Web Research Blog - Web Access, Automation, Customization, and Media

Legitimately Pushing Google Voice Text Messages on iPhone

2010-01-24T22:55:49Z

I really like Google Voice, but Apple refuses to accept it in the iPhone's App Store. Google provides a web-based Google Voice - the version just released today (1/26) looks pretty much like the Google Voice iPhone application that was rejected from the store. The problem is that the web page is pull-only - and without push you don't get notified of new text messages or voicemails - you have to actually visit the site. I set out to try to fix this, and came up with a solution that works really well and is completely legitimate -- no Apple approval required!

The summary is this - my Google App Engine application polls Google Voice every 15-20 seconds looking for new text messages. If a new text message is found, then the application sends a direct message containing the sender of the text message and the message itself to my Twitter account from a Twitter account that I set up for this purpose. I have EchoFon running on my phone, which does Push notifications (I needed the $4.99 Pro version of EchoFon to do this), so that when a new DM arrives my phone vibrates and rings.

The end effect is that when I get texts on my Google Voice account, my phone acts almost exactly like it would if I had received a text message from AT&T. I've timed the round trip and it's less than 90 seconds on average. I can respond to the message using the web-based version of Google Voice by clicking a link included with the message.

Because this uses Twitter, there's nothing Apple or AT&T can deny from the App Store unless they agree to deny all Push applications (instead of Twitter, these could be Facebook messages, emails, fake point-of-interest near your location) - so, you don't need approval to run it!

I'll update this post with details of this solution in a few days so you can get free Google Voice push on your phone too!

What if Science were like Banking?

2010-01-16T18:00:38Z

Science Editor: Hey boss, we just got an incredible submission! It's titled "Merry-Go-Round Warp Drive" and it explains how to exceed the speed of light! See, all you gotta do is get the merry-go-round going up to like 99.9% of the speed of light and then make it really big. The outside part will then be going way faster than the speed of light.

Science Senior Editor: Who is this guy? What lab's he at?

Science Editor: That's the thing - this is a 12-year-old genius savant. He turned it in for his sixth-grade science homework.

Science Senior Editor: Buy the rights. In fact, buy the rights to the whole damn class' homework assignments - we'll bundle 'em all up into a special issue, maybe sell it to Nature!

Better yet, let's bundle 'em, then auction them off paragraph by paragraph!

Grad Student: But the articles won't make any sense then.

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: Exactly! They'll be difficult to understand, causing everyone to believe they must be incredibly ground-breaking, driving up prices (and our reputations).

...a few months later in a lab near you

Grad Student: I've got this great idea for how to cure cancer. If we can get people moving up to the speed of light then they'll become super-conductors and we can zap them and all the free radicals in their bodies without hurting them. It could stave off or even cure existing cancers!

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: I'm a bit skeptical - how would you get them up to the speed of light, isn't that impossible?

Image via Wikipedia

Grad Student: No! There's this new result out of McKinley Middle School that shows how to exceed the speed of light - we'd just have to spin them really, really fast and then zap them.

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: You know, I've heard that there's a new result showing how if you spin something fast enough it can be made to move faster than the speed of light. We could do that...and then zap them.

Grad Student: Right that's what I ...

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: Ok, then we're all set! What a great idea I had! I'm going to be famous!

Grad Student: But can we get IRB approve it?

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: Ha! IRB's are a worry of the past - the past few administrations have realized that the IRB was stifling creativity - they still exist, but their responsibilities have been reduced to getting coffee for one another and hassling HCI students wanting to do surveys. They've realized that we wouldn't dare do something dangerous - it would hurt our reputations, so subject protection is self-moderating.

Grad Student: Great! So I'll schedule the first couple of participants and see how they react.

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: That's so slow, I need pay-off now. Bring in 100 people, do it all at once, you'll save time and money.

Grad Student: You're so smart Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D. I'll schedule them all as soon as I can attach this platform to this blender motor and rig up this wire for them to hold to an electrical outlet.

...a few days later at a hospital near you

Resident: Doctor! We have just received 100 patients all with electric shocks, burns, and dizziness. I've quickly surveyed them and it appears the patient John Q. is in the worst shape - we should get him to surgery stat!

Doctor: Damn residents! Get this jerk out of here, bring in C. E. Oppenheimer, and tell that jackass to keep up with the latest medical research before gambling with people's lives.

Now C., I'm glad I was able to intervene and see you first - your chart indicates your high levels of cash - is there anything I can get you? Coffee, juice?

