It is a land of ice and snow today in Seattle. I took a quick walk outside and thought I was back in Wisconsin.
The Idea Place Posts
We are visiting the Dallas area for the Thanksgiving holiday and a wedding and took time to go see Stranger Than Fiction. Availability of descriptive video as much as the film itself dictated the choice. It came down to a choice between Fast Food Nation (no descriptions) or the movie we ended up seeing. Having read Fast Food Nation a couple years ago and the desire to see a described movie, we settled on Stranger Than Fiction.
Whether it is the direction of the thumb (up or down), number of stars or some other rating system, we all tend to have our ways of judging movies. For me I suppose my quick and dirty way of ranking a movie is the number of times I check my watch during the film. The really good ones will get a zero, films that capture my attention a one or two and anything beyond a five is likely not worth the trouble.
I doubt my system will get adopted by any film studio. Something tells me that putting a tag in a movie ad of “zero watch checks” according to Kelly Ford just isn’t a selling point. Still my rating system works for me.
Stranger than Fiction was by no means a great movie. With two watch checks, it was still a reasonable way to spend an afternoon at the movies.
the basic plot of the movie is pretty straight forward. Harold Crick’s been living a very uneventful and repetitious life. We are told for example that Crick brushes his teeth 76 times each morning.
How Crick’s life is explained to us starts to show the movie’s main twist. We quickly learn that the narrator telling us about Crick’s life is an author writing a book in which a character by the name of Harold Crick appears. Of course Crick hears this narrator too and the movie starts down the path of Crick trying to figure out what’s up. Things quickly escalate when Crick learns that the character in the novel is going to be killed. Of course this means the real living Crick too will quicly be a dead man.
Fiction is just that, fantasy. So as long as you are willing to suspend belief and accept the basic premise of the story and go with the flow, the story is told well.
I found a college professor played by Dustin Hoffman particularly entertaining. There was something amusing about his straight-laced delivery to Crick telling him, Crick, that he must die to make one of the best literary works ever come to fruition. Hoffman’s one of those actors that does a great job of letting his voice fit the role of the characters he’s playing.
Coming in at two watch checks, Stranger Than Fiction is a film I’d recommend. It isn’t a must see in the theater but is worth putting on your Netflix queue.
Conclusion of those little projects known as Vista and IE7 at work meant a short weekend vacation for Aimee and myself. We’re spending the weekend on the Oregon coast in Seaside.
This little city is quickly becoming one of my favorite “get away” spots. It is about four hours drive from Seattle and has much of what I like in a place to relax. The city is very pedestrian friendly and the ocean access and beach off the Promenade are excellent.
Access to much of the Oregon coast involves getting through some rugged and rocky terrain. I enjoy a healthy hike as much as anyone but it is nice here in Seaside to be able to walk along a smooth sandy beach that’s nothing more than a step off the 2 mile sidewalk known as the Promenade.
That’s not to say the more rugged beaches are far away. We went out hiking yesterday along a winding trail that lead to the beach. It was amazing to see how much ground the recent batch of rain here in the northwest dug up. Most trails along the coast are covered with accumulated debris from the surrounding forest. But in hiking yesterday it was easy to experience all the places where water had exposed tree roots, rocks and in general dug up the forest floor.
We capped the evening off with dinner at Lil’ Bayou. This is a must visit restaurant for anyone visiting Seaside. Great food at reasonable prices and excellent service.
Retirement, something not in the near future, would be pretty nice in a place like this. Like that’s any secret though as a quick browse of any coastal home price listing shows.
The NYT has this article on the most current legal action over online accessibility. This time around it is the NFB against Target, with the case claiming Target’s web site is not accessible.
As the article points out, this is really just the latest in a series of legal actions to apply some sort of accessibility standard to the web. The typical question in these cases boils down to whether the web can be considered a place of public accommodation.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was written before the web became the ubiquitous part of society that it is today. That’s unfortunate because it has left room for much ambiguity in this area. Perhaps the legislation should have been stronger in the beginning to allow for more applicability in new circumstances but I think the spirit of the law is obvious—do not exclude parts of society from what you offer.
Whether it is this case or another down the road, I tend to think at some point the ADA or another legal standard will be applied to the web. Today it is mostly government web sites that have a legal obligation to meet accessibility requirements of Section 508 here in the U.S. There are other legal standards in the international arena as well.
Of course the real fun’s going to be determining what constitutes an accessible web site. Here in the target suit you see disagreement over even that basic fact.
The National Federation of the Blind sued Target, contending that the company’s inaction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Web site is essentially an extension of its other public accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people with disabilities.
