Pat’s Point of View

My wife is helping to organise a fundraising event for a friend with cancer:

A friend of my family, Maria Azzopardi (an ex-OLSH student) has cancer. She’s only 35 years old, has a husband and two children and may not live past Christmas. Her cancer is secondary and whilst it started out as breast cancer, it has now spread to her spine.

We’re doing some fundraising for Maria for her treatment and also to help her to spend as much time with her young children before her time comes to an end.

There will be a buffet dinner on August 4th with my brother Paul Fenech performing his Elvis show to help the cause.

I have attached a letter explaining what we are doing and trying to achieve. It’d be great if you could try to get anyone from work to buy tickets to the dinner, donate money or your company to donate vouchers, goods or cash which can be either raffled off on the night or auctioned.

Maria also has a website, there is an invite on the website to the dinner buffet. The website also explains her journey with cancer and I promise it’ll reduce you to tears even though she’s very positive and optimistic—it’s just the saddest story, one which I hope never to write.

On another note. I beg you all to take notice of the first paragraph of Maria’s story. Whilst she may not have thought it was anything serious at first, catching cancer early (of any type) is so important. If only we had the power to turn back time.

I’m sorry for the horrible message—but cancer is horrible. We’re all doing all we can to help out a friend in need. Any help you can offer will be much appreciated.

www.handz4mazz.com

Thank you for your time.

Jennifer Kennedy

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Despite having attained a much higher level of recognition and awareness, accessibility (and even usability) still faces a major issue; the lack of real user testing. Whether the reasons be economic or simply due to not knowing who to contact, most websites are still not tested at all.

Stefan Haselwimmer writes in E-Access Bulletin about a new service that hopes to solve this problem:

We launched the Usability Exchange in March of this year to overcome many of the problems faced by organisations wishing to conduct disabled-user testing. The Usability Exchange provides a database of both experienced and inexperienced disabled people, as well as an entire usability-testing platform for administering usability tests and collecting results. The time and
expense associated with carrying out usability tests is considerably reduced, making it cost-effective for organisations to conduct regular usability testing for the first time.

For more information read Stefan’s full article (scroll down to topic +11).

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, usability, web design, website testing

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/2C9FXUC08J7RT

You can’t say I didn’t ask.

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I’m fast approaching the day which all young men dread; the purchase of a family car. Arrgh! :)

By year’s end I shall be cruising the streets of Sydney in something safe, practical and economical. I don’t mind to be honest, it’s been over four years since I had to [was cruelly forced to] give up my beloved WRX and I’d drive any old bucket of bolts right now.

Taking the wife’s requirements (including “room for family additions”) into account, I have compiled a list:

• Subaru Forester
• Honda CR-V
• Nissan X-trail
• Mitsubishi Outlander
• Toyota RAV4 (5 door)

All circa 2003, and probably base models. This class of vehicle is an obvious choice for us, and for a lot of other young families, hence the explosion of “soft roaders” in recent years.

Other competitors not listed include the Hyundai Santa Fe (the 2003 model is as ugly as sin), the Ford Escape/Mazda Tribute (which I’ve read bad things about) and the Suzuki Grand Vitara (which is getting so old I’m surprised they still remember how to make them).

We’re not overly concerned about performance, nor hard core off-road capability. Just enough for the odd driving holiday and a bit of dirt/snow adventures. Bit of luggage room too.

If anyone has opinions, advice or feedback on any of these models please leave a comment. OK I don’t expect a rush of replies, I don’t think anyone reads this. At least the spammers like me, they must have families, perhaps they can recommend a car? :)

Now, back to thinking of a way to convince the Mrs that 20″ chrome wheels and twin 15″ subwoofers are valuable additions to any “baby-mobile”.

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I’ve been reading a few things lately regarding the issues with WCAG 2.0 (including Joe Clark’s recent article and Lisa Seeman’s email to the WCAG working group) and it occurred to me that perhaps resistance to accessibility is due to people’s fear of disability.

Let’s just assume for the moment that accessibility is just about catering for disabled users. It’s not, but that’s still how most people—particularly large corporations—continue to think of it, and it’s this group of users can be effected by inaccessible services in very significant ways well beyond mere frustration. When confronted with the thought of being disabled in some way, it’s pretty scary, no matter how forward-thinking, how enlightened or how much of a supporter of web-standards you are.

