Just ask! 29 August 2007

My fellow Wise-Woman Shawn Lawton Henry has happily shared her very helpful book with me.  “Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design” helps designers include accessibility in developing websites, software, hardware, and consumer products.  The book offers some excellent guidelines in involving those with disabilities in your testing and evaluation phase.

The book is free online here: http://www.uiaccess.com/JustAsk  It’s about a 200 page printout but well worth it.  Thanks Shawn, you’re a star!

Doing your homework 29 August 2007

This gentleman turned down a job at the plastics factory in Maryhill. Apparently the “Life on Mars” atmosphere, sleazy management, and Victorian shop floor just didn’t suit him. Uppity bugger!

And that’s an uppity bugger with a clear conscience who lived to tell the tale.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack since I moved to the UK for (allegedly) applying American standards of working to the Scottish environment. It’s got nothing to do with being American, and that’s just a cheap shot. But I do indeed have standards.

I like workplaces that have been renovated since the Callaghan years.
I like employers whose interview technique doesn’t leave me wanting a shower.
I like employers who want me to shake things up, not enforce the status quo.
I like employers who want to talk about my recent projects and experience, not which subjects I studied in high school.
I like employers who don’t ask what kind of car I drive, which neighbourhood I live in, and which team my husband supports.
I like knowing a company’s name, sector, and location before I apply for the role.

And finally, I like to do my homework on a potential employer. I’ve previously written about this in a post where I described struggling to find out the very name and gender of the person I’d be committing my career to, with no luck. Contrary to what old boys’ club employers believe, researching your potential employer is part and parcel of a job search. This is why the UK practice of outsourcing hiring to “recruitment consultants” who keep the company’s name, sector, and location “confidential” is so frustrating. As far as I’m concerned, if a company wants to go through a third party who refuses to tell me who they are, I won’t apply to work for them. What is it they don’t want me to know? Why are they acting like they’ve got something to hide? How is one’s street address top secret confidential information?

The truth is out there and once we know the company’s name, we find it. In this case, after a very disheartening interview process, the potential hire researched the plastics factory and found that they were in Amnesty International’s bad books for making very nasty things for very nasty people. So rather than selling his soul to work in Dickensian conditions making accouterments for police brutality, he went along his merry way. Good for him.

We can only hope that time will continue to marginalise these arrogant and secretive employers to the fringes of our workforce, and we can only hope that they don’t take more innocent souls down with them. Until then, our backwards hiring culture will continue to enable and protect employers who have something to hide, and isolate potential employees who won’t take “that’s confidential” for an answer. On the plus side, those practices will continue to encourage some of us to leave the game altogether and start our own businesses!

This summer I hear the drummin’, nine dead in Maryhill… 27 August 2007

Cut a corner here, save a few quid there, slap someone on the back here and do a mate a favour there…this is the result.

Risk assessments on buried gas pipes at a Glasgow factory where nine people died in an explosion were carried out by a student on a holiday job. The High Court in Glasgow has been told that a decision was taken by the firms operating the factory in Maryhill not to employ an outside consultant.

Read the full story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6965479.stm

Clearly the factory owners knew that the place was such a duct-taped deathtrap that they couldn’t allow a paid professional to conduct the assessment. That would have revealed too much. Let’s just get an enthusiastic young person in here who needs to fill their CV and whose questions can be dismissed as the naivety of a kid. If we don’t like what he has to say, we’ll just call it the amateurish work of a half-trained student.

Hmm, now where have I seen this twisted logic before? Oh yeah.

At least I had the option to run away.

Hiring a young employee whom you perceive as obedient and naive - in hopes that they will neither question nor talk about the things you’re trying to get away with - will come back to haunt you sooner than you think.

The judge heard today that the leaking pipe which caused the devastation was put into the plastics factory in 1969 without corrosion protection. This was ironic because the factory manufactured plastic coatings to protect underground pipes from corroding.

