Christian Heilmann, Stanford, 14/09/2008

Hello, I am Chris.

Software development has become stale a few years

ago.

Developers followed procedures, got certifications

and made money.

They also got bored out of their heads, having to wear suits and think outside the

box in small cubicles.

Hence they started a revolution.

Mash-Ups

A mashup is taking two seemingly unconnected pieces of information or

media and connect them in new ways.

It also means taking a system and inject it with third party

information.

That way you can illustrate a point or allow users to

unearth information or find connections hitherto

unknown to them.

Classic “Web2.0” mashup:

Placing photos or comments on a map.

More and more companies recognized the power of the

mashup.

You allow clever people you’d otherwise bore with

your operations to improve your product and reach others you’d never have

reached.

You also get a lot of work, testing and inspiration for

free by giving people access to your data and processes.

This is why almost every new product now comes with an Application Programming

Interface or short API.

APIs allow programmatic access to the interface other users consume – get the data

below the pretty façade.

The mashup culture blossomed and took on a

momentum of its own.

Breaking the structure of traditional summits and

conferences, unconferences and hackdays took down all

the conventions.

Unconferences are free but whoever comes has to

participate as a presenter.

Hackdays show that geeks unleashed can release an

amazing proof of concept or even real products in 24

hours.

But then the corporate empire struck back.

Companies recognized easy patterns in mashups and put

those into mashup generators to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build their own

mashups.

This effectively killed all creativity and cheapened the

idea of mashups – it is like high street stores selling

punk T-Shirts.

The fallacy was seeing mashups as a technical

phenomenon.

They are much, much older.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow_(physician)

HACKER!

John Snow helped the London authorities in 1854 to trace

back the reason of cholera to the drinking water supply.

He did so by placing the deaths caused by cholera on

a map and analyze the surroudings.

Another example comes from advertising.

James Webb Young’s

“A technique for producing ideas”

is a book about coming up with new ideas, presented in 1939 and published in 1965.

Amongst other things, he claims this to be about

combining old elements.

Mashups are a way to open up information and provide

access.

Right now developers are getting bored of mashups.

Corporate mashup generators and the sheer amount of

what has been done already have taken the sting out of

doing them.

Yet if you can get a geek interested in solving a

problem, he becomes an unstoppable force of nature.

This happened to me.

At Accessibility 2.0, an accessibility conference in

London, Antonia Hyde showed research results of

how users with learning disabilities have problems

using YouTube.

http://www.slideshare.net/hi.antonia/rich-media-and-web-apps-for-people-with-learning-

disabilities

This fascinated me, as I worked with people with

learning disabilities before, but never concentrated on removing barriers for them

when it comes to web accessibility.

Shortly before YouTube announced their API to build

your own YouTube Player.

I took the API and Antonia’s findings and built

EasyYouTube.

Screenshot of Easy YouTube

http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk

★ Easy controls

★ Option to search for videos

★ Copy and paste video URL to share

★ Select video size

★ Easy Volume Control

★ Option to show a playlist created with del.icio.us

★ Option to search YouTube

★ API to automatically open videos in Easy YouTube

★ Documentation how to host it yourself

★ Open Source

I put it online and asked for feedback from several

mailing lists.

The feedback was amazing!

Antonia was over the moon that something she budgeted to be not affordable for their

agency could be built in a day.

Blind people emailed me thanking me for a player that

is usable for them.

I did not do any extra development or took extra

consideration for screen readers.

Schools emailed me that it is great that small kids now

could watch YouTube videos!(I am not too sure about this one...)

I was happy – very happy.

I also realized that I was on to something.

To test the theory, I did some accessibility hacking at

Mashed08 – the BBC open hack day.

I built a screenreader-compatible interface for the BBC audio archive and asked

the audience if an accessibility hack event

would be of interest.

Feedback was good, and I won funding from Channel4

as a prize.

To prove the concept further, I created Easy Flickr:

Easy Flickr screenshot

showing donkeys

http://icant.co.uk/easy-flickr/index.php?s=donkeys

I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy

captioning interfaces.

I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy

captioning interfaces.

http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html

Which inspired others to hack their annotations API:

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/youtubeannotations/

And again others to build a whole web app about it:

http://www.tubecaption.com/watch?v=jpCPvHJ6p90&vcId=137

My final goal in this?

Make inclusive design drive innovation instead of

hindering it

This is why I am organizing

Scripting Enabled

On the 19th of September we’ll have a day of

presentations in London, England showing barriers of

web products...

... straight from the mouth of people who are blocked out because of their conditions.

On the 20th we follow with a hack-day where geeks will take this information and build interfaces that work

around these barriers.

I’ve got a venue, funding by Channel4, The Guardian,

Yahoo, JustGiving.com and the London Metropolitan University and Gamelab.

The event will be free, and hopefully one in a row of Scripting Enabled events.

So far, I have interest from several universities in the US,

too :)

Ultimately, this is about breaking barriers and making

people collaborate.

Geeks spend days on creating mashups with no real-life

impact.

Charities and companies spend a lot of money on IT systems and web apps that don’t deliver what they are

meant to solve.

Making those two parties talk and build things based on

real problems of real people will make us use computers

for good and drive innovation.

Right now web accessibility is a lot about assumptions and

not about removing real barriers.

This leads to terrible solutions.

We need an open mind and an innovative approach to

solve this.

I found out just two days ago that this is nothing new.

Sarah

Winchester

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Winchester

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dasqfamily/190093246/

Thanks!Chris Heilmann

http://scriptingenabled.org

http://wait-till-i.com