Category: accessibility

Infinite Canvas 6 With Rachel Nabors

Published on August 3, 2015

Last week I got to be on a podcast. This week I appear on a screencast with Rachel Nabors talking about vestibular disorders in general and how animation may affect a user on your site.

If you don’t know who Rachel is, she is an amazing illustrator, cartoonist, speaker and animator using all those skills to shine a light on the web can be a better place with the right kinds and amounts of animation.

We had a lot of fun recording it, but I need to get a better microphone, sorry for the scratchiness that my beard brings. Also, we had a few problems trying to record it. Running Skype, Camtasia, Quicktime, and all the websites we looked at kept crashing our GPUs.

The screencast is on Youtube, and you should totally subscribe. She hasn’t done one in a while and it could be another while before we see another, so unlike the podcast episode I did, I’m embedding the video here.

Enjoy! Hit us up on Twitter with any questions you may think of.

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Animated Gifs in Social Media Streams

Animated Gifs in Social Media Streams

Published on July 27, 2015

Last week I encountered a pseudo 3D animated gif from Doritos that autoplayed while viewing my Twitter feed. This gif was brightly colored, and its “3D” effect triggered a vestibular attack and migraine. As I looked more into the issue, it isn’t just Twitter who does this. It also happens in our Instagram, Vine, Facebook, and Snapchat feeds, just to name a few. Now some of you will tell me, “those channels are meant to work that way.” True, but what if due to advertising, or worse hacking, someone uploaded a gif worse than this Doritos one that autoplayed and triggered a photosensitive epileptic seizure? Who is responsible?

I would say whoever uploaded the gif is certainly responsible, but isn’t the platform as well? Do these really have to autoplay? When it comes to ads, is anyone checking to see if the ads meet certain standards? In radio and television, they don’t turn down ads because they don’t like the content, but if the ad promotes violence, cruelty, causes medical emergencies, or harm to the public, they will refuse to air it. I argue that those similar rules need to apply to the social networks we enjoy as a primary source of content.

I personally want an apology from Doritos for causing me pain. I know it wasn’t done on purpose, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been avoided. Good marketers and user experience professionals need to know the audience and if their audience might have a medical condition that this type of ad would bother, then need to change that ad.

I’m also asking Twitter, Vine, Facebook, Instagram and all other social media platforms to put controls that prevent autoplaying of videos and gifs. The user needs to have control over their experience if movement may trigger physical pain.

And for those of you saying I shouldn’t use the Twitter web interface, why is it there if not to be used? Typically I use my phone, but as a consultant I am on many different machines in a week, some of which can’t have clients installed, and sometimes I’m in buildings where my phone won’t work for security reasons.

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Human Operating Systems

Human Operating Systems

Published on July 21, 2015

When I speak with people about my chronic illness, there is often confusion on it. Many people think, “your pain [or dizziness] is just in your head” and that I can just let it go or ignore it. Yes, my disabilities are invisible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very real. When we meet people who are deaf, we can’t see what is physically wrong with them, but we believe them when they say they can’t hear us. Why don’t we believe people with other disabilities?

While at a meeting recently with a group of parents, we conducted a mindfulness exercise. We meditated on an itch we had on our body. The goal was to sit with the stress an itch can produce and yet not let it bother us. We couldn’t scratch it either. For some parents, the itch went away. Others let it bother them. I enjoyed the sensation, but then I think I have an unfair disadvantage that the group leader knows about and agreed.

One of the parents was curious, and since I’m not exactly shy about speaking of my disabilities, I expanded on it being chronic pain and dizziness. This father blew off my feelings and experience right away saying “It’s all in you head” meaning that I was making it up. I countered that it is in my head, but very real and that if I could wish it away I would in fact to do that.

Human Computers

This began a discussion that had me communicating in a way that seemed to connect with the other parents. If you have seen my talk, UX of Stairs, you have heard me mention the idea of human hardware and software. We are all really complex computers. We are made up of two main systems that are fairly standard.

