The personal ramblings and adventures of Mike Altman

What percentage of people use the closed captioning function on their TVs at home? The technology has been standardized to the point where it would be preposterous to broadcast without closed captioning. TV plays a pivotal role in home entertainment and news. Why shouldn’t it be accessible to those with disabilities? In today’s fast growing technological environment, it is clear to see that the use computers and more importantly the internet, play an important role in the lives of everyday people. The span of information and functionality on the web is almost to the point of necessity. We use it to find jobs, to do work, to learn and participate in school, to communicate, to share, and to entertain ourselves. When compared to what people use TV for, it’s hard to imagine that the same standards don’t apply.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has worked hard to push the standardization of web accessibility. With the creation of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), the W3C has put its best foot forward in educating business and web developers of the importance of web accessibility. Their website acts as a hub for design resources and best practices, as well as a forum for solving complex web accessibility challenges. New challenges arise along with the wide adoption of new technology that focuses on interactive experiences for the typical web user by manipulating content on the client’s end. JavaScript, AJAX, and Flash heavy websites prove to be a challenge to those who require the aid of assisting technology in order experience the content on the page.

No one can dispute the need for wide acceptance and implementation of web accessibility standards. There are about 60 million people in the U.S. alone who cannot utilize a computer in order to use the internet in a normal fashion. This is no shortage of users that can be simply neglected when running a business online. The question is then, why are more companies not investing proper standards compliant development? I speculate that the answer has to do with major flaws in the typical web design life cycle.

The first, simply being oversight in the planning stages. Many successful internet based companies don’t start with standard iterative design process. Depending on the product, the focus is either on some innovative back-end functionality, or flashy front-end development that draws attention. As these products become successful, new version as built on old version until so much time and money has been put into it that a complete overhaul and redesign for overlooked accessibility standardization would be far too expensive. The best way to solve this type of problem is, for large, successful internet companies to take the initiative and lead the way in best practices. Yahoo! has a mandatory accessibility training program that all new developer employees must go through. Google has invested into an automatic captioning for YouTube videos in order to make it much easier for deaf people to enjoy the same procrastination tool that many web users have been able to use for several years now.

The second flaw that I can see contributing to the lack of standardization in web accessibility, does simply not know how to sell the idea. Imagine you work for a web design shop, and you want to pitch allocating some extra budget for ensuring that the product is compliant with web accessibility standards. How would you sell that to a client? I can predict that 9 times out of 10, the client will say: “but our target audience isn’t blind/hard of hearing/elderly/(insert your own excuse).” People generally just aren’t educated enough about the need for accessibility to argue the point. This is where the WAI comes in. An accredited town crier who has presence in the developer’s community as source for professional education is exactly what we accessibility needs in order become a standard.

Further Reading

• Web Accessibility Initiative – WAI Homepage
• CNN/CNET – Web accessibility no longer an afterthought
• Practical Ecommerce – Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There?

Many developing countries have adopted an unlikely form of technology, which many take for granted. Where it was once expensive to run a power-grid, let alone a phone line people now are able to communicate without wires with the use of cell phones. These areas have skipped many technological steps and have taken a giant leap in order to be able to communicate and do business like the rest of the world does.  It’s hard to imagine how integral the ability to communicate is to daily life. Sure it makes the world a smaller place, but sometimes that’s needed in order to survive in an ever expanding technological world.

Lara Farrar describes in a CNN article how a cell phone has transformed a Ghanaian man’s small taxi business. He is able to get calls to be picked up at any time from any anywhere. He is able to be on-call at all hours, and thus never losing on a business opportunity. Families can stay in touch easier from long distance, and farmers can keep track of market prices a town over in order to keep from losing on potential profit. It’s hard to dispute that the wide acceptance of a cheap, mobile, wireless, device could be a bad thing. It won’t transform a developing country into a modern high-tech society over night, and it is of course no substitute for good education and good health care systems. But it helps.

One of the challenges that faced cell phone adoption in developing countries was the requirement for electricity in order to charge phones. Many of these places have scarce and non-dependable energy resource, and thus driving the cost of owning a cell phone up. Samsung has recently started selling a reasonably priced solar charging phone called the Solar Guru. It has all of desired basic features of a modern cell phone including an FM radio, MP3 ring tones, games, and a torch light (a useful feature I had on an old phone that I am saddened does not appear on a lot of newer phones). This phone costs about $60 and can run for 5-10 minutes of talk time with just one hour of sunlight. It’s incredible how something that comes in no scarcity in many developing farming communities can be used to bring vital communication to places where once people had to travel to neighboring towns just to charge a cell phone.