...at a conference on a small island paradise off Morocco

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D.: "...and so after 2 years, of the 100 subjects in the experimental condition, all of whom were previously diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, NONE had died from cancer."

... later that evening

Dr. Bigwig, Ph.D. (on phone with dean): "The university has onlly awarded me 20 x current tuition for my annual bonus - this is simply unacceptable. My contract clearly states that I am to be awarded 30 x annual undergrad tuition. You know the Ivies have been calling me - if you want to remain keep the top talent, you need to reward me for my stellar performance."

Dean: "But Dr. Bigwig, you killed 100 people...I know you're worth 30 x annual undergraduate tuition, but you know the parents and alumni - they just don't understand. How about I give you 10 full undergraduate tuition tickets that you could sell to future undergraduates in a year after these crazy politics have died down?"

Stay tuned for next week's article --- what if banking were like science?

WebAnywhere Gets A New Voice

2010-01-10T16:18:29Z

Check out the new voice on WebAnywhere. The voice currently being used is "Jennifer" from Ivona. The inclusion of this voice was made possible by a very generous donation from Ivona. It's incredibly pleasant, a real treat to listen to! If you'd like to use it for other things, Ivona sells a SAPI compliant version.

Look for great things in the future for WebAnywhere's voice. Ivona's donated a few other languages that are just as high quality, so we'll be rolling those out as quickly as possible. Also, we're still looking for a free, high-quality voice that we can use that can be sped up.

Apple Tablet Could Be A Kindle Killer

2010-01-06T18:13:47Z

A lot of people have been talking about the rumoured Apple Tablet - a new large-screen, multi-touch device that Apple will introduce priced in between its iPhone 3GS and Mac Books. What I haven't heard is about how this might just be the perfect reading device, and one that can more than compete with the Kindle (whether or not it includes the fancy digital paper.) And the reason is accessibility.

Apple designs great products, and actually includes good access technology on them *for free.* Because the iPhone includes VoiceOver it's quickly becoming the most sought-after phone for blind people. OS X includes a version of VoiceOver that's a fully-functioning screen reader, as opposed to Window's Narrator which true to its name kind of just tells you the high-level of what's going on without letting you actually get much of anything done.

Wisconsin already dropped the Kindle due to its inaccessibility, and despite some rather vague claims of how they're going to hack in some basic accessibility features, Amazon has already shown that accessibility will take a back seat. Schools (secondary and post-secondary) don't want to deal with inaccessible products unless there's a clear advantage - I think this is one case where if you can read books on Apple's tablet they win. Granted there are cost considerations - but the Kindle's already pretty darn expensive for something that pretty much only reads books (most of which you have to buy for $10-20 a pop!).

We in the accessibility field often say that accessibility can differentiate products - I'm really interested to see if this will turn out to be a clear example of that!

Why Comcast Should Have Held Firm Against Fox

2010-01-02T17:21:22Z

Image via Wikipedia

In the last few days, Fox was able to strong-arm a better deal with Comcast, likely upping the price paid to the broadcaster for each subscriber (likely in the middle of the $1 Fox demanded and the $0.30 Comcast offered). On the surface this seems ridiculous for a number of reasons - namely, (i) most subscribers should be able to get Fox for free over the air if they have the antenna and converter box and (ii) Fox somehow makes enough ad money to support local broadcasting stations all over the country, which can't be cheap. There's a good case to be made that by "standing firm" Fox is actually putting another nail in its coffin - or at least in the coffin of its current business model.

(This posts gets a little away from the accessibility core of this blog, but I'll wrap up with little blurb connecting it in.)

A building tsunami is set to wreck the current business models of the networks. Since the dawn of television, the networks have enjoyed a psuedo-monopoly on content delivery - it was just too darn expensive for small folks to deliver their own content. Cable has been ever-so-gradually chipping away at that advantage with the introduction of new channels, but they've locked us all in with packages that still only deliver less than 100 channels for a reasonable price. Those channels are also still burdened with having to deliver 24 hours of content every single day. What happens when there are millions of channels available, that may pop into or out of existence as they have content to deliver, for lower cost that the expensive packages we have now?

Before addressing that question, lets first ask what exactly Fox (and the other networks) offer us? On the one hand, they're the only ones big enough to afford to buy the rights to broadcast big events - sports, the Olympics, etc, and to some extent they're the only ones who can develop high budget sitcoms and dramas. But because of how networks work, those shows need to target a really broad audience and still make a strong showing among certain age categories that really drive ad revenues). How can the junk on YouTube compete? But then, if people were free to watch whatever they wanted, and not limited by the networks - how long would it be before the NFL decides they'd rather take the bigger piece of the pie by broadcasting games online on their own?

