Two Brain Cells

There’s been some discussion recently about how URL shortening services like TinyURL help to break the web and decrease security by introducing an additional, potentially unreliable step in the hyperlink.

To counter this, I proudly present a new URL munging service, SameURL.

So, a BBC News editor sends out internal memo asking presenters to read out web addresses, email addresses and phone numbers, rather than just saying “as you can see on your screens”, so that blind and other visually-impaired viewers can use them too.

The usual anti-PC crowd, as usual, gets the wrong message and decides that the BBC is banning the phrase “as you can see” because it might cause ‘offence’ to blind people. The actual, simple motivation is, of course, accessibility — offending people never came into it.

The editor posts a clarification to his blog.

Cue hilarious comment thread where Joe Public struggles valiantly to deal with the concept that blind people might actually use computers in the 21st century.

Brickbats all round, but particularly to these stand-out comments:

• zsalya: People who are actually blind don’t make much use of URLs or email. #
• RelaxedSteak: How would a blind person be able to turn on a computer, open up a web browser find the navigation bar and type in bbc.co.uk or some other web address? #
• bringbackbiscan: this is going to sound insensitive, but what use is a url to a blind person? they wont be able to see the information anyway and surely the audio will only be of use on certain sites? #
• QantumBlip: What planet is the author of this article living on?

  I am all for improving disabled access to computers, I think computers can help disabled people a lot, but, let’s look at this issue objectively:

  The specific complaint was that of television presenters not reading out the URL of websites and simply referring viewers to look at the URL presented on the television screen.

  How useful is a website going to be to a blind person if they can’t even see the website in the first place!!

  So what value is there in reading out aloud the web URL to blind people if they can’t even access the website!

  Now whilst there are some text to speech conversion programs around, they’re only going to be of any use on websites which are very high in textual content, and then how can the blind person navigate around the website using hypertext links if they can’t even see those links in the first place!

  The author clearly hasn’t thought through what he’s proposing. #

• QantumBlip: Someone please tell me, how a blind person can navigate a mouse around a webpage when they can’t see where the mouse is and can’t see where they want to place the mouse cursor.

  If they could achieve that, then they surely could drive a car from one town to another! Not sure the Police would be too happy about it.

  Be realistic folks. #

• mrkcrtr: Surely, if a visually impaired person cannot see the URL on the TV screen then they will not be able to see the BBC website either? #
• JonL87: I have a simple question…if a blind person needs to have the URL spelled out on TV, how would they be able to read the website? #

And, among the few voices of reason, a bouquet to TheRealCatherineO for this wonderful remark:

I’m staggered at the comments that blind people don’t make much use of the TV, computers or email. What do they imagine they do all day? Weave baskets? #

Basket-weaving indeed.

Good advice regardless of beta status, methinks.

See my handily annotated screenshot:

Here’s the original page.

I’m seeing this kind of thing a lot lately:

I seem to start writing a lot of stuff that I can’t be bothered to finish. Or, equally, I write stuff that I decide is stupid, and so I decide not to post it. The latter, at least, is good, I think — I’m being my own editor. And everyone knows that every good writer needs a good editor.

Therefore, I am a good writer.

On 13 November I mentioned that Rackspace’s Texas datacenter had suffered a major power and service outage.

Now their London datacenter has suffered a similar loss of power and service. Half the servers are down.

Not a good couple of months for Rackspace.

37signals had some downtime recently because of a failure at Rackspace.

Rackspace advertises on 37signals’ site.

So you get this: