Refresh DC Accessibility Presentation – 01/17/2008

I will be giving an Accessibility presentation at the Janruary 17, 2008, meeting of Refresh DC. The following is the important information:

Thursday, January 17, 2008 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Greater Washington Board of Trade
1725 I Street NW, Suite 200
Washington , District of Columbia 20006

Please make sure to register on Upcoming so they have an idea of how many people are coming.

A Few Quick Things About the OLPC

Yesterday I met Justin Thorp, Rodney DeGracia, Stewart, and Partica over at Murky Coffee in Arlington, VA with our One Laptop per Child machines (OLPCs). We had a good time talking about our new laptops. Stewart even mentioned that the OLPC he had brought with him was his daughters. He had purchased it for her and when he got to using it he like it so much that he did the Give 1 Get 1 again, before the dead line of December 31, 2007, so he could have one for himself.

We played the memorize game with each other over the mesh network. Justin and Stewart used the mesh network to collaborate on a document. It was fun watching Stewart type in his version of the document and then the changes happen on Justin’s in an instant.

There were three items that I had noticed before and wanted to re-test and look at with others there to make sure I was not imagining things.

The first thing was that if you have fixed width website that is greater than 800 pixels you will have to scroll your screen horizontally. The width might be slightly less than 800 pixels, I’m not sure the exact number. I know that my main website, which is 750 pixels wide fits in just fine. One of the OLPC websites does not fit on the screen has to be scrolled and I can’t remember which one right now. You would hope that their own website would fit on their machine. I figure they’re busy and have other things to do that are more important right now.

The second item was that when you fill out a form field or URL that you have done before it does not give you a list of what you have already typed before. This is not a big problem just a nuisance for someone that has used computers for years, but for someone that never has they will not know this information. It looks like the OLPC will let you save cookies, since I marked my Hotmail to remember me  on it and it did I will have to check this out more to make sure it is correct.

The final item and the one I find more interesting and troublesome is that if you have an application that puts up an alert box up it never comes up. I found this out by trying to delete a Twitter message that I had typed wrong on my Twitter account while using the OLPC. On Twitter when you request to delete a message it puts up an alert box that says “Sure you want to delete this update. There is NO undo!”. If you are using a normal machine it comes up fine and give you the option to hit “OK” or “Cancel”. Well when using the OLPC browser this message never came  up. You click the trash can to get the delete function to work and the little circle just spins for awhile, stops, and then nothing happens.

I know that most of the web forms and applications that I have built or maintain now have alert boxes that come up to show errors in the page, etc.. Time to test this out on a few other pages first to make sure I’m correct on this assumption. This could be a problem that makes it difficult for people with these machines to accomplish different tasks that include forms. This puts a barrier up and makes it an accessibility issue to those people using the OLPC. Hopefully it is only a temporary thing until they get it fixed. I know of a lot of web applications will show you a list of errors by putting them in an alert box. By using web standards for your websites I think you will keep away from problems that the OLPC can not handle.

Have any of you noticed either of these problems with your OLPCs or is there any other things I might have missed using my machine. This information would be helpful to me and others for when we are building web pages ad applications to make sure they work on as many devices as possible. If things go well there will be millions of these out in the world in a short time.

More General Information about the OLPC

There are a few things that I have noticed over the course of the day using the OLPC, the XO Laptop, or the $100 Laptop. One of the big ones is that if you take it to a coffee shop people will look at you and then the laptop and look at the laptop some more.

I had a lot of people come up to me and ask if it really worked. I said “Yes, it does and you can get one for yourself even” and went into how they can order the OLPC themselves from OLPCs Give 1 Get 1 website.

I had a lot of people ask “Is that one of those green laptops”, or “Is that one of those $100 laptop”.  I got the most questions from older people asking “Isn’t that the laptop we saw them talking about one CBS”? I assume they saw the “60 Minutes” piece on the OLPC. Each time I would stop reading about the laptop and offered them a chance to use it.

One lady I guess was going to order one for someone or she already had, so she wanted to see it and touch it. She had a young girl who was eleven if I remember correctly use it. The young girl said it was easy for her to type on. Of course she tried to go to one of the Disney websites, which asked for the latest Flash plug-in to see most of the website, not that accessible of a website. A Disney website is probably not the first place someone from third world country would go or at least it shouldn’t be.

Another gentleman asked what kind of software you could put on it, since someone he knew or he was going to a third world country and wanted get a few to let people there use it if it could do a bunch of activities.

One women I know asked if you could look up porn on the laptop. I told I figured you could, since I had not heard that they had software to stop it. Really wanted to know if kids could look up porn. So when she got hold of the OLPC she went to the Playboy website and started laughing when she got to their home page. I grab the OLPC back from her to get rid of it, since we were sitting the middle of the coffee shop with a lot of little kids and older adults.

I did get some reading done about the OLPC on how to get started, how it works, and what activities the OLPC has on it. They even have a wiki, which contains information about hardware, software, content, testing, educators, developers, and a whole lot more. They have some cool rollovers explaining what certain parts of the machine are for. One of the ones I just found was the page that has information on what the keyboard does. They also have a page that shows which features the OLPC has.

