Let’s say you pass a blind person walking down a busy sidewalk, tapping a cane in front of her. Now let’s say that someone sneaks up on her and sticks out a leg to trip her up, putting it between the cane and her legs so that it will not be detected before the unfortunate victim has fallen face-first onto a concrete sidewalk. Let’s say that you ask the assailant why the hell she indulged in such a senseless act of cruelty, and her baffled reply is, Jesus! I was just playing a practical joke. I didn’t realize that people walking down the sidewalk might not be able to see!

Unfortunately, this is not very different from how many Web designers treat the blind on a regular basis. Sites are frequently designed without any thought at all for how people who don’t have normal sight might be able to access them. I’m not saying this to be preachy; bad, inaccessible web design is a sin I’ve certainly been guilty of in the past, and one that I have to make a conscious effort to overcome. It’s not easy just to sit down and produce a website that will be accessible to people with radically different ways of browsing the web. But even when the right thing to do is hard, it’s still the right thing to do, and accessibility is something that we should all seriously think about, and act on, starting right now.

Most of the sins against accessibility on the web, though, are sins of omission; people fail to make use of web design features (such as proper semantic markup or alt text for <img> tags) that make things easier on the blind. There are, however, those who do worse than that: who indulge in sins of commission by breaking standard web features and actively making their sites unpleasant, or simply impossible to use, for people who don’t have normal sight. Sometimes they do this by implementing important sections of their website with glitzy and completely inaccessible technologies like Flash. And sometimes they do it because they think they have legitimate business reasons for trodding all over basic Web standards.

As much as I love Google, it looks like they have decided to put themselves in that latter camp with their proposed free e-mail service. Google, apparently, is worried that people might reverse-engineer their webmail interface and use it in unauthorized ways; in order to get around this they have apparently decided to override basic web conventions (such as, you know, using <a href="..."> for links) and implement the interface through scripting hacks. Mark Pilgrim discusses the astonishing number of usability landmines in his demolition-review of the Gmail interface:

Gmail is the least web-like web application I have ever seen. It requires both Javascript and cookies in order to load at all. It uses frames in such a way that prevents bookmarking and breaks the back button, and frames can not be loaded in isolation because every frame relies on scripts defined in other frames. The entire application appears to have been designed to thwart reverse engineering (of the YahooPops and Hotmail Popper variety).

Furthermore, the most innovative feature of Gmail—the global keyboard shortcuts—appears to have been designed by vi users (j moves down, k moves up, and we are expected to memorize multi-key sequences for navigation). Yet by using fake links everywhere, Gmail throws away the most basic web feature, breaks useful browser-level innovations like Mozilla’s “Find as you type”, and breaks third-party products like JAWS and WindowEyes. So the target market for Gmail appears to be vi users who use Internet Explorer, and have a working pair of eyes.

In short, the only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.

Lots of people have raised privacy concerns about Gmail (see, for example, CultureCat’s remarks on Gmail and the recent Slashdot thread); I think these concerns are understandable, and worth raising, but more than a little overblown. I’ll have more to say on that in coming days, but for now I want to say that this ought to be considered a complete show-stopper. There is no excuse for interfaces that discriminate against the blind like Gmail’s planned interface does. No-one with a conscience could allow their company to go forward with a service like this. I can only hope that Sergey Brin and his compatriots will prove that they have one–by thoroughly rethinking what they are doing, and fixing their interface so that it does not needlessly make life harder for the visually disabled.

For further reading:

• Rad Geek People’s Daily accessibility statement
• An excellent resource on accessible design is Mark Pilgrim‘s web book, Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible website.

At last, a bombing campaign that I can support.

As it turns out, certain anti-Semitic imbeciles have gotten their nutsoid conspiracy site (charmingly entitled JewWatch, which I shan’t link here, lest it throw off the GoogleBombing) listed as the number one site returned by a Google search for the word Jew.

But there’s a campaign afoot–just in time for Passover–and that is about to change.

Sporadic GoogleBombing sorties have been lighting up LiveJournal for a the past few days; today, Alas, A Blog is letting loose, and the campaign is spreading out through other political weblogs. It’s time for a ruthless carpet-bombing of the whole area. So, if you have a web page or weblog, and if you prefer objective, factual information about Jews to raving fascist conspiracy theorists, here is how you can help out:

1. Go to your webpage, weblog, LiveJournal, or anything else that Google can see. If you don’t have one, get one — set up a free website from Geocities, Angelfire, Pitas, BlogSpot, or wherever you like. It doesn’t matter where. Just sprinkle it with a bit of personal information (or put up that huge site you’ve always dreamed of), and remember to add the Google bombing code somewhere on your page (see below). You can help even more by helping to spread the idea further: provide a link back to this page or to the post from Alas, A Blog, or provide your own explanation of what the GoogleBomb is and how people can get involved.

