implement ODF to make their applications more accessible to those with disabilities.

If you are interested in accessibility issues or have been following ODF, then you probably already know that concerns over accessibility have factored strongly in the ODF story since last August, when the first public objections were made by the community of the disabled in the context of Massachusett's proposed adoption of ODF. ODF, it became clear at that time, did not offer the same degree of accessibility to those with disabilities as did Microsoft Office, when used in conjunction with a number of third party developer tools. This differential (not surprisingly) has been much commented on not only by those directly affected, by also by Microsoft and others who are not proponents of ODF.

Over the last year, however, there has been a great deal of effort expended, both within OASIS and elsewhere, on closing the gap between applications that support ODF and the composite Microsoft Office accessible desktop, further to a commitment by those involved to not only equal, but exceed that desktop in accessibility. Those efforts included formation of an accessibility subcommittee within the OASIS ODF Technical Committee charged with addressing accessibility needs within ODF.

Checking in on the ODF Alliance

7/28/2006

The ODF Alliance issued a press release containing further good news yesterday, providing a good excuse to check in at their Website to see how that organization is doing. The answer appears to be rather nicely, thank you, with membership standing at "nealry 280," representing 43 countries according to the press release. A recent addition to the membership rolls is the City of Bristol, which earlier this year announced its adoption of Sun's ODF-compliant StarOffice for its c. 5,500 municipal employee desktops.

That's handsome progress since the last time that I checked in on April 19 (138 members then) , and even more impressive when it's remembered that the Alliance was launched on March 3, 2006 with just 36 members.

The other piece of news in the press release is confirmation of an earlier report at the Open Malaysia Website that Malaysia is on its way to approving and recommending ODF for use by public employees. According to the press release:

This past week, Malaysia's standards body voted to propose ODF as a country standard, following the recognition in May by the International Organization For Standardization (ISO) of ODF as an international standard. After a public comment period that ends in October, Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is expected to formally endorse ODF by year's end, recommending the format for use by the public sector.

That's obviously good news for ODF, adding Malaysia to a growing list of countries (France, Belgium and India) that are actively considering ODF or moving towards public endorsement of technology based on open standards (Denmark and Norway). Massachusetts, of course, remains on course for ODF adoption.

The press release also addresses a third topic: Microsoft's recent announcement that it is supporting an open source converter project at SourceForge. That news was greeted with varying degrees of praise and skepticism in the press and by interested parties. Here's what Alliance Executive Director Marino Marcich had to say on this topic in the press release:

Briefly noted: Internet governance breakthrough (?) – I guess you had to be there

7/28/2006

A topic I've been following for about a year now is the struggle over "Internet governance," which has translated most directly during that time period into the following question: "will the US Department of Commerce give up control of the root directories of the Internet or won't it?" The debate over that question sadly monopolized the World Summit on the Internet Society (WSIS) for most of the life of that initiative (to date), and promises to continue to do so.

That's a shame, because the WSIS initiative was founded to bring the benefits of information technology and Internet access to all of the peoples of the world. Appropriately, it's administered by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) under the auspices of the United Nations, and if you're interested you can follow what's happened (and hasn't happened) over the past year by scrolling through the news stories, comments and blog entries availalbe in this folder, or by scanning this issue of the Consortium Standards Bulletin.

As you'll see from the materials in either location, ICANN's stewardship of the root directories is up for renewal (or termination) at the end of September of this year. Comments were earlier submitted on what to do when September has run its course, and a public meeting was held two days ago on the question of whether or not to renew the ICANN Memorandum of Understanding, or to put the job out to bid.

According to The Register's Kieren McCarthy, that meeting "should go down in Internet history," as the moment in time when the U.S. government "conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet." But the article then goes on to say:

However, assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer, the US official in charge of such matters, also made clear that the US was still determined to keep control of the net's root zone file - at least in the medium-term.

