I’d certainly welcome the opportunity to bike with someone, but don’t think I’d need help checking out nearby streets. I know this part of town quite well, and have already explored it quite thoroughly on foot. I’ll almost certainly take you up on your offer to help me buy a bike, though, at least in as much as going to the bike store, making sure whatever I buy looks good and sturdy, and helping me take it home.

Thanks a bunch. I’m really looking forward to this, and having the support of friends like you is very much appreciated.

(The doctor said he didn’t want to worry her. And she was an MD. Feh. Lord, preserve us from those who think they know what’s best for us!)

Much as being able to see is extremely convenient for me, I think I’d miss being able to hear more than I’d miss being able to see. The thought of being blind has more of an “annoying” feel to it, while the thought of being deaf is closer to “panic”. Heart disease? “Oh, shit.”

Somewhere in the mess that is our garage I have a bike, and somewhere I have a helmet, and if I can get myself to where I can ride the dang thing again without falling off every 30 feet (I haven’t tried in awhile), and I could make the time, I’d be interested in going out with you to check out different streets around where you live on bike.

I for one am a user of Spiel, the scriptable Android screen reader. And I’m looking forward to using Hermes and what ever else Nolan sets his mind to. He’s the real deal. Yes, lots of us complain about the slow boil in the Android accessibility kitchen, but Nolan is certainly doing something about it.

Rusty Perez

I will admit to a propensity to ramble, so I’ll start with my contributions that are most relevant to you, personally. I thought that these had been mentioned in the post, were in fact a huge reason I wrote it, but for someone who claims to assume the best in people, you never once referred to them while assuming the worst of me in your comment.

Moments after Ideal K-9′s release, I offered to contribute to you a patch that makes the login dialogs and other screens far more accessible. Users commented on the effects of this patch when they downloaded the mainstream K9 client, so they were clearly appreciated and beneficial. But I never heard anything from you. Meanwhile, the K9 developers enthusiastically accepted my contributions and let me know they had been incorporated, which is always great and encouraging for volunteer contributors like myself. Without such acknowledgment from upstream, we might as well be screaming into a hurricane.

Also relevant to you, I practically begged to help out with your work on the browser. I do web apps as a hobby and possibly as a business, and I wanted to help you create a rich, accessible platform for deploying those. Again, nothing. I even created a series of keyboard commands for WebReader that allow for heading and other level navigation. Granted, I haven’t worked on those in a while, but you never expressed any interest, and life is too short to spend my volunteer efforts where they aren’t appreciated. If you still want those, I’ll happily send you the javascript source and will happily license it to you for inclusion in the next WebReader, but I won’t volunteer for you if all I hear is silence.

So let’s rewind to, oh, ’96. I’ve used Linux since the cleverly-named “Slackware 96″. For about ten years, I contributed patches here and there to a number of projects, as well as filing numerous detailed bug reports. As a software developer yourself, I’m sure you can appreciate that competent bug reports are worth their weight in platinum.

In ’06, I started work on an accessible game project using the company name of Surreal Horizons. While my accessible Asteroids clone didn’t go anywhere, it did give me a solid background in thinking about the complex task of rendering a 2-D environment in a way that is more accessible to blind users. I even put lots of thought into how the same might be done with 3-D navigation. I don’t expect I’ll be flying any spacecraft in the near future, but the real world is a complex place, much like a field of hurtling asteroids and aliens. Learning how to present that complexity of detail in a way that makes sense is great for mobile app development. In particular, it’s proving relevant in my current GPS app, but more on that in a moment.

I began contributing to open source accessibility development in ’07. I’d used a Trekker for a bit over a year, didn’t like it and thought that I could do better. So I set about developing Hermes, an accessible open source GPS solution. When I started work on Hermes, there was no platform for it. The iPhone had just been released, Android was only a gleam in someone’s eye. I thought I was going to have to build proprietary devices just to host my own app, but even so, I worked hard on a project that may never have amounted to anything. Several incarnations later and I finally have something that I use on a daily basis. It tells me where I am, helps me find my bus stop. I hope that one day it will guide my canoe or kayak along a mapped river or stream. My Trekker’s battery went flat, it wiped its software and is now unusable to me until I find someone with a Windows computer to help me reinstall it. I haven’t looked back, and am thinking of selling it to someone else. The project is available under the GPL as an open source web service, and an Android app is under rapid development. Name someone else whose goals are that ambitious. I’d love to exchange a few beers with them and talk about how things might be made even better. Also, name someone else who isn’t doing this and planning to sell it for thousands. Hermes represents over three years of personal research and development in the field of accessible GPS. It represents lots of time spent walking or taking busses just to have a GPS in real-world locations rather than in theoretical models. Check it out and run an instance yourself by visiting http://hermesgps.info.

In September of ’08, I began writing Spiel, a screen reader for the Android platform and the only option other than TalkBack, even a year later. Much of that work was done as a volunteer, and all of it is open source. Spiel now has a featureset that rivals that of TalkBack, and I’d hands-down recommend it to anyone looking for an Android screen reader. You might be able to appreciate that, as I believe you tested your own apps against that particular contribution of mine. Spiel represents 13 months of mostly volunteer contribution, and it is thanks to the funding of the National Braille Press that I’ve actually been able to, you know, get paid by someone other than the Social Security Administration for the work I’ve done over these past few years, work that I give away for free because I think that accessibility should be. I think you can understand that, which is why I’d hoped to work with you some months ago.

