So anyone here with an American Epress has probably gotten the MylifeMyCard advertisments and the information on their MyWishList contest (http://mywishlist.mylifemycard.com/). What I find interesting is every year the contest has been in Flash (not good for the blind to start), but this year they outdid themselves. They managed to add a captcha to the contest that has no audio alternative --wonderful.

You're probably thinking well why does this guy care? Mainly 1) my neighbor is blind and 2) I'm in law school and had to study the American with Disabilities Act. All in all I'd say anyone with standing could sue the living shit out of AMEX for a violation of their ADA rights --since this is a public contest. I mean AMEX might argue "Hey, we're a private group and the contest is private," but I doubt a court would buy it. They've got millions of card holders and the contest is open to every one of them. Either way, it's not very nice of American Express to forget their are blind card holders who they're straight screwing over.

Time to make a phone call,
Tyler

After some recent events, I've been wondering: "Should we contribute to OSS, but make these contributions voidable?" What I mean is should we write code for a project, donate it to that project, but make sure it can be taken out / stop use, if that project goes sour? Here's an extreme example:

Project X is formed and it's a great idea. You join up with Project X and make a few modifications and add some cool new features. Project X continues to grow and becomes really popular with millions of users, so you start listing yourself as connected with Project X. Finally, Project X's administrator, who you trusted to handle the project correctly, decides that the logo should be switched from a Teddy Bear to Ted Bundy and display a message about killing your family. There was no fork, there was only a modification to the project, a project that you've tied yourself to. So you of course cut your ties and do your best to explain you had nothing to do with that project, but what if you could say "stop promoting your project until you remove my ties / contributions to it?"

Unlike most OSS project where there is was a fork to the project before it went sour, here this is not the case. Here, we've got a project administrator who just decided to up and change course out of the blue and you're caught in the crossfire. The best you can do is drop all connections with the project and play clean up with your reputation, but is that right? You can fork the project, hoping that the users offended by the changes are willing to try your new product, but you've still been negatively impacted (reputation, lose of users, etc.). What if they jump to another alternative, because the "Project X" name has been tainted forever and when they see your application load, they're just waiting for Ted Bundy to pop up and tell them to kill their families so they just shut it down and uninstall it?

I know as OSS developers we allow our code to be used freely by others, but we assume that major changes will result in a fork. What happens when there is no fork and the administrator of the project just decides to switch coarse taking us with them? What can we do? I like to think most OSS developers have faith that people who start/maintain OSS projects are going to keep to their words and keep software free and/or at least follow the path. Should we take out insurance on our contributions, make contracts with the administrators ("you can use this until you sell us out") or should we just have blind faith that OSS will manage itself?

Right now, I'm at a loss. Do I plan to keep my faith in people to do what they promise or do I make sure I can stop them from adversely affecting me? Is open source going to get to the point where we need contracts with Administrators to keep their words and keep projects on track? Or should we stick to the old Fork and Rebuild ontology and hope that we can "cover" all the damage to our reputations without much hassle?

I just don't know,
Tyler

Why do computers make life for blind living hell? Most major databases, when they generate a PDF file for download store the file as unsearchable images in a PDF. The result, screen readers for the blind don't work.

Why does this matter? Well a year ago I would have said it really didn't, but living next to a blind L.L.M. candidate made me think differently. I spent 4+ hours converting PDFs for him to a readable format so his screen reader would read the text to him. It ended up costing him $60.00 in software, 4+ hours of both of our time, and he now gets OCR'd text formats that a sighted person gets to read for free. However, $60.00 later there's still some major problems.

If you've ever read a legal treatise there's about half a page of text and then half a page of cites. The normal reader skips over the cites, but for my neighbor they get read to him by his screen reader and throw his comprehension off. The other big problem? The OCR software (the only one sub 500.00) didn't structure their menus to be navigated by keyboard, so the screen reader can't read off the menu items. The result, a sighted person has to convert all of the documents, because the blind can't use the software. Argh.

Over the years he's learned to kind of block out the citations, but it's a sad state of affairs. You honestly never consider how a blind person deals with software or data until you spend your entire night helping them out. No Superbowl, No homework done, No coding done, nothing... just 4+ hours spend making something readable for a friend. Seriously, for everyone who hates XML take a lesson from this. If the documents were sent out in a well formatted XML, the reader could be configured to ignore cites while reading, not generate UNREADABLE images (or at least provide text descriptions), and a billion other formats.

We as software developers really need to put more time into accessibility planning. I know it's a seemingly small percentage of users, but for the ones it impacts it really makes a huge difference. So in the future, turn off your screen, turn on a screen reader and see if you can navigate your software, read the data you’re pumping out, get around your website, if you can smile. If not, try again.