With all the question and people playing with it I did not get to do as much as I wanted today on learning about the activities on the OLPC. It was like three different “Tam Tam” activities. They are:

  • Tam Tam mini” – an application that allows for people to perform music and play instruments.
  • “Tam Tam Edit” – an application allows you to generate music using a colorful and intuitive graphical interface.
  • “TamTam Jam” – the music performance activity. Sounds are played by striking individual keys on the keyboard. This is designed more for younger children.

Other activities that the OLPC has are: (this information was mostly taken from the activities webpage)

  • Chat“ -simple environment for discussion, whether it is between two individuals or an entire classroom.
  • Memorize“ – is the classic memory game of finding and matching pairs with a twist: a pair can consist of any multimedia object, such as images, sounds,and text.
  • Record” – provides a simple way for children to take pictures, view slideshows, and record video and audio all content that can be shared via the mesh network.
  • Journal“ – is an automated diary of everything a child does with his or her laptop.
  • Draw“ – provides a canvas for a child or a group of children to express themselves creatively.
  • Pippy“ – a simple and fun introduction to programming in Python, the dynamic programming language underlying much of the software on the laptop.
  • and a whole lot more

The final cool thing on the activities page is the last item, which  is the part about downloads for the OLPC. The download page has like 50+ items to download and use like (some is games others is source code):

  • Domino“ – classic space game
  • Image Quiz“ – a simple concept: one question, one image, one click
  • 3D Pong“ – three dimensional wireframe arcade game
  • SimCity“ – construct and maintain your own city
  • Block Party“ – Tetris-inspired game
  • and a whole bunch of other things

The woman across the table from me at Murky Coffee in Arlington said, “I should bring the OLPC out with me, it might actually be better than having a puppy or a baby with me for getting people to stop and talk to me”.

Hopefully this blog post is usefully for those that do not have their OLPCs yet, are waiting until Christmas to open with their kids, want to read up on what it has, what is being developed, or what you can do with it.

Interesting Things You See and Here at Chinatown Starbucks

On my way to the DC Blogger meet up at RFD (Regional Food and Drink) in Chinatown I saw a large group of people with bright lime green police vests on getting ready to cross the street. I was like what do we need that many cops here and not other places in DC.

I stopped in the Chinatown Starbucks to kill sometime before the meet up. I got myself a bottle of water, since I’m not a coffee drinker. I know its bad for the environment the plastic and all, I reuse them. There was like one chair downstairs left. I wanted to read, but also watch the people go by on their way to the Wizards game and whatever else they were going. There was a woman at the table and I asked if she minded if I used the spare chair she had at her table, she said fine and went back to her phone conversation. From what I heard she spent like 15 or 20 minutes talking in French to someone before she finished and then left.

While she was on her cell phone a bunch of the cops (about a dozen) stopped in front of the store blocking the view of the sidewalk. She looked up from her conversation stopped talking for like the first time in 10 minutes and just shrugged her shoulders and went back talking. A few of the cops came in and got coffee.

Next a metro cop came in with his bicycle and stood behind the counter drinking a coffee. He must have to work this area all the time an needed to warm up. One of the real police officers came in and started talking to the metro police officer. I came to find out all the cops in the vests that were wandering about were police academy cadets. I was wondering why they needed like forty plus cops and or cadets in Chinatown on a Wednesday night. Don’t other parts of town need them more, like at least Adams Morgan for the drunks.

The real police officer ended up being one of the instructors and said that the cadets were going to be in that area until like New Years. The Metro officer asked if this was part of the cadets training or getting extra experience. It seemed like it was extra experience which would make their time in the academy longer. The metro cop said that really stinks, since he remembered once he was about done with the academy like 10 years ago all he wanted was to get out.

While this conversation was going on another DC police officer came in who I think was an academy instructor too. After she got in one of the cadets came in and told them that some person had come over to them and said a guy was bothering people around the corner outside one of restaurants. The second academy officer told them to never mind it was probably nothing to worry about. After a bit she decided to go out and ask the cadet for a description of the person just to mess with them to see if they had been paying attention or not to what was going on.

Finally all the cops and cadets left the Starbucks except for the bicycle cop. This is finally when I noticed the woman at the table behind me was having a man read different articles from the newspaper. The more I listened she was helping him learn or improve his reading skills. She was very patient with him. After the first article she asked if he liked sports. He said sure and she had him read the first part of the article about Sean Taylor making the Pro Bowl even thou he passed away like three weeks ago.

He would read along slowing trying to make sure he read and pronounced everything correctly. A few times he stumbled on a word and she would have him go back until he got it right. He trouble pronouncing “Posthumously”, so do I. She did this in a very nice way so he learned and I guess did not feel put down. After he would read for  awhile she would stop him and then asked him to explain what he read in his own words. I guess this was to make sure he understood what he had just read.

Once they had run out of time, since I think they both had to be other places to go she gave him a present in one of those small hanled gift bags. He gave her a card which she opened and read, while they talked about what each one was doing for the holidays. They decided to meet the Wednesday after New Years, since I don’t think either one was in town after Christmas. When they left he had never opened his bag and I wanted to see what he got from her.

My guess was it was some small book. This is what the holiday time should be about helping others improve their lives.

Some times during the heck tick holidays you just need to sit a while, read some yourself, watch, and listened to others.