Birth of the Web 25 August 2007

We all had to start somewhere, and for me, my life as a web site designer began in 1997 with a one-page web site I put together for a friend’s band. I coded it myself in Notepad using a laminated guide to HTML which I had bought in my university bookstore. Much to my roommates’ fury, I kept walking my laptop to the phone to connect it to the phone cord to dial up (you’re laughing) to the university server, retype the code in UNIX, and open IE 3.0 to test it out. The background graphic was a bmp, the content was centred in Times New Roman, and there may well have been an animated rotating gif of a CD. All my site files had eight letter file names, as the long file name had not been invented yet.

Bless.

The irony is that at that time, I was five months into a very expensive four year university career which proved absolutely useless when I moved to a part of the world that plays by different rules. (I have learned the hard way that if you did not come up through the UK education system, your education does not count.) The silly hobby I picked up kneeling next to the telephone in my dorm room ultimately became the profession - a profession which literally did not exist at that time. And the university career ultimately turned out to be the hobby.

Looking back at early web sites is always a great reassurance to web designers - it reminds us that our craft is always changing and we’re allowed to stumble as we learn. Read “Birth of the Web” from the BBC Scotland news team, and then take a look at their handiwork circa 1997.

The web developer in the tinfoil hat hiding from the black helicopters says… 21 August 2007

Web development finally has its own equivalent of the crazy old man who wanders around the front yard naked aiming a garden hose at airplanes while yelling about the Viet Cong.

That would be this guy, who has created a web site dedicated to the proposition that because the optional, third-party Adblock module on Firefox can be used to block ads, it is taking revenue away from advertisers, which is theft, therefore it’s Firefox which should be banned.

He’s serious.

This is like saying that Ford cars should be banned from the roads because they have cupholders which can be used to hold hot drinks, which would be stealing from Pepsi.

He’s even cobbled together a PHP script which he wants webmasters to use to block their sites from being viewed in Firefox.

(Rumours that he wrote the first draft on his living room wall using a turd pen are currently under investigation.)

And to top it off, he’s got a bit on his site decrying Firefox users as “cultists”. Yes, a Bible Belt fundamentalist is calling other people “cultists”.

Hee. Hee. Heeeeee!

From the top:

1) Online ads only earn revenue when clicked upon, not when loaded. Therefore, by his own logic, not clicking on every visible advert is theft. Some have said the offline analogy is that he would consider you to be stealing from Ford if you don’t watch their car commercial. But because online advertising revenue is only triggered by voluntary interaction, the offline analogy is that you’re stealing from Ford if you see an advert and then don’t go to your nearest dealership to take a Ford for a test drive. Where does he get this notion of advertisers as benevolent donors who must be paid back for their altruism?

2) Firefox can be tweaked to register as other browsers, so blocking “Firefox” is pointless. If you’re going to start a crusade against a group of software users, at least know how the software works? And for that matter, Adblock is also available for other browsers - going to ban them all too?

3) Obtrusive ads such as Flash ones - which are what drive most users, including myself, to use Adblock in the first place - can block content entirely or interfere with or even prevent further navigation, so by his logic, he would need to consent to having his own web sites being unviewable or redirected by a third party. The FSM, for example. He is a truly awesome web developer. Did you know that “CSS” stands for “capellini i sugo salsiccia”?

4) As a web developer, it’s not about imposing your personal vendettas onto innocent bystanders - it’s about using your KSAs to create the best package of solutions to meet the client’s business needs. Let’s just see him pitch himself to a client while informing them that their company’s web site will be blocked from up to 40% of their customers because he considers them to be thieving cultists. He’ll be lucky if they let him finish the interview. And finally;

5) Who the f*** does this guy think he is to dictate how we should view the web, with what software, and which navigation choices are criminal offenses according to his own value system?

You know, it’s been a while since I encountered someone so completely and totally batshit. I needed that laugh.

