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Here and there
Sep. 21st, 2011 11:01 amI've been a bit stressed lately with OTW stuff that isn't public yet. The OTW always has internal discussions going on that aren't publicly visible, ranging from usual committee meetings to new initiatives. I think there are always some of those that could be more public than they are, and some that are private for good reason.
In the meantime, I can at least talk more generally about the issues I care about. Firstly, transparency, surprisingly enough! A lot of the content in the monthly org-wide meeting is also in the monthly newsletter, but it feels different when you're there, meeting the people who do the work, and being able to ask questions. So I'd like to encourage anyone interested in the org to watch out for the announcements, come along for part of the meeting if you can, or post questions in the comments of the monthly newsletter. I'd particularly like to encourage people to comment and subscribe to comments on the main OTW site - unlike LJ, there's no limit to the number of posts you can track. The next org-wide meeting is this Saturday - details have been emailed out to all volunteers, so contact Volcom if you haven't heard about it.
Secondly, accessibility. We're revamping our Javascript on the AO3, which is going to enable more accessiblity improvements in the future, but currently means we're reminding ourselves quite how much of the site doesn't work if you turn JS off (answer: too much). Of course, in between that, we're trying to handle servers falling over, error 502 and everything else. I've also been doing a bit of recent investigation into both screenreaders (learning to use NVDA) and voice recognition software (mainly the built-in Windows one, not Dragon). We have a couple of people within the OTW who use voice recognition, and we have worked hard to make the Archive accessible, but there are still areas we could improve, notably the tag wrangling pages. If you spot a problem, please do report it to us so we can fix it - detailed bug reports are a huge help. Our internal tools are also an issue - Campfire is okay to use with Dragon or Windows Voice Recognition, if you can manage a few mouse clicks in between, but it's totally impossible with a screenreader. I raised this to Campfire support, and they said they'd never tested with a screenreader, and didn't have any plans to change it. At least they agreed to suggest to their developers to consider fixing things, and someone in their support team has now tried it with NVDA, but it's a little frustrating.
In other news, the Fanlore project to revamp their CSS is going well - there's a recent post about it on their comm. The AO3 project to revamp all our CSS and change the way skins work is also in progress, and the first draft is being tested at the moment, before review by AD&T for design and accessibility.
In the meantime, I can at least talk more generally about the issues I care about. Firstly, transparency, surprisingly enough! A lot of the content in the monthly org-wide meeting is also in the monthly newsletter, but it feels different when you're there, meeting the people who do the work, and being able to ask questions. So I'd like to encourage anyone interested in the org to watch out for the announcements, come along for part of the meeting if you can, or post questions in the comments of the monthly newsletter. I'd particularly like to encourage people to comment and subscribe to comments on the main OTW site - unlike LJ, there's no limit to the number of posts you can track. The next org-wide meeting is this Saturday - details have been emailed out to all volunteers, so contact Volcom if you haven't heard about it.
Secondly, accessibility. We're revamping our Javascript on the AO3, which is going to enable more accessiblity improvements in the future, but currently means we're reminding ourselves quite how much of the site doesn't work if you turn JS off (answer: too much). Of course, in between that, we're trying to handle servers falling over, error 502 and everything else. I've also been doing a bit of recent investigation into both screenreaders (learning to use NVDA) and voice recognition software (mainly the built-in Windows one, not Dragon). We have a couple of people within the OTW who use voice recognition, and we have worked hard to make the Archive accessible, but there are still areas we could improve, notably the tag wrangling pages. If you spot a problem, please do report it to us so we can fix it - detailed bug reports are a huge help. Our internal tools are also an issue - Campfire is okay to use with Dragon or Windows Voice Recognition, if you can manage a few mouse clicks in between, but it's totally impossible with a screenreader. I raised this to Campfire support, and they said they'd never tested with a screenreader, and didn't have any plans to change it. At least they agreed to suggest to their developers to consider fixing things, and someone in their support team has now tried it with NVDA, but it's a little frustrating.
In other news, the Fanlore project to revamp their CSS is going well - there's a recent post about it on their comm. The AO3 project to revamp all our CSS and change the way skins work is also in progress, and the first draft is being tested at the moment, before review by AD&T for design and accessibility.