Whether it’s a vision impairment, a learning difficulty or motor control disorder, the thought that you might be in such a situation can be terrifying. It’s important to point out that many people who have disabilities as per medical diagnosis don’t consider themselves disabled, and live perfectly productive and fulfilling lives. My point isn’t that they’re ‘worse off’ or pitiful, rather that most of us would perceive an illness or loss of ability or faculty, as less than desirable. I think this might be more than enough to stop people from ‘getting into the head’ of the audience in order to understand their needs and build something that effectively meet those needs. Perhaps it’s just too scary to think about what it would be like to be in that position.

I’m not excluding myself from this, although I must admit I’d never though of website accessibility in this way before now. Really thinking about what it must be like to live with a mental disability, for instance, and trying to participate in our society, along side those of us fortunate enough to not have any such challenges, is terrifying. Not being able to live my life as I currently do, not being able to do the things I can do, not being as lucky as I am…makes me not want to think about it.

Now of course there are other reasons for disregarding the accessibility movement; particularly economic ("it costs more to make our website accessible") but it could be that we just don’t want to think about it. We ignore it. Maybe this is why we feel a lot better making some sort of effort towards accessibility. If we tweak some code or drop in an alt attribute, we’re doing our part which means we don’t need to think about it any deeper.

But I’d like to think that by going further and creating truly accessible content and services we can make at least one (possibly small) part of some people’s lives easier (and I’m talking about being able to buy your groceries online even though you have can’t use a mouse or keyboard, not ensuring the latest Big Brother gossip is viewable on a mobile phone). Wouldn’t we all appreciate that if we were in ‘their’ position?

See what people are blogging about: WCAG 2.0, accessibility, disability

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It must be tough to be rich; struggling to think of new ways to spend money. That’s why you see stuff like diamond-crusted mobile phones (and if you think that’s blingin’ crazy, how about $45,000 for a mobile phone?).

Last weekend I was looking around at power boards with a built-in surge protector (to combat our evil clothes dryer that causes a massive jolt to run through the entire electrical system of our flat). Your usual department store variety goes for about twenty odd dollars, for 4-5 sockets. But then I decided to take a look at the professionals’ choice at the local home theatre store; $280, truly the Rolls Royce of power boards! For the record it did have not only surge protection but filtration to ‘fix’ your incoming supply.

Another example? A US$1400 RCA cable. Yes that’s one thousand four hundred dollars for a cable. Even walking into your local HiFi store will present you with cables, brands like Monster, for well over $200 Australian. C’mon, for an audio cable? Their customers must be looking for excuses to spend money.

Whilst living in London I ventured into Harrod’s to look at engagement rings—my plan rapidly changed, about as fast as I turned around and walked out. But whilst in the jewellery department I saw a diamond ring for about £375,000. OMG! And since it was on public display for all the riff-raff like me to see, I’m sure it was at the low end of their range.

I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of expensive things for those who need to blow some cash, or are just too stupid to know better. It’s kinda like the mad rush you see happening around this time of year, as people try to write off as much tax as possible, by buying stuff to claim back. We’ve all heard of the friend of a friend who knows a guy who can write receipts labelled “business laptop” instead of “Xbox 360″ :)

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It gave me great pleasure indeed to watch this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the winning entry from Finland: a mighty meavy metal bash by Finnish band Lordi. No doubt they would win best costume too—if there were such an award—for their monster outfits.

Oh those whacky Scandinavians. Rock on!

PS: Unfortunately Malta were at the bottom of the ladder with only “un pont”, but at least they made the final. And don’t forget their fantastic second place last year. Surely per capita that’s got to be the best showing ever. (My wife is Maltese, if you’re wondering why I might care)

See what people are blogging about: Eurovision, Finland, Lordi, heavy metal

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I’ve finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.0 and I’ve also chosen a new theme. It’s a lot neater and cleaner and will be more accessible (soon). It’s still a work in progress but it’s generally much better than the previous design.

The new design is based on K2 (the son for Kubrick, the default WordPress theme). I like the nice clean typography and expandable layout…although it’s currently a fixed width until I work out how I want it to expand.

Hope you enjoy.

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If I agree with you, will you shut-up?

Bumper sticker

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Last night we went to see Andrew Strong at Revesby Workers. He’s the guy from The Commitments, the singer.

It was a fantastic night of Dublin Soul, blues and rock. Andrew has a fantastic voice and he’s quite a good guitarist too. There were lots of old favourites and a few of his new songs too. Of course he did “Mustang Sally” to perfection…there may well have been a riot if he didn’t :)

His sister Niamh was the support act, so it must run in the family, fairly similar stuff. For the finale Andrew pulled out some Hendrix and Steppenwolf, just to make sure the oldies woke up in time to leave! You may well think he’s all about soul but he definitely knows how to rock.

See what people are blogging about: Andrew Strong, the commitments, soul music

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