Samsung is one of the few who attempts to bring cell phones to new markets where there is seldom a competitor. Its simply good business. Out of this there are sure to be competitors who will be able to offer more at a cheaper cost. Many of us in the US complain of cell service providers taking advantage of the consumer. This is the only downside that I can see with the potential boom in cell phones in poor developing countries. I fear that the cut-throat competition that thrives in cell service providers may attempt to get the best of economically week societies. What would be a preventative solution? Many have already adopted a pay as you go type plan in these places. Maybe if the trend continues in this direction, consumers will be safe from the communications giants that wring many modern consumers into contracts that exploit.

Further Reading

• CNN – Africans get upwardly mobile in cell phone boom
• Green Technology Daily - Will solar speed up emerging cell phone revolution
• Developments.org - Mobile phone revolution

The argument of whether business methods should have the ability to be patented at first sounds irrelevant and ludicrous that anyone would care. Upon closer inspection, the ramifications of such a change go beyond men in suits and high-rise bureaucratic empires. It could affect everything from software and pharma, to the teaching methods used to teach children in schools. On November 9^th 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court hear the oral argument of appeal for the re Bilski patent for a method of hedging risk in commodities trading. More specifically, re Bilski was rejected for a patent on a business model that asses risk for an energy payment plan based on upfront payment (before use). The patent was rejected on the grounds that the patent was an abstract idea and had no practical technological application thus, not a technological invention.

So what does this have to do with software and education? Justice Antonin Scalia explained the ramifications of this by equating a patent for business methods with standards in horse training. “Let’s take training horses, don’t you think that some people, horse whisperers or others, had some, you know, some insights into the best way to train horses? And that should have been patentable on your theory.” Why shouldn’t he make this outlandish comparison?

The decision of the appeal will and is being used in similar cases with IBM to combat the rejection of appeals for software. If a business method or more generally, an idea can be patented, what is to stop large corporations who can afford patent lawyers from claiming ownership over standard business practices? Imagine not being able to put in an IT ticket at work when something on your computer goes wrong. What would it be like if Dominos Pizza was the only pizza shop that could offer free delivery?

This could hit software the hardest. Software moves and develops very quickly. Computers and their capabilities have moved very far and fast over the past 20 years. Hardware has changed, and made it possible to do things made of 1960′s science fiction a reality in a very short period of time. Software innovates and grows along with the hardware to do new and powerful things. Software is able to innovate and progress so quickly because much of the development happens through virtual communities. Developers are able to share, inspire, challenge, and ultimately learn from each other. Sure, people may argue that open source is the epitome of socialism. But it would be a crime to argue that open source offers little in terms of innovation and peer-education for the purpose of moving software forward.

It comes down to companies claiming ownership not simply of their own products, but of mathematical algorithms used in their software. Patent ownership comes with over a decade of free monopoly type reign over a piece of technology or technological process before it enters into the public domain. In the world of software, falling a year behind is to become archaic and obsolete let alone 17 years. Patent ownership of a business model would therefore slow development to a halt. It is important to be able to build and improve on existing technology and software.

The ability to own a patent can be used as a defensive measure for companies. Suppose that a hugely successful e-marketing firm somehow solves the age old problem of spam with an algorithm. They could know how to offer complete and total spam protection without the need to aggregate large databases in order to block messages. The company could file a patent for this algorithm, and do nothing with it. Why would they do this? The company would loose all high ground on being able to profit from email spam by releasing the solution to the problem that they themselves create. So why not sit on the solution for a few years and keep their business profitable?

Sure a lot of the things I argue are worst case scenario if things go unchecked. It’s important to understand how far this decision for changes to patent law can reach. It must be dealt with delicately in order to ensure the modernization of technological ownership while keeping good business practice in check.

Further Reading:

• GEN – Oral Argument Sheds Light in Bilski v. Kappos
• Businessweek – Supreme Court to Review ‘Business Method’ Patents
• Washington Post – High court considers whether business methods can be patented
• Ars Technica – Microsoft’s pseudo sudo patent doesn’t really cover sudo