OK, now I have your attention I’ll confess that this isn’t exactly true… But I would direct people to a post of mine back in August 2009, where an associate and I proposed an idea for filtering tweets based on audience. I’m delighted that this has now come to life through Google+ Circles, but wonder if the problems I foresaw back in 2009 will still prove to be a stumbing block for Google.

I’m still getting familiar with Google+, setting up and expanding my Circles. I hope to blog more about it soon.

I recently bought a new phone. It’s great, but like most smartphones it’s taking a bit of time to get completely used to the complex interface.

On the second day of playing with it, I was browsing the web and came across a site which had Captcha. It was a Google product, and I had to complete the Captcha field to continue with what I wanted to do. The problem was, the image that it had come up with was terribly distorted, and I couldn’t make out the letters and numbers. I tried several possibilities, failing every time. Normally I would simply refresh the page to get a new image, but I hadn’t yet learned how to do that on my phone! I tried going back then forwards again, but it just loaded the same image. And crucially, there was no link to an accessible alternative.

It was one of those rare occasions where I had hit an absolute brick wall because of an inaccessible web design feature.

What did I do? Well, I could have fired up my laptop and done it on that. I could have closed the browser and logged back on, or tried again later. I did none of those things – the moment was lost, as was my interest in completing the task. But what if it had been something really important?

The experience reminded me of a few conversations I have had recently about web accessibility, and all of these had a similar theme – the unnecessary need for some users to take the long way round to access information.

In terms of web accessibility, the most serious type of problem is when a user can’t access information at all (for example, when no alt description is given to an image containing important content, such as navigational tabs). But there is also the slightly ‘softer’ issue where information is available, but the user has to work to get to it.

Are you sending your users the long way round? (Photo by incurable_hippie)

Someone recently posted to the Accessify Forum, asking whether it was a good idea to create an alternative accessible version of a website. I recommended that this be avoided, as it creates an unnecessary division between ‘types’ of user which is undesirable and potentially discriminatory. Making it necessary to click on a “Text-only” or “Accessible” version simply introduces another workaround which some users will have to use, and goes against the principles of inclusion and integration that Web Accessibility tries to promote. It reminds me of when you see signs for wheelchair access which take you round the back of a building – some people will have to take the long way round, and may feel quite inferior as a result.

Another example was during the recent televised UK election debates. When the second debate televised by Sky News hit the airwaves, there was immediate outrage across Twitter and the web at the fact that no live captions or BSL interpretation were available. This meant some users had to look elsewhere for the content – something they should not have had to do.

THERE ARE NO #SUBTITLES (why not?) on #leadersdebate it is NOT #accessible for 1 in 7 (70,000) #DEAF people @skynews you #fail!!! pls RT

An angry Tweet from Pesky People

Too much of the web involves these sort of workarounds for some users, and the problem seems to be that some developers think that this is good enough. Going back to the building analogy, there are often very reasonable factors which mean ramp access has to be round the back – for example, to comply with building regulations. However, there are far less reasons why a web site should require someone to take the long way round.

So if you’re a developer, give consideration to how you’re presenting your content and think carefully about whether you’re offering an equal experience for all your users. Forcing someone to take an alternative route or employ workarounds to get to your content, just as with my experience with Google on my new phone, may well mean they give up and go elsewhere.

Photo derived from a work by incurable_hippie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

A big year for Twitter

BBC News has a nice summary of the year on Twitter, looking at the news stories which were big on the micro-blogging platform. Twitter proved its worth by being at the heart of key events such as the Iranian election, allowing citizens to report from the scenes of protest even after other channels of communication had been cut.

Social Networking in general had a good year, with an ever-increasing expectation that companies should be using such platforms to talk to their customers. CNET has a brief look at the highs and lows for various Social Networks, focusing on how current front-runners Twitter and Facebook are evolving to stay ahead of the game.

Meanwhile, Mashable‘s Jennifer Van Grove has a look at Google’s 2009, reflecting on the search giant’s big releases and major accomplishments. It was undoubtedly a big year for the company, with the likes of Google Wave attempting to revolutionise the way we communicate and collaborate.

Back at the BBC, the technology team talk about the technology they loved in 2009, discussing many things you’ll have heard as well as a few you may not.

For those getting tired of reading, the Guardian’s Tech Weekly Team have a 40 minute podcast reviewing the year in tech, whilst Web Axe looks back at some of its best web accessibility podcasts from 2009.