"The historic role that we announced that we were going to preserve is fairly clearly articulated: the technical verification and authorisation of changes to the authoritative root," Kneuer explained....

An XML Language for Emotions?

7/27/2006

The W3C announced the launch of an intriguing new "Incubator Activity" earlier this week that should test the limits to which XML, the lingua franca of all things IT, can be put. The new initiative is called the "Emotion Incubator Group," and its purpose is to take us beyond the narrow range of the emoticon. According to the group's Charter:

The mission of the Emotion Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to investigate the prospects of defining a general-purpose Emotion annotation and representation language, which should be usable in a large variety of technological contexts where emotions need to be represented.

That statement also illustrates the range of ways in which those at the cutting edge of standards development are trying to enrich the potential for human-IT interaction, even as they seek to increase the effectiveness of computer-to-computer innovation through Semantic Web standards.

What would an "emotion annotation and representation language" be all about, and is the creation of such a language actually practical? Let's have a look.

ODF Notes and Reports from All Over (Installment VI)

7/24/2006

Last fall, when things were moving quite rapidly in the ODF/OpenXML (then called "Microsoft XML reference schema") front, I did a c. weekly series of blog entries titled as above, pulling together most of what I thought was worth reading from all manner of sources on this topic. Today, there are a number of sites that are fulfilling that function (Bob Sutor's blog is one of the most thoroughly and reliably updated), so I have not felt that this to be as necessary a task as before.

Recently, however, the volume of news and commentary has risen to the point that perhaps there is a need for a new service for those interested in the ODF story: not a gathering, but a winnowing function, selecting those pieces of information, and those analyses, that are particularly worthwhile and shuffling them into some sort of coherently arranged bouquet of contrasting insights. That's what I'll try and do in this entry, and will continue to do on a periodic basis in the future if the chore seems to be worthwhile.

So here goes.

Live’n the WiFi LifeStyle: the iPod Bows to the Router

7/15/2006

Here’s an interesting bit of data from the wild: 8 out of 10 folks that own both an iPod and a wireless router would give up their cool music tool before they'd do without their boring, clunky router. The same percentage of those sampled would also give up their home phone before they'd sacrifice their ability to surf the Web from their favorite couch. The data can be found in a survey conducted by Kelson Research for the WiFi Alliance, the consortium that promotes IEEE WiFi 802.11 standards and, more importantly, certifies compliance with them.

Surprised? Don't be, because the iPod/iTunes system comprises a closed, proprietary environment, while WiFi products are based on a continuously evolving family of open standards, and that makes a far bigger difference than you might think. If this sounds like too simplistic an explanation, consider the following:

Let's look at the numbers first (gross sales and rate of change). What we see is that there are many, many more wireless-enabled devices in the field than there are iPods. According to research analysts In-Stat, wireless chipset sales hit 140 million last year, and should reach 430 million per year in 2009, by which time there should already be over a billion chipsets still in active use. 40 million of the chipsets sold last year found their way into home and small office/home office (SOHO) routers, and another 45 million into laptops and other mobile PCs. That leaves roughly 55 million more to be incorporated into phones and other mobile devices. Moreover, that 140 million number was up 50% from the year before.

In contrast, UBS Investment Research expects iPod sales to come in about a million units under projection this year, with about 39.8 million new iPods being bought in 2006, and a flattening in iPod sales growth after rapid expansion in prior years.

While comparing music players and Internet access numbers is not a totally fair comparison, the ability of WiFi to achieve such dramatically larger sales numbers is still instructive, since few new capabilities of any kind enjoy such explosive growth. When they do, though, its often because they are based on open standards, and from two resulting, related effects: the ability and likelihood of multiple vendors to build new products, because the standard upon which the new products are based is open, and the tempting size of the market demand that can rapidly evolve because of the rich selection of competing products. The result is sometimes referred to as a "virtuous cycle" of incentives and rewards to both sides of the sales equation.

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