The Nuremburg Defense comes to Scotland 20 August 2007

The fallout from the e-coli outbreak at my local supermarket continues, with the Sunday Herald reporting that the supermarket along with another one nearby had clocked up over 20 environmental health warnings in just the two years since one was built and the other was converted from Safeway to Morrison’s.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1628119.0.0.php

According to comments left by readers on that page, when consumers have confronted them about their hygiene practices, the store has claimed it’s all “within policy”.

Oh, so they’re using the Nuremburg defense now!

Rather than explaining why they have made a system out of the in-your-face rejection of basic food hygiene standards, they are issuing offensively disconnected statements like

“The UK supermarket industry is among the best in the world with regards to food safety and hygiene. Morrisons ranks highly within the sector, having a good reputation for high standards, quality staff training and rigorous processes. We receive routine assessment of our food preparation areas, and actions arising from the inspection reports are promptly and professionally taken, as would be expected of one of the UK’s leading retailers.”

I feel queasy now and I didn’t even touch the deli meat.

And although I have not dug deeply enough to find any examples of it, I would lose respect for any organisation which chose to “support the Morrison’s family during this difficult time”. That would imply standards as low as the deli counter’s. We need fewer syncophants and press releases in this country and more self-policing and hostile inquiry.

But we won’t get it anytime soon. We have no examples to guide us. In this country, our ability to understand what is being done to us is crippled thanks to our complete lack of investigative journalism. Reportage is strictly reactive, deferent, and unquestioning. Our newspapers mindlessly reprint what they are told to print without questioning any of it. 20 environmental hygiene violations are reported after they’ve caused a death, not before, and the papers happily print the supermarket’s canned defense without ripping it to shreds.

Any reporter worth their salt would be on the phone at this very minute getting environmental health reports and statistics for every supermarket in Scotland and plotting them on a map by region and by company. If a certain supermarket proved to be an outbreak waiting to happen, the reporter would announce that. If a certain region or council refused to release their statistics - perhaps because someone’s brother is the store manager - that would be reported as well. But, tsk tsk, that is just not the way things are done here, and who the hell do you think you are for questioning the lack of questioning.

That is how a commercial organisation responsible for a death can claim the Nuremburg Defense, in public, without reproach.

Scotland’s Official Kettle Filler 16 August 2007

My husband is Scotland’s Official Kettle Filler.

Let me explain.

Up until last year, we were having a lot of difficulty with Scottish Power, our electricity provider. The problems were were so widespread, and so badly heightened by the fact that Scottish Power’s customer service seemed to be staffed by sick cats, that the BBC was inviting people to write in to share their stories. So I did.

Out of the blue, one evening last summer I got a call from a BBC news producer who wanted to come to our home to film us for a story on a typical family experiencing typical electricity provider woes.

Us? Typical family? Stop snorting.

Because this came up on less than 12 hours notice, and I could neither get out of work nor had any desire to parade my obesely pregnant and nasal American self on national television, I “volunteered” my husband for the task. I went back into communications manager mode, giving him a professional briefing on why they were coming to our house and what sort of questions they would ask, and left him to it.

The interview, which aired on BBC One’s national news program at one PM, went really well. Although my husband’s part had to be chopped and edited to fit a very brief slot, the story was still a good one. To put a cherry on top, we were having trouble with neighbours from hell at the time, and it’s my understanding that at the sight of a BBC News van in front of their door, they crapped themselves.

Although the original video and story are no longer available online, BBC Scotland continues to use about ten seconds of footage from the interview whenever they need an illustration of domestic electricity or water usage.

That would be the ten seconds showing my husband filling the kettle.

We cannot tell you how many times this footage has aired. Relatives have texted us to say he was just on the TV. Friends have informed him of it at work. People have stopped us on the street to mention it.

I was giving my daughter her bottle tonight while watching Reporting Scotland and thinking “hey, those people have got a dish rack and sink and kettle just like ours, only theirs are clean.”