2. Somewhere in the HTML on your site, include the following snippet. You can either include it in the HTML of updates themselves, or in the linkroll. The more frequently you update your site with this HTML snippet present on it, the better the results:

   <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew" title="WikiPedia: Jew">Jew</a>

   Which will result in a link like this:

   Jew

3. Add the URI for your website to Google if you haven’t already.

And from there, watch the magic of precision GoogleBombing work!

Onwards!

–The Management

P.S. You may notice that I have added a Precision Bombing section to the linkroll for all my pages; this drastically boosts the number of pages supporting the GoogleBomb, and also ensures that the support won’t drop when my initial post scrolls down past the bottom of the front page.

I’d like to interrupt the recent stream of political posts for a moment to geek over the prospects of robotic automobiles. Well, not quite; there will be a bit of political grumbling before the end, and there are a few mixed feelings about the technology. But first–the robots!

DETROIT, April 3 — The modern car does not have to guess your weight. It already knows.

It watches how you drive and it can pull a Trump. Skid, and before you can blink, you’re fired — the car is driving for you, if only for a moment. Cars today can decide when to brake, steer and can park themselves. They can even see.

In short, the back-seat driver now lives under the hood. And it does more than just talk.

This is all technology on the road now, if not in a single country or car. But industry engineers and executives view it as the start of a trend that will play out over the next decade, in which automobiles become increasingly in touch with their surroundings and able to act autonomously.

…

Diminishing returns from air bags and other devices that help people survive crashes have led to a wave of new technology to help avoid accidents. Or, if an on-board microprocessor judges a collision to be inevitable, the car puts itself into a defensive crouch. Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely.

This trend is made possible by the car’s evolution from a mechanical device to an increasingly computerized one, in which electronic impulses replace or augment moving parts. That means microprocessors can take control of the most basic driving functions, like steering and braking.

At the same time, there is a parallel evolution in sensory technology. Most advanced safety systems are equipped with sensors that look inside the car, tracking tire rotation, brake pressure and how rapidly a driver is turning the steering wheel.

…

Japanese automakers have pushed the boundaries of these technologies farthest in their home market, a society with an affinity for gadgetry. Toyota recently introduced a car that parks itself.

I love gadgets. And while I like having a car available, I hate the routine unpleasantness that goes along with driving most places you need to get. A self-parking car is just so tomorrow–and so nice a solution to one of the more routine frustrations of driving, that it will leave my geeky soul all a-glow for weeks.

I do have to confess, though, that the glow wears off a little when I think about it more. Sure, I’m all for intelligent machines–and robots, no less! And sure, I think that increased road safety is all for the best. But–as Thomas Landauer pointed out back in 1996 in The Trouble With Computers–all too often we end up wasting a lot of productive energy by investing it in sophisticated technological solutions to problems that were created by the inappropriate application of technology in the first place. Landauer discusses this in the context of uncritical transfer of tasks to the computer; but it’s no less true of transportation.

Think of it this way: the reason that people are working on sophisticated robo-cars is because when you have millions of people individually driving cars on crowded streets at high speeds, it makes it all too likely that a lot of people will crash into each other and get killed. One way to do this is to pour a lot of technological effort into making the cars more aware of their surroundings and able to automatically take actions that will reduce the likelihood of a crash, and reduce the damage if one occurs.

Another way to get cars to carry a lot of people without running into each other is to tie a bunch of them together, move them as a unit, and call it a train.

But trains have floundered over the past century while automobiles have flourished. Why? Well, not because stressful, dangerous, polluting, rage-inducing car commutes are really how the average person wants to get from place to place; it has a lot more to do with the fact that the various levels of government in the United States have effectively forced us to adopt automobiles as our method of mass transit through creating a cartelized financial disaster-area in the train industry, and by pouring billions of dollars every year into subsidies for creating and maintaining free highways.

Don’t get me wrong. I wish I had the resources to get myself one of those self-parking cars. I think a future filled with robo-mobiles is one I’d like to live in. But I also appreciate a simple solution to what ought to be a simple problem. So two cheers for robo-cars, and one boo held back for the Interstate Highway System.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled jeremiads against the Bush Administration.