There will always be people, groups and organizations willing to support the creation of content - sports leagues of course, as well as someone to make the Bachelor and even (regretfully) the Real Housewives of Wherever Is Next. The biggest question remaining is whether the networks are needed in the middle. There's definitely a role for something like networks, but it's not clear you need the big dogs that the networks have become. You need someone to produce, market, and bankroll -- but you no longer need the final channel out to people.

That channel is quickly becoming the Internet - with MythTV, AppleTV, SlingBox, Boxee, and Netflix it's not clear you need the networks or cable television. Hulu is the network's attempt to remain in control, but it's simultaneously wets the appetite of more people for free, instantly available content and remains remarkably inadequate - too few shows and no live events. If the other networks follow suit, working out stronger deals with the cable companies, more people will disconnect their cable.

While the networks will remain, their importance will diminish. What will replace them are thousands of smaller "networks" that will help people make the sense of all the new content that they now have access to - something the networks used to do and something that non-networks can and will eagerly do. Putting content up is one thing, but the main functionality still lacking is a "playlist," something to help folks who just want to turn on the tube find interesting shows and not have to get up every 30 minutes to find something else. That is, I hypothesize that channels won't go away just because the networks have.

In summary, as the networks seek to capitalize on their own sense of self-importance, they are dooming themselves. Until a viable alternative to cable Internet comes along, the cable companies themselves have little to worry about - I have no doubt that they will find a way to offset declining revenues from the droves dropping cable television with new fees or services to help people watch Internet television. The networks will be the losers, and will be losers of their own creations.

Of course, all of this is speculation. I'm hoping to begin investigating the hypotheses suggested in this article soon.

Finally, I promised to connect this back to access. History has shown that large shifts in popular technology used to consume information often comes with access problems. The networks represented a small set of companies on which to focus complaints, and as powerful corporations public opinion could easily help bring legislation offering requirements. If millions of smaller entities replace the networks, it will be harder to regulate - who will provide captions? This is already a problem on YouTube and other video sharing sites.

But, the earlier we think about such issues, the better chance we have of heading them off before they become too big of problems to readily address.

ASSETS 2009 Round-Up

2009-11-02T21:16:23Z

ASSETS 2009 happened just a few days ago, and it was once again a great showing of the exciting research happening at the intersection of computer science, human computer interaction, and access technology.

Some highlights (from my perspective, of course), were the best paper awards, who went to two really great papers. The best student paper (that I must admit I was a co-author on) was entitled "ClassInFocus: Enabling Improved Visual Attention Strategies for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students" and was written by Anna Cavender, Jeffrey P. Bigham, and Richard E. Ladner. It introduces a really great system for enabling deaf and hard of hearing students to combine multiple sources of information all on a single screen in the classroom, and some novel notification strategies to help them know what to pay attention to when.

The best paper award went to a great paper entitled "Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement: Challenges and Possibilities", that came out of the IBM Tokyo Research Lab and was written by Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato, and Chieko Asakawa. This paper highlights some introducing qualities of the Social Accessibility Framework that they've been developing and overviews their initial challenges and successes.

Response Time over 24 Hours

2009-08-12T13:56:36Z

In my continuing effort to leverage Mechanical Turk to help with accessibility tasks, I've done another experiment on Mechanical Turk. The full results of the experiment are posted on MIT's Deneme blog.

The main results are that turkers seem to be around 24 hours a day and are relatively quick - took less than 100 seconds on average to get an answer back. Now, we'll have to see if we can play some tricks to make this even faster.

In related news, I heard a rumor from a reliable source that WebVisum might be responsible for at least some of those CAPTCHAs that you see posted on Mechanical Turk. This is somewhat surprising to me, since I would have expected them to use a free volunteer-based model. In any case, it's still not clear to me how it works.

Harnessing Human Computation in the Real World

2009-07-15T22:30:14Z

I've had the great pleasure of spending some time with the UID Group at MIT CSAIL.

They're thinking a lot about harnessing Mechanical Turk to complete a variety of tasks, and how MT might be integrated seamlessly into software - what if calling on a turker was a simple as calling a function? What would that look like and what could you do with it?

For a while, I've been toying with the idea of using MT to help blind people not with improving web accessibility, but with everyday, real-world tasks. One simple application might, for instance, help blind people find objects that they've lost.

A big question is how quickly we could get Turkers to answer a question like that. As a first step, I ran a small experiment in which I asked turkers to click on some duct tape in a picture.