(cough)

I’d like to be able to use this example to offer some productive lesson on media management but I’ve not got one. I could pull out something philosophical like, errrrrrum, the week BEFORE you repaint and redo your kitchen, a film crew will show up, preserving the previous residents’ 1980s decor on film for all eternity. Or, errrrrrum, no matter how complex things get it all boils down to…sorry, no I won’t even finish that one. Boils down. Kettle. Harrumph.

The moral is: if you need a dashing yet bewildered Scotsman to demonstrate how to perform simple kitchen tasks on national television, I’ve got yer man.  And all we were trying to do was get our bill corrected!

Are you listening to your audience? 16 August 2007

Here’s some food for thought for companies which have an existing web site, whether it was built in-house or farmed out. In this article, Erin Walker asks if you’re ready to overcome the biggest problem with your company’s web site: yourself. Does your web site reflect your customers’ goals and preferences, or does it reflect your artistic whims and ego?

You’re Not Listening to Your Audience: The Flaw in Your Website Design

It brings to mind the argument I had with the world’s most narcissistic managing director, who honest to god wanted the company’s web site to play a recording of him chirping “Welcome to (company)!” when the web site loaded. I asked him how he thought this would get him new business, how this would benefit the customers, and more importantly, what exactly his goal was in forcing Scottish visitors to download and listen to the male version of Jade Goody’s accent. (OK, I didn’t use that exact phrase…)

He went off in a huff, presumably to admire himself in the nearest mirror. I might have even heard his petticoats swishing as he sashayed away.

Deli Meat is Murder 14 August 2007

Today brought the news that my usual supermarket is at the centre of a fatal e-coli outbreak. It’s a bit too close to home, especially considering that I’ve been using that supermarket’s meat to make food for my baby.

The news again raises the question of the proposed Corporate Homicide Bill in Scotland. (Read more about culpable and corporate homicide here.) I am not one of those businesspeople who automatically opposes any legislation which restricts business out of principle. Too many Enrons, WorldComs, Big Dig tunnels, Transcos, and Smithsonian Institutions for that matter have proven time and again that businesses do need their balloons burst from time to time.

This is not the time for the supermarket to close ranks, have their PR firm issue monotone statements, and for that matter to keep the stores open as if nothing had happened. What part of “one person is dead and five more are in hospital” are they trying to press-release away? The fact that they’re refusing to state what day or time the tainted meat was sold proves that there’s a lot they don’t quite want us to know yet.

And for what it’s worth, I got food poisoning from some dodgy meat the very first time I visited that supermarket, which was on the weekend it opened. This isn’t a unique occurrence - this has been coming to a head since the day they opened their doors.

Someone somewhere in that company killed a woman as sure as if they’d stabbed her. Trusting the company to maintain common sense as well as basic food hygeine obviously didn’t work. Calling this neglect what it is - corporate homicide - isn’t obstructive legislation. It means business, in every sense of the phrase.

Incidentally, if you want to find out how many stupid food hygiene mistakes you’re making in your own kitchen, get your free Masterchef certificate.

Business as usual on Atlantic Quay 10 August 2007

Is it too late to bring back public hangings on Glasgow Green? I’ll bring the ice cream.

Auditors have identified a catalogue of serious management failings behind a botched £14m computerisation project at Scottish Enterprise.

As revealed in The Herald two months ago, the scheme to standardise handling customer information across the entire network, including its computer and telephone system, was approved in 2003 and only completed last year. Now it is being replaced.
…
KPMG found the “customer relationship management” project, replacing up to 50 systems with a single unified system, was launched without a proper business assessment.

There was no initial approval from SE’s own technology department and they did not appoint an outside partner company to share the risk, which it is now accepted was “ill advised”.

There was then a failure to track progress of the project and the proposed timescale imposed was unrealistic. Contracts worth £8m were awarded without competition and no evidence was retained for market testing - against legal advice.

Lack of competitive tendering left SE unable to demonstrate it got value for money, and the failure to appoint an outside partner left SE paying contractors on high day-rates.

Read the full story at http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.1611654.0.0.php