Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: citizens online

Showing posts with label citizens online. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Help break down one of the last silos of the web

One of the least spoken about silos restricting the web is the one locking disabled people out.

No one gets to erect a public building without thinking about access for all – but websites – great and small – seldom dignify disabled folk with the same amount of thought.

Stop and consider how lucky you are for a moment; you the majority who think nothing of reading what’s on the screen, hearing it, seeing it, interacting with it through keyboard, mouse, touchpad, mobile phone, touch screen and more.

For a very large number of people getting information from the web, and engaging in the economic value generation connection brings, cannot be taken for granted.

There’s a disabled person out there right now who could help you solve your current problem, point you at something you need, join you to make something you care about happen. But they can’t because he or she is locked in a silo marked ‘no access’. For every excluded person the web ( all of us) loses an opportunity to be greater than we are. This matters... to you!

FixTheWeb is a charitable attempt to break down that silo – to connect more of us. It’s got backing from key stakeholders in the voluntary sector, support from Stephen Fry and a good stock of volunteers already wading in.

It’s doing great. But it needs to do better. And that’s where you come in.

Sure, come sign up. Offer your dev or design services of course. But fundamentally the short term requirement is cash to drive it to the next level.

So if you or your company has some cash set aside for charitable works, please consider FixTheWeb, right now. If you can’t – please pass on to someone who may be able to help.

Thanks

Stephen Fry on FixTheWeb:

“We all expect a few glitches when we go on line, but when it comes to accessibility for disabled and older people, the problem is colossal. Fix the Web is doing something about it in a positive and practical way – I urge you to get involved and help get this problem fixed. This campaign gets to the very heart of the problem – it’s pure genius!”

Disclosure: David Cushman is a Trustee of Citizens Online, the charity leading FixTheWeb. For more details contact the co-ordinator.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Join 10,000 of us and Fix The Web for all

I'm happy to say I have some small involvement in the Fix The Web campaign that is being launched today - and I hope you'll be able to say the same when you've finished reading this.

Fix The Web is a platform for making the web a better place for all of us by making it a better place for disabled users.

To make that seemingly daunting task a do-able one, we're turning to the crowd to join us in identifying where the issues are and in helping by working together to fix them.

The web is a wonderful place but it places obstacles in the way of millions of disabled people. They are being excluded by unfriendly navigation and other poor user experience issues.

Every person lost to the network halves its value. So it's in all our interests to remove the barriers to participation for as many as possible.

To compound the problem for disabled users, it is often difficult to complain about the offending sites. Fix the Web (http://ww.fixtheweb.net) offers a quick and easy way to register complaints. AND it introduces a volunteer-led process for those complaints to be reported back to website owners to get them fixed.

And there are big financial incentives for site owners to get them fixed - with £50bn-£60bn of spending power in disabled people's pockets in the UK alone.

With Fix The Web process of reporting an offending url is easily done in under a minute:

Through a form on the site: http://ww.fixtheweb.net,
via Twitter (#fixtheweb #fail, url and the problem)
by emailing post@fixtheweb.net.

Fix the Web is an initiative of Citizens Online a national charity, of which I am a Trustee, which campaigns for internet access for all.

Citizens Online believes disabled people should not be expected to fight for a better web alone. So Fix the Web is recruiting a taskforce of tech-minded volunteers to champion the cause and report problems back to web owners. The project aims to have 10,000 volunteers dealing with 250,000 websites within two years of launch.

You or someone you know can help. So please join in or share - or join in and share.

To offer your technical or other support to Fix the Web visit: http://ww.fixtheweb.net. Maybe someone would like to offer to design a logo...

And if you can do nothing more than pass this on, please do that.

Thanks.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Join me in celebrating Britain's digital heroes

Each year Citizens Online (of which I am a board trustee) opens a wonderful awards programme which offers £5000 for the TalkTalk Digital Heroes winner.

The awards celebrate people who use digital technology to bring about positive social change.

The 2010 TalkTalk Digital Heroes Awards is the UK’s only scheme to reward the amazing individuals who are using digital technology to benefit their local communities.

The awards will be given to outstanding individuals, working within UK community groups or charities, who are using the power of digital technology to implement bright ideas which bring about positive social change. The awards will be used to fund both new and existing digital projects.

Last year our TalkTalk awards saw an incredible response with over 30,000 public votes deciding on 12 truly inspirational winners. Please join me in trying to spread the word even more widely this year.

Don’t leave it too late. Deadline for entries is September 30th.

More on the awards and how to enter at: http://www.talk-talk.mirror.co.uk/

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Accessibility and your responsibility to the network

By (almost) anyone's count, stats, vibe, gut, whatever... 'social media' is becoming the dominant form of media across the world.

We are collectively and globally spending more of our time taking part in it than we do passively receiving all the other broadcast media put together.

And with that position of dominance comes responsibility.

In large traditional media companies (such as the ones I spent much of my life working in) there is a demand for legal compliance. The big boys sign-up to W3C etc. They also make an effort to make their output e-accessible.

They need to be seen to be meeting the needs of disabled users - whether those users have difficulty, seeing, hearing, moving etc. They see a box they need to tick.

But there appears to be little thought for the needs of these users in many of the most mainstream of social tools, technologies and platforms. (image - an open door - via Ben Zvan)

APIs are of course usually available - which offers opportunities for those with the skills and the inclinations to create tools to improve accessibility. They result in great stuff like Accessible Twitter and EasyYouTube for example, but by no means the whole solution. There aren't enough of them solving the whole range of issues, for a start.