The Results are posted here. In summary, we got 10 turkers to click on the duct tape in the picture correctly for just 1 cent each. We got the first answer after 90 seconds, and had all 10 in a little over 3 minutes. Very encouraging results for realtime human computation being practical and affordable!

Dissertation Done!

2009-06-22T18:31:41Z

Last week, I finished and submitted my dissertation entitled Intelligent Interfaces "Enabling Blind Web Users to Build Accessibility Into the Web." This work is a great summary of the work that I've been doing in accessibility over the past few years, and a good guide to where I think access technology and the web will be going in the future.

The more we understand about how people interact with web content, the more we can help automatically and *unobtrusively* adapt content to better suit the needs of users. I think disabled users themselves can (and maybe must) play an integral role in this process to make it happen more quickly.

The thesis of my dissertation is:
With intelligent interfaces supporting them, blind end users can collaboratively and effectively improve the accessibility, usability, and availability of their own web access.

Global Reach of WebAnywhere

2009-06-21T19:58:02Z

Although we didn't originally design WebAnywhere thinking of reaching a global audience, one of the important advantages of it is anyone across the globe can get immediate access to the latest version just by visiting the WebAnywhere Website. The graph below, along with the associated numbers, demonstrate the very real global reach we've achieved in such a short itme.
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Alt Text - Still A Problem, This Time on the NYTimes

2009-04-25T17:57:05Z

I was reading the NYTimes today, and ran across the following editorial. The point of the article is to show some of the statistics involving intolerance and child suicide. Unfortunately, all of the interesting data tables were presented as graphics and none had alternative text provided.

One table containing multiple columns, rows, and descriptive text, had the following HTML code:

Whatever tool the author was using was smart enough to that alt text needed to be included for this image, but the author may have remained unaware.

For 15 years, the lack of alt text has been a problem for web accessibility, and we haven't figured out a solution. The original WebInSight project could offer a solution by OCR'ing this text, but a lot of the structure would be lost.

What needs to be done to prevent another decade from passing in which we still haven't solved the most basic and easiest to understand accessibility issue?

Reactions of a Man on Crutches

2009-04-03T17:22:50Z

The NYTimes had an article today describing the attention that a guy crutches has gotten by publishing photos of subway riders who did not offer him their seats. It's interesting - he discusses issues that disabled people might share. I wonder if he would have gotten so much attention if he hadn't been someone who was temporarily disabled. I also wonder if it matters.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/man-on-crutches-in-train-with-camer/?hp

Introduction to Screen Readers by Victor Tsaran, Yahoo

2009-04-03T16:42:45Z

I found this video to be a great introduction and confirmation of web accessibility issues for screen reader users. Victor is an incredible guy - I urge anyone interested in the area to watch his video.

Victor Tsaran: "An Introduction to Screen Readers" @ Yahoo! Video

Base Level of Access More Important with Newspaper Closings

2009-03-23T13:21:38Z

During the past few weeks, large newspapers have stopped printing (most recently the Ann Arbor News). Most often, these print newspapers have said they still plan to provide news on their web sites. As this trend continues, as more of the information that used to be available in print or other forms becomes available only on the web, it becomes even more important that people have access to the tools they need to access computers wherever they have access to a computer.

Our WebAnywhere project is a start on this - providing free non-visual access to the web, but many of the people affected by events like newspapers stopping their print editions are those who could benefit from other interfaces. As just two examples, simpler interfaces could benefit all sorts of people who find current computers and browsers too complex, and magnification could benefit low-vision users. WebAnywhere is transitioning to a platform that can handle these diverse preferences and let anyone provide new interfaces that someone might find helpful.

Toward this end, WebAnywhere is associated with the RaisingtheFloor initiative, which is a broad coalition of folks who have the goal of raising the base level of access for everyone, regardless of disability.

WebAnywhere at CSUN

2009-03-16T13:50:55Z

WebAnywhere will be visiting CSUN, so if you'll be there too and are interested in chatting, please find either me (Jeff Bigham) or Wendy Chisholm.

Wendy will be speaking about AccessComputing on Wednesday at 9:20am in EMP-2006, and I will be speaking with Annuska Perkins as part of the Microsoft Imagine Cup presentation Saturday at 10:40am in BLV-1046.

I'll also be checking email regularly, so if you'd like to meet to find out more about how you can become involved in the project, please email me at jbigham@cs.washington.edu. I also plan to live blog the conference, so you'll be able to keep up with what I'm seeing in nearly real time.