North Africa

The Mission of the (Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing) is: To empower people of widely varying abilities and disabilities to build community using computers, the internet, and assistive technology.

RantWoman would like to tell a success story about the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing. RantWoman would like to tell the story but we are still getting there--in steps. The success story we are aiming at:

We have a customer who is from a country in North Africa. RantWoman for instance is pretty aware that there is A LOT happening in the news from North Africa these days. A lot of this news can be gotten, guess where, on the Internet! All this customer wants to do is to come in and sit down and listen to the news from his 3 or 4 preferred outlets in his native language.

Sounds simple, right?

The Friendly Neighborhood Center manages, most of the time, to deliver, to very happy effect: the customer gets his news. Other people from his community come and chat with him about the news. But getting there is anything but straightforward and the community part is sort of happening with or without the technology.

This customer is blind. He has not particularly had opportunities to learn all the different nuances of software and operating system and keyboard commands and media player that have to play together to do that.

More to the point, the Friendly Neighborhood Center has:

--Customers with a wide range of abilities and disabilities

--Staff with a wide range of abilities and disabilities.

--Customers who communicate in a variety of languages.

--Staff who use a variety of languages.

--Customers and staff with widerly varying familiarity with computer matters.

You get the idea?

SOMETIMES the customer comes in and there is a staffperson who can just do the launch task for him, type in a url, find the media player link, launch the news. As long as the link has the media player clearly identifiable, this task can usually be done by anyone, even if the site is in the customer's native language. There are clean directions about how to do this. RantWoman cannot actually see enough to follow the exact directions involved but RantWoman is sort of a cowboy and frequently uses what she remembers of these directions as a starting point.

Most of the time, there are staffpeople who either are blind / visually impaired OR can read the customer's native language. These hardy souls are all in our different ways trying to help our customer learn how to do the launch steps as above. We have not apprently banked on the wiles of the internet.

There are perfectly lovely directions involving the screen reader and keyboard shortcuts. These would be fabulous, except that BING sometimes grabs the url and takes us off to Bing search results. We don't WANT bleeping Bing results. We just want to go to the link in question. Then something goes awry with the media player. RantWoman for instance can see enough to know that a new window has popped up, but screen reader users cannot. Some of the staff can help troubleshoot; some of them cannot.

The customer favors websites in his native language. The screen reader has not been set up to interact with his native language. Unlike some other languages where the screen reader will at least mention links, for sites in this language, the screen reader will not even acknowledge links so a person could count links.

We aspire to have the customer walk in and be able to start his own news. We aspire to that, but in the meantime, we use lots of people's talents and get there our own way.