February 21, 2009
This is a better photo. It’s nearly a year since John passed away.  We miss you, John.

This is a better photo.

It’s nearly a year since John passed away.  We miss you, John.

WAVE results

Sigh… this page had an accessibility error. (that search input field above here, in the div with the id “search,” needed a label.  Don’t worry, I fixed it.)

Accessibility practice starts with the glow, even the righteousness of the mission.  But, as it continues, that glow has to be channeled into the patience and cleverness required to put that mission into policy.  It also has to deal with the on-the-ground challenges of implementation; the frustration of things breaking, or of solutions being contingent; the frequent feeling of compromising oneself when putting accessibility in practice.  From the highs of honoring John to the buzzkill of a input field without a label.

Honestly, it helps to remember the times that John got pissed off at a badly marked up interface, and to remember candid talks about where the ideals of universal design butted up against implementability.  John got grouchy like everyone else, and thank god for that.  It’s helpful to keep as many memories of John’s being human as I can.

For some reason, though, I’ve always liked this one, even if John and Dillon are in the background here.

For some reason, though, I’ve always liked this one, even if John and Dillon are in the background here.

I wish I had better photos with John.  I never thought of that as particularly important before.

I wish I had better photos with John.  I never thought of that as particularly important before.

January 30, 2009
The John Slatin Captioning Project

The Captioning Project, enabled by administrative grant funds and in collaboration with UT Services for Students with Disabilities, allows UT TeamWeb to broker captioning and transcribing of multimedia, primarily for student use.  It’s an opportunity for us to serve the university community and to preserve John’s mission.

November 16, 2008
John and Dillon performed in Sextet, a dance for dancers, guide dogs and their people. John supervised my dissertation, which had a lot to do with film, video games, comic books: visual media.  Lots of visual media.  Early on, I berated myself for putting upon him like this.  How asinine, to pull John into a project full of artifacts that he could not access.  Of course, it didn’t take long to realize he was not only OK with that — he could bring a perspective to the work that gave it far more resonance and maturity. I was writing about the coherence of fictional worlds both within and beyond their component media.  John was able to pull this discussion into new directions, redefining “transmedia” beyond a series of popular visual forms, moving into discussions of kinaesthesia, transformability, device independence. John not only viewed accessibility as a mindfulness that moves us to account for other people’s sensory patterns; he viewed it as a field that explores and interrogates the interactions between our information and our sensory patterns.  In art, research, and policy, he considered these interactions not only as sites of responsibility and struggle but also as sites of innovation and pleasure.

John and Dillon performed in Sextet, a dance for dancers, guide dogs and their people.

John supervised my dissertation, which had a lot to do with film, video games, comic books: visual media.  Lots of visual media.  Early on, I berated myself for putting upon him like this.  How asinine, to pull John into a project full of artifacts that he could not access.  Of course, it didn’t take long to realize he was not only OK with that — he could bring a perspective to the work that gave it far more resonance and maturity.

I was writing about the coherence of fictional worlds both within and beyond their component media.  John was able to pull this discussion into new directions, redefining “transmedia” beyond a series of popular visual forms, moving into discussions of kinaesthesia, transformability, device independence.

John not only viewed accessibility as a mindfulness that moves us to account for other people’s sensory patterns; he viewed it as a field that explores and interrogates the interactions between our information and our sensory patterns.  In art, research, and policy, he considered these interactions not only as sites of responsibility and struggle but also as sites of innovation and pleasure.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

John was an editor and committee co-chair for the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0.  WCAG 2.0 is the result of several years of work and is a pivotal common document for the Web, bearing the influence of — and shaping the future choices of — institutions from NIST to ANEC to Adobe, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and SAP.

Work and the Accessibility Institute

I came back to campus in May 2008 to work with the University’s central information technology group.  It was a little more than a month after John passed away.

Right away, I started getting information about the Accessibility Institute being in limbo: it wasn’t clear what would happen next to it, who would own it, what could keep it going.

There was a moment of excitement there — a hope that we could save the Institute.  My team got into the discussion happening among many groups on campus with an interest in the Institute.  In retrospect, it was naive of me to think that such an effort would be simple.  The Institute as we remember it isn’t here any more.

Accessibility work is continuing on campus, and while I wish there were more, I’m glad to get to be a participant in this work. Glenda Sims is keeping the torch burning, and my team has taken over portions of the research and advocacy that the Institute carried on.

John was there for this effort as well: he was in my mind not just as a memory to honor but a wealth of teaching to remember.  I remembered the fights he had to put up to keep the Institute going.  I remembered our discussions about complexity, and took away a lesson: that I had a lot to learn about organizational complexity in this context, and that respecting that complexity was key to understanding information here.

I remembered that more is different.  Bigger is different.  It isn’t just the goal or the phenomenon; it’s the network of ideas, practices, assumptions that inform, complicate, make the goal, the phenomenon possible.

Working to save the Accessibility Institute, despite the outcome, taught me a lot about the network of ideas, practices, and assumptions that inform how work gets done in the halls of administration here.  It helped me apply the lessons - John’s lessons - that enable me to keep doing good work.

Save the Accessibility Institute

The Accessibility Institute

The Accessibility Institute, which closed August 2008.

Start

How to talk about my work with “a short reflection of John’s influence on my work”?  This might be different for me since my work isn’t scholarship, and John’s influence on my work doesn’t entirely fit within models of scholarly influence.

My work products are not necessarily written, or when written aren’t the genres that we associate with “works.”  I don’t really write theoretical pieces any more.

But John influences me

  • in my emails, my proposals, my policy contributions.
  • whenever I apply concepts of technology at play among individuals, within work, within and across teams and organizations.
  • whenever I have to think about a Web that provides as much device independence as possible — a Web that does not assume one reality of information access but tries to enable as many modes of access as it can.
  • whenever I think about interaction, whenever I try to untangle the knots that tie use, input, interface events, feedback, display to “information.”
  • whenever I walk halls that he (and Dillon) walked.