A Target spokeswoman would not comment on those assertions, but in court the company offered testimony from three blind users rebutting the federation’s arguments.
From my experience pinning down exactly what’s accessible is often a challenge. I’ve successfully purchased items from Target’s online site on several occasions. Does that mean the site’s accessible? I also know of web sites that I’ve not been able to use but know that the reason was attributable to the particular screen reader I was using at the time.
Then too comes in the question of accessible versus usable. It is ironic that the article site’s Amazon’s “accessible” option here as an example of a company doing the right thing.
Amazon, she added, “is already generally usable for people with screen readers.” It has offered a text-only, streamlined site designed for such devices (amazon.com/access).
Ignoring the entire question of having a separate site for accessibility, opening the referenced Amazon.com web page one can quickly find a basic accessibility issue that violates any known standard on accessible web design. Specifically, the edit box used for entering search terms is missing the HTML title or label tag. These are used to give the box a menaingful name for screen readers and other assistive technology. Today this box reads simply as “edit” to a screen reader.
Now does this make the site inaccessible? By definition one could probably say yes. That said, the page is clearly usable. If there were multiple edit boxes on this same page, the missing labels could become quite a problem though.
What about user skill and knowledge? What level of familiarity with the web , access technology and such should be expected when considering accessibility and usability?
Oh, what memories! The Nitty Gritty is one of those institutions that I suppose most cities, especially those that play host to major colleges, has to have to be considered complete. I confess to having the birthday bell rung for me a time or few during the almost 10 years I called Madison home. Ironic that these days the old gritty mugs are more often filled with milk for dinner than that other beverage that Wisconsin’s so famous for.
The Nitty Gritty is one of those places that’s a must stop, birthday or not, if you’ve never been to Madison. Then too, it is a requirement for any return visit to the city if you’ve ever called the city built on an isthmus home.
The Seattle Times has been running a series they call Your Courts, Their Secrets.
The series looks at different legal settlements that have been improperly kept secret and is an example to me of what quality journalism should be about. Today’s installment examines the case of a school teacher with a lengthy demonstrated history of sexual assault and how the system kept things hidden.
This is a series worth reading and it is good to see something beyond the surface level coverage that fills most of the pages of the Times on a regular basis.
It has been almost a year since Aimee and I travelled to India. Today an article in the Seattle Times caught my attention as they have a travel writer visiting for two weeks.
Walking through the grounds at Humayuan’s Tomb, a precursor of the Taj Mahal, built in the 1500s, I was struck at how easy it is to escape the traffic noise and congestion, and get a feel for what medieval Delhi used to be like.
This isn’t the most descriptive paragraph but it caught my attention because it captures a lot of what I remember about India. The noise, chaos and constant action that surrounded us is still something that I marvel at when thinking back on our trip. Yet reading about the writer’s experience at the tomb reminds me how peaceful the grounds were.
I’m looking forward to reading this author’s experiences.
Interesting what you find out is in your own backyard. Kirkland is quite literally just down the road from me and here’s an interesting idea on what that city’s doing with pedestrian safety.
Comments closedWhat began as an experiment at five intersections with no signals downtown in 1996 has grown to 47 throughout the city. Pedestrians can pick up a flag in a stand, wave it while crossing the street, then deposit it at a stand on the other side.
Technically I suppose this isn’t around the corner but in driving home from the airport recently we noticed a construction sign on a road near our house indicating lane closures that were about to start. The road in question is Old Redmond Road in the city of Redmond and is the road where I catch a bus for work. There’s also the typical suburban strip mall down a few blocks from where we live on this road.
Regretably there’s been no sidewalk on part of Old Redmond Road and for more than two years a project to put one in was in a stalled state due to funding issues or so I was told. This has made it difficult for me to walk to things like a grocery store and such in this shopping center.
A bit of web browsing this morning tells me that the City of Redmond must have found some money. The project descriptionn says that the missing sidewalks will be added.
Personally this is great news for my little corner of the world.
Comments closedOne feature in the JAWS screen reader is known as “custom label assign”. This is particularly helpful on web sites that fail to label graphics or other items that should contain alternative text or other such labels. This can turn the gibberish of /../images/33342.;gif into something more meaningful.
In the case of www.nfl.com, many of the team logos are not labeled correctly.
I’ve created a custom label file that gives these items correct names. You can obtain the file from http://www.kellyford.org/random/nfl.zip.
To use the file, ope it in the JAWS settings packager and choose the import option. For more detailed instructions see the JAWS help file within the Settings Packager.