Cheers,
Tyler

P.S. Next project after CRUD updates and when I get free time (read: 2015ish) I'll add the RIFE/Accessibility framework

Bombs in Bangladesh, who cares? Me. Why? Because while as I've noted I'm in law school, and a software architect for a company in China, but I haven't mentioned my fiancé is a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Bangladesh. There's going to be some background information and then I'll get on with my griping.

So back to the point, Bombs in Bangladesh, who cares? People with fiancés in the Peace Corps who live in Bangladesh, that's who. Apparently, last week an article came out about how the JMB (a militant group on Bangladesh) attempted to bomb the Peace Corps training facility and kill the 60 new volunteers when they arrived approx. 6 months ago (read: my fiancé). They wanted to ward off NGOs from assisting the governments, so they tried to gather some extra suicide bombers to hit the Peace Corps training office in Gazipur.

What has the Peace Corps done about this? Nothing, not a damn thing. What about world media? Nothing, not a damn thing. Why? Because just about no one cares about Bombs in Bangladesh, except those of us with loved ones there.

The Peace Corps has offered its volunteers what is known as "Interrupted Service", basically they're allowed to leave Bangladesh and try to find another country to work in with the Peace Corps. Sound nice, right? Well, it would be except that the 6 months of time + 3 months of training my fiancé has put in doesn't transfer to the new project. That means that she would have to spend another 27 months to get her benefits and a proper discharge from the Peace Corps.

It really ticks me off that they would take my fiancé, who just wanted to help people, send her to a country where they KNEW their was trouble, knew an election was coming up next year, figured that they'd have to close the program down and evacuate the volunteers, at some point, and offer her no other option than "start over and get nothing." She's promised them two years of her life and the best they gave her back is placing her in harms way. It is disgusting that the Peace Corps would treat their volunteers this way.

I understand that training from one country to another isn't transferable, but 1) they NEVER should have sent her to a country they didn't have full confidence for her safety and where she couldn’t finish her two year commitment or at least; 2) the time she's spent should count towards her two year commitment.

In conclusion boo the Peace Corps, boo the JMB, yay Bangladesh, and yay software development, and yay RIFE ( http://www.rifers.org )

Note: I've been to Bangladesh and the people are lovely, kind, caring, and completely against this kind of violence. The news media seems to forget to say that out of the 150 million people in Bangladesh there are probably 5,000 militant Islamists and the "average" people of Bangladesh detest them. Honestly, if you have a chance to visit Bangladesh I'd definitely suggest it. Leave Dhaka and spend some time in one of the countryside towns, it's beautiful and the people are very kind. Honestly, I've traveled all over the world and Bangladesh was one of my favorite places.

This isn't about RIFE, so much as about why the Internet and things like RIFE are good.

So, I'm a 24 year old software developer from Florida, USA. I'm currently in law school and working for a company in China as their Chief Architect. I have a fiance, who teaches English for the Peace Corps in Bangladesh.

One day, my fiance decided to send me a letter and a few pictures of her from Bangladesh. This letter travelled for 5 long months before arriving on the East coast of Florida (I live on the West coast). The letter was remailed from a previous address only to get lost in the 180 mile journey (3 hour car ride) from the East coast to the West coast. So, it crosses god knows how many date lines, borders, and security checks to arrive in the USA, only 180 miles from me, to get lost by my local post office.

You see, this is the post office who 5 days AFTER I returned home from China, decided that I had moved and closed my mailbox, because there was excessive mail in it (mind you there was NOTHING in my mailbox since I'd checked it two days before they shut it down). This is also the post office that left me a letter informing me that I needed to pickup a package at the post office and that it could not be redelivered. I get up an hour early (before a full day of law classes) to get my package, arrive at the post office when it opens, wait in line, and I'm told they don't have a package for me, it must be on the mail truck for redelivery. They continue to ask if I can come back tomorrow to get it. Luckily, I learned in law school it's a bad idea to beat people.

So, back to email. In those 5 months, I've sent literally hundereds of emails to my fiance, made hundreds of phone calls, and sent hundreds of SMS messages. The best part? almost ALL of them have been recieved without issue. Now, I think that traditional mail is a very romantic concept. Having something hand written by someone you love is a great thing. However, the ability for goober ass American post people (not all of them, I know some personally and they're great hard working people) to lose a letter that I've waited 5 months for and FINALLY thought I'd have in my hands from my loved one, seems to just enforce why we should all use email and just either fix the damn US post system or abandon it all together and go pure digital / private carriers.

In conclusion, we all need to support wonderful projects like RIFE, because they don't lose our mail, as a matter of fact I discovered they make versions of everything we edit (you can't access them yet, but Bevin is on the case).

Cheers,
Tyler

P.S. I'll let you know if I get my mail
P.P.S. I'll try to make my next post more RIFE centric.