Posted on

OpenAIR Competition 2014

A Plastic Brain

This year I volunteered to be an accessibility mentor to an Accessible Internet Relay (OpenAIR) project on Team AxIS and was surprised and pleased to be helping an advocacy non-profit run by Anne Forrest called A Plastic Brain in Austin, Texas. Like so many of us in the disability community, Anne advocates for people from personal experience. A Plastic Brain is for people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Anne “lives with persistent symptoms from a mild TBI that she received during a June 1997 car accident and continues to recover.”

Cognitive Connections

Nineteen years ago when my daughter Siobhan was just over three years old we finally got a diagnosis of Cri du chat Syndrome and I wanted to start an email list. Lacking my own server, I got a lead to The Brain Injury Information NETwork where, for free, they set up a list for me and I soon was communicating with people all over the world about the severe cognitive, speech, and motor delays common to Cri du chat people. I’m currently contributing to the W3C Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force and I also help out with the WordPress Accessibility Team. So when I heard that Anne is working on a WordPress site for people with cognitive issues and she herself lives with traumatic brain injury a lot of things just came together for me. I’m so very glad to be helping Anne and her husband Michael Crider because on so many levels there’s a personal connection. And like with so many personal connections in this distributed world some of us now inhabit, we haven’t even met yet!

Completing the Circle

Just to cinch the deal, the development team is part of Cognizant with headquarters in Teaneck, New Jersey. Where I was born. This is just wonderful! The development team is located in India and when we all had our first meeting I was very glad to hear that when clients require it, they add accessibility. Their team, led by Antonia Jayaraj and seconded by AnanthaKrishnan M (Krishna) also includes Aparna Rajan, Prasath Manoharan, and Renuka Subramani and they are all doing a great job and each of the team members, including Anne Forrest and Michael Crider have contributed multiple times to reaching milestones. The evening of our first meeting, for instance, Michael and Anne created wireframes and a day later the development team had a minimum viable product (MVP) up on a server in HTML. Wow! Go team!

Cognitive Challenge

So this brings me to the heart of the matter, which is the reason the team would like to win the competition. We’ve all done great things for vision, mobility, and hearing, but there isn’t quite as much research for cognitive disabilities. While the W3C cognitive taskforce is changing that, we aren’t done yet. Anne has done much to inform us about her needs and how she makes connections. For instance, she responds better to navigation on the left, so we’ve included that in the design. Low contrast allows her to function better, so though we are meeting the guidelines, the contrast is lower. If there are other OpenAIR teams dealing with cognitive disabilities the AxIS team wants to collaborate with you. I believe that winning will help focus attention on cognitive issues, and the work the international accessibility community needs to do on this topic will be advanced.

Posted on

World Information Architecture Day 2015

Global Conversation

This past February World Information Architecture Day 2014 took place in 24 cities, 15 countries, 6 continents. These stimulating events bring together an international community of world-class Information Architecture minds including academics, practioners, technologists, and business leaders for a global conversation. In 2015 there will be more cities, more countries, more events.

Not A Surprise

I attended World Information Architecture Day 2014 in Pasadena. We were given real world problems to solve for some community based projects and broke into groups to come up with solutions. The group I was in thought up ways for the Los Angeles Metro to increase ridership. When I brought up accessibility within my group I found that very few people knew about it. This is not a surprise.

Search Where The Light Is

I started doing outreach here in Silicon Beach on Jun 2, 2012 when I started the Los Angeles Accessibility and Inclusive Design meetup group. I immediately started going to User Experience meetings and talking to everyone. There is a wise saying: start searching where the light is. In Los Angeles the light is in User Experience with thousands of members and hundreds of active participants in two major meet ups and other groups.

Persistence

At my first User Experience (UX) meeting I introduced myself to someone and she told me that she did user experience research and I told her that I do accessibility. The next thing I knew she had translocated herself to the opposite side of the room. I’m persistent. I kept at it. I announced my meetup events and other accessibility events such as Accessibiity Camp Los Angeles, the CSUN conference, anything I could use to get the message out that accessibility was important and needed and wanted by many people.

Awareness

By the middle of 2013, the beginning of my second year of outreach, I would introduce myself to people at UX meetings and there would be a pause. Then slowly the person would say: “Oh, you’re that accessibility guy.” This was a big increase in recognition. From translocation to recognition in one year. Branding helped: @AccessibleJoe. I kept working the rooms. Some Global Accessibility Awareness Days have happened. They were a big factor in raising awareness. Thanks Joe Devon and Jennison Asuncion.

A Big Deal

Due at least in part to my outreach work the need for accessibility is being recognized by a mainstream organization. This is a big deal. The Executive Director of World Information Architecture Day 2015, Lara Fedoroff, has asked me to serve as the World Information Architecture Day Accessibility Director. Whitney Quesenbery is also helping. Lara wants to build accessibility into the events from the beginning. This means creating accessible web sites, paying attention to physical needs at the venues, getting accessibility information to event planners, and embedding accessibility experts into each team in each city.

Offer to Help

The offer to help make World Information Architecture Day 2015 accessible in all the meanings of the word will take teamwork. I’ve contacted a few accessibility experts here in Los Angeles and asked them to help with some preliminary user experience research being conducted by Elisabeth Bentley. I’ll eventually be reaching out to the world wide tribe of accessibility folks before this is over.