RYNSA: WORDS

Since starting my job lat month as a ‘computer literacy tutor’ with/for disabled adults in southeast Melbourne, I have become acutely aware of how difficult it can be for some members of our society (in this case Australia) to access certain institutions, services and cultural experiences.  These are things that individuals without disability often take for granted, and addressing them goes far beyond wheelchair ramps at the courthouse or braille consoles on public elevators.  It’s more complex than that.  Actually, it pretty much includes everything… even the web.

Last week, Xu Yan, who has been teaching herself all about CSS, discovered that my website is not particularly HTML compatible.  After the initial annoyance of this fact wore off, it got me thinking about universal access.  Right now the vast majority of people around the world who use IE (Yan says it’s around 55% now) cannot visit my blog without having to deal with some fairly obvious design flaws, issues that are not all that serious but may yet affect readability.  This then got me thinking about the small minority of global disabled internet users who probably face similar ‘compatibility’ issues all the time, whether it’s font size, color schemes, frame location, or something else that might make viewing a given website particularly difficult.

It suddenly seemed really, really unfair that this population of human beings, often the least-recognized or publicly accommadated minority in the world, couldn’t peruse the web with the same degree of care-free whimsy that I enjoy on a near daily basis.  It’s just wrong, really.  Everyone should have the privilege of reading my crappy writing, damnit!

Seriously, I am a little embarrassed that despite my technological (Web 2.0) interests over the years, in conjunction with my progressive political efforts, that I have not been more conscious about disability access until now.  In order to remedy this, then, I will be working towards redesigning my website, both the blog and the vlog.  I am therefore collecting URLs to code and design resources for making websites more accessible.  Currently my focus is on WordPress themes, and here’s what I’ve found so far:

Nice2All
Rapid Access

I’ll post more information as my research progresses.  Hopefully, time permitting, a new version of my website will be up an running within the next few months.

According to this Boing Boing post from last week, ccMixter is now planning on leaving Creative Commons to reform as an independent project of its own, and they’re looking for someone to lead the team. They’ve graciously opened up the project coordinator search process to include us everyday folks. So get those brilliant project proposals in quick! 

If you didn’t already know, ccMixter is a great website for finding legal and entirely downloadable music and music samples. It’s a tremendously helpful resource for media-makers trying to obtain some fairly high-quality tunes to support their various multimedia productions. I’ve used ccMixter a number of times for this-and-that video soundtrack, and I love it. It’s especially helpful in you’re in a pinch, and you need something interesting but not-too-distracting to play under the imagery.

Actually, I really hope ccMixter can find a suitable candidate for the job. On the FAQs page they blandly self-describe as a “community music remixing site,” though it’s really much more than that. Some feel, myself included, that ccMixter might just represent a prototype of what’s to come in mainstream media sharing–a kind of public platform for dynamic, transparent and almost amoeba-like flows of information between creators. It would be a digital ocean, if you will, wherein artists share, trade and build upon each other’s work outside the rigid boundaries of the land-locked, stagnant and corporate controlled intellectual property rights system.

Perhaps that’s a little naive, I don’t know. I’m still working on the theory…

This coming Sunday, June 1st (which is tomorrow), the newly-established One Laptop Per Child, Australia crew will be hosting a conference in Sydney. I’ve got another volunteer opportunity this weekend (more on that in another post), which makes getting to New South Wales virtually impossible. Otherwise, I’d probably be there. Maybe. I don’t know… meh.

My hesitancy stems form the fact that OLPC News (among others–TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Engadget), has been reporting on what appears to be a major shift in OLPC values. It seems that Nicholas Negroponte–the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and the proverbial grandfather of the OLPC project–has agreed to align himself and the initiative with Microsoft. The new generation of OLPC laptops will all include simplified versions of Windows XP.

The problem here, of course, is that this will happen at the expense of Sugar Labs, the newly-formed company that created the educational, open-source, GNU/Linux-based operating system that currently lives, albeit temporarily, on the OLPC XO 1. Moreover, this is a relatively clear departure from the stated constructionist mission of the whole OLPC project in that the use of proprietary software (Windows XP) subjects children, it is sometimes said, to “a regime of social control.” Windows, which makes up over 90% of all operating systems in use worldwide, represents a more hierarchical, capitalistic, top-down instructionism. Or at least that’s what the OLPC fans are saying online. 

Honestly, I’m on the fence about all this. The idealism behind Sugar, etc., is certainly admirable, but it may be a little foolish in the face of global poverty. There’s a tendency in the privileged world (ie, the United States) to confuse techy, middle-class intellectual discussions with reality. I would venture to suggest, however, that the heated debates taking place online now have very little to do with the impoverishment experienced everyday in the ‘developing’ world. Trying to choose between constructionism and instructionism, for instance, is a radically different bargain than choosing between your child’s education and food for the family.

My understanding here, also, is that the OLPC project moved towards XP precisely because poor countries were demanding it. Whether correct or not, government and community leaders in the ‘developing’ world felt that independent, open-source software like Sugar’s wouldn’t be as useful as XP. They wanted their youth to learn on an operating system that was considered ’standard’ around the globe, and common to practices within business, government, education, NGO, etc., of wealthier countries.

Despite the fact that it emboldens Microsoft’s monopoly, and contradicts the premise of the open-source OLPC project, I can’t blame the disenfranchized and impoverished for wanting XP. They are making pragmatic decisions that reflect difficult, real-world circumstances. In this regard, I suppose I would rather protect and promote the rights of marginalized people to make (potentially) bad decisions, than force-feed them an idea that may not be useful. I mean, the technology isn’t as important as the people.

However this conflict is resolved within the OLPC community, I do think it behooves social justice activists to educate themselves simultaneously about technological alternatives and real-world contexts. Not every good idea is a workable one. Were it so, we’d have discarded with neoliberalism a long damn time ago.