The first is our hardware. We are all initially connected with the components needed to grow our biological hardware the same, but due to environmental changes, sometimes that hardware doesn’t develop the way it should. After birth we encounter a gigantic world that too is going to influence our hardware. But for the most part we are born with 5 input systems (5 senses), and two output systems (oral and physical).

We also come with a base operating system. One that turns the hardware on and keeps it running. It can take input and translate it to output. But most importantly it can learn. It can combine the input with algorithms we call emotions and creates a new output that is a subclass that we call art. And art comes in many forms. For some it is a visual output like drawing and painting, others produce auditory output like music or language, and still there is the expansion of the core physical output in the form of dance or sports. With training, anyone can process any input through emotions and produce any of these types of output, but for some it comes more naturally than others.

Once in a while you encounter something in your life that affects your software just as it could affect your hardware. This could be a happy event, or perhaps a traumatic one. This experience alters your input, output, or algorithms in such a way that when you experience it again (or something that reminds you of it), your reaction won’t be the same as someone sitting next to you who hasn’t shared that experience.

For some people, this event can simply be suffering lots of pain. Over time, you develop a tolerance for that pain. Sometimes, you are stubborn, like me, and try to move through it when you can’t make it go away. Additionally, your hardware, nerves in this case, may be more or less sensitive causing the input, not the algorithm, to give you a different tolerance.

My dizziness is a matter of my software being rewritten. The vestibular system is made up of our inner ear system, ocular system, and our sense of spatial awareness. Together these form a kind of internal gyroscope. Thousands of points of data are coming in through these systems every second of every day. Your brain needs to clean that data up and process it.

You subconsciously apply a filter to the incoming data and remove the outliers and extremes. This reduces the data to an average that can be easier to work with. I think this is how my algorithm actually works, except that my filter needs new parameters of what to filter. Right now, it doesn’t filter much. A couple years ago, somehow my settings loaded a new configuration file that turned the filter off completely. Over the last 30 months, I’ve been slowly adding them back in through experience and direct training. This makes sense to me as I have been able to slowly tolerate more experiences.

So what happens when my filter is broken? Imagine you are making coffee in the morning. You have your filter in the pot with the coffee in. As you start to pour the water in it strains through the coffee first, then the paper. But the coffee and the paper can only take so much water at a time. If we pour too fast we begin to see the water backup, the coffee grounds float, and eventually the water/coffee combo flow over the sides of the pot. This is what is going in my head. With too much stimuli or when a filter isn’t working properly, I simply can not digest the data coming in. Something will get lost and a mess follows.

Most of the time this means I experience aphasia. Aphasia comes in two forms, receptive and expressive. Receptive aphasia means I literally won’t know what you are saying or doing (usually words). I won’t recognize the sounds, or that they are in fact words. Any I do catch will not register their meaning. “In one ear, out the other.” is probably the best description of this.

Expressive aphasia is when I’m the one doing the communicating. Typically I stop in the middle of a thought or sentence. I’ll wave my hands wildly and move my mouth, but nothing other than gibberish comes out. I can see the concept right in front of me, but I lack the proper words to express it.

While technically the software is in my head, anyone who has tried to program anything (even a VCR clock), knows that it isn’t always as simple as forgetting the current settings and putting in new ones. With learning systems, we can’t delete those files, otherwise we corrupt the whole system. We must slowly reteach things to overwrite the current configuration. The algorithm will never be the same as the original as it always retains the history of what it previously learned, but with enough training, we can get close to the original. This is my hope.

Humans aren’t copies of each other. We are each unique in our hardware and software. The next time you meet someone whose software isn’t running the same as yours, instead of blowing them off, take a moment and try to understand how and why they process things differently. It will help you empathize and understand them. It will also help you expand your algorithms to make you a better person and technologist.

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Optimizing Working Remote

Optimizing Working Remote

Published on March 13, 2015

For the last eighteen months, I have been working remotely from my home in Wisconsin for a startup located in San Francisco. This has been one of the greatest adventures I have had in my life; learning a tremendous amount about the world of startups, better coding practices, how to make a remote environment work, and about myself. Today I want to share what I feel are best practices for myself & the teams I’m on working with to get the most out of being remote.