I’ve made a number of smaller contributions throughout the years, some of which still exist while others have lapsed. I wrote Utterance, an XMPP-based Twitter client that makes Twitter more accessible by bridging it to instant messaging clients. More recently, I developed StackMan (http://dev.thewordnerd.info/stackman), a simple Android remote stacktrace analysis tool that I’ll be open sourcing soon. This has made it super simple for me as a solo developer to see relevant bug reports in my Android apps, respond to them quickly, and deploy fixes without requiring users to proactively approach me with bug reports (Yes, Android offers facilities like this, but only in 2.2, and only in apps distributed via the market.) Recently I started development on an app called Scandroid, which uses IQEngines’ image recognition API to provide text descriptions of physical objects. I also played around with an app that would integrate DirectionsForMe.org search results directly into Android, so you could type your favorite product into the search box and get back a tabbed display of cooking directions, product content, etc. I don’t think the latter will go anywhere because D4Me’s XHTML is invalid XML (and as such doesn’t parse in my screen scraper.) And the former? Quite frankly, because I’d have to take money to use IQEngines, because their API isn’t free. And no, I don’t object to taking money, but starting a business for something that’d likely only net a few bucks a month isn’t worth it for me, and instead of just saying “ah, fuck it, there’s no money to be made in this,” I’d rather spend a week or two working on that and give it away for free, improving people’s lives, than saying that the lack of money makes it not worthwhile. Unfortunately I don’t know how to do that, but I hope you see where I’m coming from. I don’t care about the money. I care about having the most awesome platform on which to develop the things that might make me and others money some day. And you know what? That’s going to happen lots faster if one group, not 3-4, is working on an accessible browser, or accessible email, or accessible anything-we-take-for-granted.

And I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting, too. But I want to make one thing clear before I close. I don’t owe you this. You don’t get to say “Stand and deliver!” and get my CV. Some of my projects are plainly visible in the sidebar of my blog. I’ve blogged extensively about Hermes and Spiel development over the past year. The information is there already, super easy to get at, and I don’t have to type it up again. I meant what I said when I offered help, meant what I did when I sent you patches, meant what I said when I claimed that my anger was only due to me feeling like my hands were tied, and that I wouldn’t waste time writing what I did if I felt there was any other way. I’m doing you a favor, hoping that now you’ll view me as someone worth having a dialog with. Because. I. Want. To. Talk. To. You. No. Really. I. Want. To. Help. How can I make that any more plain? That’s why I’ve offered patches. That’s why I’ve tried contacting you. And when I’ve done that and am still called the things I was here, even by association, well, the only thing I can think to do in that situation is to take the dissonance firmly in both hands and club anyone I need to about the head with it.

I hope that you’re interested in working with me, or with anyone else in the community who cares enough about your apps to use them. Man, it’s a huge world out there, and when someone takes the time to use Spiel and to give me feedback on it, I’m touched. They can keep using TalkBack, but they’ve given me a chance, care enough about what I’ve done to try it, and that’s huge. If this comment burns a bridge then that’s unfortunate, but I really admire what you’ve done, and while this is my own read on things, it feels like kind of a slap in the face to be told, either explicitly or implicitly through silence, “no, you don’t get to play, we don’t want your experience and contribution.”

I hope this is sufficient for you. Have a good day.

– Nolan, who can’t seem to log into his own blog’s comment host anymore to own up to his own words. See? I want great accessibility so I can choose not to post anonymously, just like any other sighted user. Is that too much to ask?

There is only one version of K9 on Android Market… and it is now accessible. Just for the hell of it, after my signature, I included a copy of the e-mail I received from the developer of K9 acknowledging our “accessibility” contribution to their project.

Rather than sitting on our asses bitching and complaining about things, we are doing something about accessibility. Since I don’t know the individual who wrote this article I am curious whether he/she “walks the talk” or “talks the walk.”

If it’s the former, I have the utmost respect for you, your opinions, and your comments.

However, if you only “talk the walk” my opinion about you is different. So please, for my sake, list your substantive contributions to changing the things you don’t like.

There is a lot of space in these comment fields to list your contributions.

I always assume the best in people… so I look forward to seeing a long list of positive things you’ve done to make a difference.

Respectfully,

Steve 

Steve Jacobs, President IDEAL Group, Inc. and, CEO, Apps4Android

——– Original Message ——– Subject: Accessibility Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:15:06 -0400 From: Jesse Vincent To: k-9-mail

I’m pleased to report that thanks to a generous contribution of code from The IDEAL Group, K-9 3.102 now supports screen readers. This is the same functionality that’s in “IDEAL K-9 Mail” on the Market. Shortly after the initial release of IDEAL K-9, I contacted Steve Jacobs from The IDEAL Group and invited him and his team to become K-9 dog walkers by contributing their enhancements to K-9. It’s taken me a little bit of time to find the cycles to integrate their changes, but it’s finally done.

Thanks Steve & IDEAL!

Best, Jesse