The "Apple Glove"

Finally, the Register has a collection of quotes from the year as well as some of the best (of the worst) patent claims, including IBM’s bizarre noise-maker and Apple’s attempt to reinvent the glove.

Happy New Year!

Google has not taken a strong lead in producing standards compliant, accessible web sites. Although contributing to the W3C and other standards bodies, the many sites that Google produces do limit access to people with disabilities. Given the web presence that Google has, this is enough of a problem, however it is worsened by the fact that Google’s model is copied regularly by web developers looking for an industry standard to follow.

A new home for accessibility at Google

Google were impressively quick to respond, posting a link on the petition to a new official blog post entitled A New Home for Accessibility at Google, by accessibility product manager Jonas Klink.

The post announced a new website, www.google.com/accessibility, pulling in all of Google’s existing resources on accessibility. There are some impressive examples of the good things that Google is involved in, such as a new talking RSS reader for Android devices and their incremental improvements to WAI-ARIA support in Google Chrome. This is wonderful stuff to hear about.

Jonas goes on to talk about Google’s approach of “launch early and iterate” – whereby they get things out of the door early on and respond to feedback to improve their products, and encourages that very feedback via a specific accessiblity-bug reporting form.

Given the recent disappointment surrounding the apparent inaccessibility of Google Wave (see WebAIM’s blog post for a review), this all seems very timely. And whilst most of us would recognise that it’s not always possible to make new products 100% accessible right from the outset, especially where people are trying something new and innovative, it would be great to see the subject given higher priority in the development phase of the big players like Google.

The “launch early and iterate” mentality has many great strengths (and I’ve always liked the idea that beta is forever), but perhaps one of the risks of relying on feedback to focus your improvements is that, with a completely inaccessible product, you probably won’t be getting much feedback from the people affected the most – those who are completely locked out. Also, many of the issues from which Google Wave reportedly suffers are obvious issues – things which Google shouldn’t need to rely on feedback to spot. In that respect, cynics might even consider this an attempt to shift the responsibility onto the user, rather than the service provider, which is never a good thing.

For that reason, Google’s response is encouraging but not complete. It would be great to see some more specific commitments to developing accessible products – and not just from Google. We therefore need to keep the pressure up, respond to the invitation for feedback, and, crucially, support those users who are actually affected, helping them to provide the most valuable feedback of all.

Perhaps then we’ll be getting somewhere.

I recently had a great back-of-a-beer-mat brainstorm with @spartakan exploring the advantages of being able to tag Tweets (and other similar Social Networking content) by intended recipient and for the recipient to be able to filter them accordingly.

My angle was that my use of Twitter is purely professional, and I’m not that interested in the chatty element of it. If I could filter out the personal stuff, monitoring other people’s Tweets would become much more efficient and relevant. Equally, @spartakan had a problem on Facebook where both friends and colleagues have added him. Like so many Facebook users, he has found the blurring lines between work and social life to be a little disturbing.

Our thinking was that you could Tweet (or whatever) to groups of followers or friends based on some simple criteria. So you might post a Personal Tweet, for example, which would only go to followers interested in your personal updates. Equally, a Professional Tweet would only go to those following your professional updates.

Problem number 1: Friend or colleague – who defines the relationship?

From a followers’ point of view, I’d like to have control of what my status in relation to others is. For example:

• My relationship to person A is that he works in my field of professional interest, although I don’t know him, so I only want his professional updates.
• I am friends with person B and I only want her personal updates.
• I work with person C but see him socially so I want both personal and professional updates from him.

But what if it’s not up to me to set the status? What if it is up to those I am following, and person B thinks I’m interested in her professional updates? From my point of view, the system falls down.

Problem number 2: Appropriate tagging – who will bother?

The closest we’ve got to decent filtering on Twitter is through the use of hashtags. Using these, we can search for subjects which we’re interested in. It’s a crude, user-invented form of meta-tagging, but it works quite well. If we were to introduce additional meta-tagging, though, to enable this filtering, how can we be sure that people will do so appropriately (i.e. actually tag their professional updates as such)? Actually, I think we can be fairly sure that many people won’t.

Problem 3: Complexity vs adoption

The Professional/Personal model is a very simpistic one, and in real life we’d need many more categories. @spartakan mentioned that he’d like to distinguish between friends and family on Facebook, and this is a common issue (people not wanting their mum to see their photos of drunken nights out and so on). The trouble is that the more complex it becomes, the less likely people are to use it correctly (if at all).