You never see accessibility buttons easy to find on your sign in to Facebook etc. And many a sign-in process includes some unfriendly CAPTCHA processes, too.

I don't have solutions - I do think it's going to take a motivated crowd response to sort out. But I also think, like so much else about a networked world, we all have to take responsibility for each other.

I often say that one extra node on your network doubles its value (that's group forming network theory, folks).

Conversely, if the barriers of accessibility preclude one extra node from joining your network you are halving its value. That's a sobering thought.

Or as Stowe Boyd puts it: "I am made greater by the sum of my connections, so are my connections."

CitizensOnline (the charity which I serve as a trustee) is trying to do something about access to the web - and I'll update you as soon as I'm able on the detail of that. Dr Gail Bradbrook has started a blog on this Fix The Web issue. She's also set up a poll you can take part in:

But in the meantime you could start doing your bit by providing captions for your videos, titling your photographs descriptively and usefully and limiting the abbreviations you use in your status updates (hat tip to Joseph C Dolson)

I'm not going to get this right myself every time. Expect howlers. How do I embed a description in the flickr-hosted image with this post, for example? But I do know it's in my interests - and that of the network - to try.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Who did you help get value from the web today?

I get a lot of value from the internet. And I'm on the board of trustees of a national UK charity which thinks it would be fairer if everyone could understand and share in that same bounty.

Understand, share in - and contribute to.

Here's one way that those who have learned to love the web can spread their joy - and one way I hope you'll participate with and be inspired by: The BT Internet Ranger of the Year Award.

Here's the official Citizen's Online blurb: "We are looking for young people, up to the age of 16, who have (helped) other people get online. If you know a young person who has done this, you can either nominate them or encourage them to nominate themselves. We are looking to have BT Internet Ranger award winners in each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Each winner will receive an HP laptop plus £250 worth of IT vouchers, together with a certificate. A best of the national winners will receive an additional £250 worth of IT vouchers.

BT Internet Ranger Schools Award
This year, for the first time, a separate award will be made to a school or a group of schools who encourage young people, up to the age of 16, to use their skills to help other people learn about computers and how to surf the internet. This is a "forward looking" award scheme to promote future activity rather than the more traditional "backward looking" recognition for work which has already been carried out. The winning school or group of schools will receive £5,000.

Deadline for applications: Friday 15th January 2010
Apply online:

Citizens Online is a national charity which believes participation in the digital world is a basic human right.

Monday, June 29, 2009

The cocaine of discovery - everyone should get a hit...

You may or may not be aware that I'm a Trustee for Citizen's Online - part of which is EverybodyOnline.
EverybodyOnline helps communities and individuals in disadvantaged areas across the UK to engage with digital technology.
It aims to help communities overcome any barriers they may have to computers and the internet so they can take advantage of the wealth of opportunities digital technology and the internet has to offer.
'Simple' things that so many of us take for granted. Like this:

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Digital access is about discovering value - not Mbs

The big idea at the heart of the Digital Britain interim report is 2mb broadband access for every home in the UK.

I've been thinking about the issues of access a lot recently - mostly prompted by my work as a Trustee at CitizensOnline.org (which I, of course, recommend to you :-). (I should make clear before I go on, the following are my views - not necessarily those of Citizens Online.)

For a start 2mb isn't very much these days. If it was a real (rather than 'as advertised') 2mb that would be a start. My 8mb home connection rarely actually delivers half its claim. (thanks BT).

But that is very much only half of the story. (image courtesy)

Speed of access to the internet is not the same as speed at which something can be broadcast at you via broadband.

Speed of access is - just like all the best things about the internet - about a two-way flow.

The internet is created by us, with us. You are a participant and contributor to it. To access it is therefore to have an equal ability to contribute to it as it is to draw down from it: So 2mb download and upload speed, please.

But the story of access is about more even than this. It is one thing to have connection to the pipe - and a nice fat two-way one at that - it is quite another to get your share of the value.

It's a little like Victorian Government sending a free set of encylopaedias to every home, only to discover only the rich kids benefit - because they know how to read.

It's time to think about the equivalent of teaching people how to read and write. on the web - making their ability to participate and share a core foundation of how the UK as a whole benefits from the digital revolution.

Let me give you a real and personal example. If the very nice people at the Government decide in their wisdom to provide free wifi in the road my dear old mum lives in it she'll get precisely zero value from it. Zip, nada, until such time as someone either gives her an interface to access participatory sites with such ease it's like popping the kettle on. Or until such time as someone invests the time and trouble to show through demonstration the value she could join in.

Access to the value creating power of the network is little to do with access to a particular terminal at a particular speed.

How many people got real value from the early internet; from the dial-up modem internet; from the not-always-available internet - from the bloody-hard-to-use internet? Lots.

Those pioneers didn't need 2mb downloads to join in the value.

We wouldn't have today's internet if they had. They found value inspite of the limitations.

And they told their friends. Their friends joined in and made it bigger and better.

Their friends got value, told their friends etc etc ad infinitum.

Helping others discover the value available through the tools on offer is the crucial and critical thing here.

It's the part the Government should be focusing on with its reports and big ideas.

But it's also the part ALL of us can commit to doing something about.

Sure, you can lobby your MP to put pressure on for the Government to spend more cash on ever fatter pipes.

Or you can just coach one more person in the value you get from being online.

The more of us who make it to the edges - the less those in the centre have control over the big decisions anyway...