FLOSS advocates — and anyone who likes excellent software for free — rejoice! OpenOffice.org has released its latest milestone release: OpenOffice.org version 1.1.1, a new version of OpenOffice.org 1.1 with scads of new bug fixes, a couple new features, and better performance than ever. OOo is a full-featured, high-quality, open source office suite, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a vector graphics drawer, and presentation software. All the software can read and write files from Microsoft Office, but it also features an open, XML-based standard file format, and it can even export documents to PDF and presentations to Flash. Download it today! You have nothing to lose but your licensing fees …

So I had this $25.00 gift certificate for Google AdWords, and — foolish me — thought that I might use it to advertise my site. After a few hours in the big leagues, however, I got this e-mail greeting in my mailbox:

Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:12:57 -0800

From: <adwords-support@google.com>

To: …

Subject: Your Google AdWords Approval Status

Hello Charles,

Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. After reviewing your account, I have found that one or more of your ads or keywords does not meet our guidelines. The results are outlined in the report below.

…

SUGGESTIONS:

-> Content: At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain language that advocates against an individual, group, or organization. As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site.

Well, that’s fine. Google has the right to determine what they will or won’t run ads for. But I’m a bit puzzled by the application of the standards being cited. My reply:

Dear Google AdWords Team:

Thank you for your recent e-mail concerning my account with Google AdWords. While I understand that you have every right to determine what will or will not be advertised through Google, I have to confess that I’m a bit mystified by the reasons you have given here for suspending the ad campaign for my weblog, http://radgeek.com

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:12:57 -0800, you wrote:

SUGGESTIONS:

-> Content: At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain language that advocates against an individual, group, or organization. As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site.

Again, you’re fully within your rights to choose what you will or won’t advertise. But I’m having trouble understanding what it is on my website that constitutes language that advocates against an individual, group, or organization. Of course, my website carries a great deal of political content; and since it carries political content it contains some entries that are critical of other people and organizations. For example, lately I have carried items criticizing Samuel Huntington’s and David Brooks’ writings on immigration, condemning Virgin Airways’ plans to install urinals in the shape of women’s lips in the JFK Airport clubhouse, criticizing President Bush and condemning the terrorist bombing in Madrid, and encouraging people to attend the pro-choice march in Washington DC in April. All of these items might be construed as advocating against some individual (such as the President or David Brooks), some organization (such as Virgin Airways or al-Qaeda), or some group (such as misogynists). But what is the line between merely disagreeing with someone or some group, and presenting views in opposition to theirs, and language advocating against that person or group? I would understand if AdWords simply did not accept political ads, or ads from sites trading in political criticism. But THAT is surely not the case. Consider the following typical AdWords results from a search for the keyword republican:

“The Passion of Clinton”
and other Democratic nonsense
New & Satire: We report You despair
www.affunnystan.com

Build a Stronger America
Support the RNC and the President’s
Compassionate Conservative agenda.
www.RNC.org

The Right Wing Conspiracy
Proudly become an official member.
T-shirt, free newsletter, and books
RightWingConspiracy.org

John Ashcroft Gets Sexy?
The Ashcroft Sex Film Contest
Celebrity Judges – Win $1,000!
nerve.com/promos/videocontest

All of these sites carry strongly-worded political content, and all of them criticize specific individuals and organizations. Or consider the following AdWords search result for the keyword feminism:

Feminist Fantasies
Essays on feminism in the media,
workplace, home, and the military.
www.eagleforum.org

(This is an ad that leads directly to a page containing a great deal of advocacy against feminists as a group, and advertising a book which is devoted to the same.)

I’m not writing to suggest that these sites should be suspended. Rather, I don’t understand what the salient differences are between the content at these pages and the content at http://radgeek.com/ such that the former is acceptable content for advertisement through Google AdWords and the latter is not. Could you explain to me further why this is so–or perhaps give some specific example of the nature of the problem? If so I would be much obliged. I really appreciate the service that Google makes available through AdWords, but I don’t understand the policies and if I don’t understand them, I fear that this will leave me unable to choose to advertise events or products through your service in the future. Since I would like to have as productive a relationship with you as possible, I hope that you could either make clear to me what the problems with my site are, or — if there are not such problems — reinstate the account.

Thank you very much.

Charles Johnson
Rad Geek People’s Daily

Of course, I am not an impartial observer of my own website. Is there something that I’m just not getting here? Is it because I called the President a dickhead? Is it because my recent slam on John Ashcroft wasn’t accompanied with a snarky porn video contest? What is it? If you know, help me out here–if I’m going to be too offensive to The Powers That Be to run on Google AdWords, I’d at least like to know what it is that I’m doing right….