Say the Word: Accessibility

RantWoman put in her monthly appearance at the Citizens Telecommunications TEchnology Advisory Board
http://www.seattle.gov/cttab/


Admittedly, RantWoman was a little distracted as to information coming in, but during the public comment period, she reported about recently attending Accessibility Camp Seattle http://accessibilitycampseattle.org/blog/


RantWoman's bullet points which here probably diverge from whatever got recorded:

--The make your own agenda Unconference concept is a REALLY Cool way to get developers, people whose job is accessibility and who speak in language like metrics and "the business case" in the room with users and buyers and "Accessibility is a Civil Right" voices.

--The Humana story: We needed to make our site accessible for market reasons (pesky legal mandates specifically tied to Medicare a big percentage of customers and revenues). ... We imbedded an accessibility subject matter expert in the development process so that accessibility glitches got fixed in the stream with everything else. The cost looked scary at first (50%? over first guess) but wound up being less over the life cycle.
A Microsoft pro chimed in: if you build it right the first time, it is better code for lots of other reasons too.)

--There seem to be a certain number of groupies, the Accessibility Camp equivalent of Deadheads who get to travel around and visit all the different Accessibility Camp events. RantWoman apologizes to everyone who might be terrified of having the words "business case" and Deadheads anywhere within 100,000 words of each other, but you just never know...


Chairman of CTTAB. "Thank you RantWoman. It's an important topic to remember."

Even more gratifying, later in the meeting, Chairman of CTTAB again, "Let's make sure we keep Accessibillity in our list..," RantWoman thinks of strategic objectives!



RantWoman also heartily applauds the interest and passions of the other long spoken voice of Public Comment, a representative of SCAN TV talking about all the independent public access content producers, huge audiences across the world for some shows and lots of creativity and enthusiasm. RantWoman always admires the passion behind such speeches.

RantWoman has interacted only superficially in the process of letting the city's next contract for public access cable production to the Seattle Community College district instead of to SCAN TV. To be honest, SCAN TV losing the contract sounds like another strategic planning / organizational development issue. RantWoman regrets that she already has plenty of those in her life!

On the other hand, RantWoman shares her other Public Commenter's passion and concern for not losing all the human connections involved in the existing pool of producers. RantWoman thinks it will take intentional work to preserve that especially if shifts in technology force producers to have to get new skills to maintain their presence. RantWoman has no clue what can be done in the legislation and contracting process to address that concern but other people get paid bigger bucks to think about that.