We live in the information age. The majority of our work is dealing with information and finances. The average worker goes into an office and works on a computer located in that office. However, there is nothing about that office that requires the person be co-located with all the other employees. This is especially relevant in the world of creatives.

Designers, programmers, UXers, and writers are in a particular advantage of not needing to be co-located. The tools that have sprung up in the last few years allows them to collaborate real time from thousands of miles away. Meetings can be held and accomplished with cheap (if not free) video and audio conferencing, unlike a decade ago when it cost tens of thousands of dollars for a quality, yet unreliable rig from Cisco.

Recent studies actually show the trend in “Open Office” plans are actually harmful to productivity, primarily in creatives. Most of them need to get in a zone to produce their best work. The lack of office doors, intrusion of email and IM, and chaos of noise consistently pokes holes in a person’s ability to achieve this zone. Working remotely can actually remove these distractions and introduce more zone times, thus more productivity. So how can you make this work?

1. Commitment

There has to be a commitment, not just on the immediate team, but from the executives on down to having successful remote employees. No matter how dedicated a manager is to having the truly best players regardless of location, if someone up the chain isn’t 100% behind the idea of remote workers, they will poison the whole thing.

It will likely start slow and unnoticed, but it does slowly creep its way in.

2. Communication

Since you are working from home, it becomes harder to look over your shoulder, across the aisle or walk around the corner to ask a question. The people just aren’t that close. Communication needs to find a channel where people can talk, not just one-to-one in IM, but in a team setting. Barriers need to be sought out to lower the friction of a quick check with a coworker to solve a problem.

This starts with a quality group chat application. It could be as simple as using IRC on Freenode, or using tools like Slack, FlowDock, and HipChat. These permit the one-to-one communication, but are really built to replace the shouting over desks that happens in the office.

When using your chat application, each team member needs to communicate with the rest of the team when they are available. There will be times when you need to log off chat, be it to get lunch, take a meeting, run an errand, but most likely to create a zone state. Instead of just dropping off or logging out, send a message first. Let your team know you are dropping off, why, and how long you expect to be. Greet them in the morning and say goodnight before you leave for the night.

This little courtesy will go a long way. The better you are at it, the more time you can take to be in the zone. If you have hours that you work the best during, block those out on your calendar & show yourself as busy. When those roll around, log off and focus.

Whenever possible, step up the communication from text to voice or better yet video. Daily standups or check-ins should be over video. Any meeting as well. Find a tool where you can screen share, like Hangouts, Slack, HipChat, or Webex. Whenever the discussion is not just social and more than a few quick volleys of text questions and answers, jump into a video chat. Let people see your face. Share screens and collaborate on the project, paid programming, design critiques, or joint editing all bond the team players and actually produce better results faster than passing them back and forth in email.

3. Social Inclusion

A hard thing to deal with as a remote worker is the lack of water cooler talk. The average worker spends 40 plus hours a week at work and an additional 10 commuting. If you sleep 8 hours a night, then you family and social time is reduced to 62 hours, and half of those are your weekend. If you’re like me, they get consumed running errands and doing work around the house. There isn’t much time to see friends or family.

This is why having social relationships with your workmates is important. With the amount of time we spend in work, we need to get along and share experiences. As a remote worker though, you are often working at home, alone. Having a communication with the team that is less formal than the rest of your meetings builds this bond. Set up an “Off Topic” room in chat where people can be themselves and let loose with the gifs, YouTube videos, and jokes.

One of the more successful teams I’ve worked with would do daily standups via Hangout, but every Friday after standup they would have a “Show & Tell”. One team member would put together a presentation, preferably not related to work, and share with the team. This gave everyone a chance to really get to know who they are and what they enjoy. I learned how to make a roux, how to grow hops and even a bit about hockey.

If your team is split remote and in the office, make sure to only throw team events that can be shared by everyone. This doesn’t mean you can’t go out and have dinner or get drinks after work to celebrate, but make sure to create an event where the remote teams are able to participate.

Needs some ideas of how to include remote workers in a celebration event? Try some of these:

Send them a meal! Call up a local restaurant they like, order their favorite dish and have it delivered when the rest of the team is having lunch. Make sure to put them up on video chat in the meeting room so everyone can talk.
Movie night! Find a campy or favorite movie on Netflix & set up an audio chat. Have everyone on the call start the movie at the same time and enjoy a little MST3K action with team by snarking, sharing trivia, or playing games based on the flick.
Game night! There are ways to play a variety of games online or over video. Great examples are Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons (checkout Roll20), Pictionary (Using Scoot & Doodle), or Trivial Pursuit.
Cooking lessons! Get a volunteer to teach how they make their favorite recipe. Send out the list of ingredients a few days before hand so all the participants can get them, then teach from the kitchen while everyone cooks. Rotate out the chef so everyone can be the teacher.
Book club! Pick a book, set a time, get some wine and discuss over video. I participated in a remote sci-fi book club that met monthly to discuss the book. We had dozens of folks turning up on the chat. I’ve also done a tech book club, where we would read a couple of chapters a week and discuss how to implement these in our own work.

4. Eliminate Distractions

Now that we eliminated the problems of going remote and staying in tune with the team, there are two things prevent remote workers from being productive at home. Good remote workers know how to limit distractions. They also know how to balance their time. When the you don’t have to leave the building, it becomes easy to get drawn back into work.

Set a routine up. Every morning I get up with my kids, get them out the door to school and feed the cats. Then I shower. Sure, I could work in my PJs, or even without pants, but by showering, I’m setting a stake in the ground saying, “My day starts now.”

I’m not good at taking breaks. So I started using the Pomodoro technique. I set a timer for 25 minutes. During that time I work. No Twitter, Facebook or Youtube. I’ll mute chat and email. When the 25 minutes are up, I’ll take a ten minute break to do some stretching, get a drink or food, head to the restroom. When I come back, I start another 25 minutes. Every few work slots I dedicate to catching up on chat, email, or any other communications I need.

I also have an alarm set to remind me to eat lunch. If I get in a flow, or worse and have a bunch of meetings in a row, I forget to eat. Taking care of yourself first is the most important thing when working remote. I have another alarm set to end my day. Yes, occasionally I run over, but I try to keep my work day under 10 hours. When I hit that, I shut down anything work related, help my family with dinner prep, and enjoy a nice evening with them.

If you have a problem staying off social media, set filters on your hosts file or your router that prevent you from going to those sites during work hours.

Remember you are working. Don’t do house chores unless you are on your 10 minute break. And if you have little kids or pets, get a door and close it.

One more thing I try to do daily is go out for a walk. It’s hard in the Wisconsin winter, especially for someone who is already unstable, but getting out for 20-30 minutes can really refresh you brain and your body.

Last piece of advice I have for remote workers, find an excuse to leave the house for at least an hour every couple of days. It’s best if you can meet with friends. Just don’t let yourself become accidentally agoraphobic.

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A Word on Color

A Word on Color

Published on March 2, 2015

Over the weekend, there has been a lot of buzz about ‘the dress’ and whether it is blue and black, or white and gold. The reality of the dress is that due to white balance in the camera, lighting conditions and the fact that everybody perceives color a little differently the true color of the dress can not be known from that single photo. But it is this last piece I want to talk about today.

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People Driven Development

People Driven Development

Published on February 5, 2015

As a developer, I hear terms like behavior driven development and test driven development being used constantly. And these are good methods for building software. The concept being you establish an expected behavior of your software and write testing scenarios to prove your software meets that behavior.

Single Payer Healthcare

Published on October 31, 2013

I’m pretty lucky. I have a solid career and reliable income. I also have health insurance through my employer, unlike millions of other Americans. However, something happened this week that scared the hell out of me. I caught pneumonia.

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