<br /> No Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition v 1.4.1 support for APPLET!!<br />

Source code: sketch_mar18a

It requires java, so if you can’t see it, that’s why.

	Patrick Fox Razorfish
	Becky Gibson IBM

Accessibility is all around us in the real world – curb cuts, access ramps, closed captioning. Accessibility is and should be ubiquitous. Accessibility benefits all of us – we watch closed captions when we’re watching a basketball game in a bar, we use curb cuts for strollers and bikes.

Semantic HTML is the foundation of accessibility. Your markup should indicate where headings, menus, links, etc. are. The essential part of making javascript accessible is to start with a normal page with good markup, and add the javascript afterward in such a way that the page looks normal with javascript turned off.

The sxsw website, for example, is completely reliant on javascript for its functionality. It’s unusable with javascript turned off. Also, rather than identifying the links as links, they are divs with a javascript “onclick” command. They should at the very least have anchor links.

You can use style sheets to show content if the user has javascript disabled, and hide it if the user has javascript enabled.

You should provide both mouse and keyboard events so that users can navigate with keyboard only.

Don’t mess with the functionality of the browser – don’t change how the up and down keys work, how the tab key works, etc.

There is a program called WAI-ARIA that is working on making web 2.0 accessible. It transmits data to assistive technologies (ATs) like screen readers informing the AT what sort of element it is looking at. So if you have a menu with collapsible sections, the AT would recognize that and alert the user.

ARIA also makes items “focusable,” meaning the AT can look at specific elements using tabindex.

ARIA can alert the user if ajax has updated any part of the page. Users can turn off the updates, make them “polite” – meaning that it waits until the AT is done reading or completing it’s current task, or make them “assertive” – meaning that it interrupts whatever is going on.

Examples of ajax updates would be autosaving a blog post and new email arrival. A screen reader user set on “polite” would hear that they have new mail after the screen reader finished reading out the email that it is currently reading.

ARIA works on JAWS 10 and Firefox 3.

To interface with ARIA, your page should have different regions which are identified by a “role” attribute, such as “main,” “banner,” or “navigation.” When the user looks at the page with a screen reader, the screen reader will tell the user what regions are on the page and allow the user to choose a region using the keyboard. The page can indicate to ARIA which regions are “live,” meaning that they might be updated by javascript or ajax. ARIA will watch those regions and alert the user if they change.

However, the page should still determine whether the user has javascript turned on, and serve them a static page if they do not.

Coding for ARIA does take more time, but JavaScript Toolkits have ARIA integrated so that it happens automatically.

Dojo is an open source javascript toolkit that fully supports ARIA.

	Serkan Piantino Facebook Inc
	Alan Schaaf Imgur LLC
	Kevin Weil Twitter
	Christopher Slowe Reddit
	Jason Kincaid TechCrunch

Imgur was released a year ago on Reddit. It was on a shared hosting plan. It lasted two days before the site was terminated for generating too much traffic. The site went down. Imgur moved to Mediatemple. That lasted three weeks, so they moved again, and again. Imgur moved four or five times in four months, scaling up to a better server with more bandwidth. Imgur went to foxhole.net, a content delivery network, because they have servers all over the world. That allowed the devs to concentrate on making the site faster rather than keeping the servers up.

Reddit is running on EC2 using about 50 machines. They have 20 app servers. They got a big speed boost by going single-threaded. They use Postgress and memcache.

Twitter started as a rails application tied to a single MySQL database. They have an open source queuing system, so they can do asynchronous processing.

A lot of the core architecture behind Facebook is still LAMP. They run newsfeed, ads, and search all on separate servers. On Facebook, you’re typically friends with 0-5000 people, whereas on Twitter you can follow millions of people, so they can render everything on the fly where Twitter can’t.

What is Reddit using for indexing?
They roll their own indeces using memcachedb. They are getting a .02% failure rate with that.

At what point are LAMP stacks not enough?
Knowing when a machine needs to be replaced is tough. Facebook has a monitoring system set up with alerts and teams dedicated to figuring out where they will have scaling problems before they have them. Monitor. Monitor. Monitor.

How do you scale search?
Search is really hard. The metric you are measured against is Google, which is a ridiculous standard. Reddit does about two queries per second. Getting quality results is really hard to tweak. It’s very qualitative in terms of what is “good” search.

What was the first thing that blew up?
Imgur had apache blow up first. “It was like trying to hammer a nail with a sledgehammer.” Twitter originally put the whole social graph in a MySQL database, but it was getting into the billions of rows. They had to build their own social graph store. They are in the process of open sourcing it.

What modules is Facebook using to convert PHP to C++?
They built a project called hiphop which compiles all their php down to binary C++. There are whitepapers about it, and it’s open source.

How do you deal with deployment?
Facebook and Twitter use BitTorrent to deploy builds to all their servers, cutting deployment from 12 minutes down to 30 seconds. Reddit cobbled something together in perl.

Why haven’t any of you used proprietary databases?
We prefer to work with open source. As you deal with scaling problems, you have to peak under the hood and see what you can tweak. Calling a vendor is a pain. Oracle is expensive. We like to be nimble and play well with the community.

And the slides:

And here are links to some of the resources mentioned in the talk:

Creative Commons
Creative Commons “Wanna Work Together?” video
Twitter in Plain English video
Human Rights Campaign Facebook Cause
RSS in Plain English video
Cory Doctorow on how to be an uber blogger video
Flip video camera
Books: Getting Things Done and Four Hour Work Week
LinkedIn
Ignite Seattle
Ignite Portland
BarCamp Seattle
BarCamp Portland
Audience suggestion: Pecha Kucha Seattle and Pecha Kucha Portland
Saturday House

I could talk about this stuff all day long. I’ll be at the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference, so feel free to connect with me there or ping me on Twitter.

My panel is called Start to Finish Drupal Redesign, and you can vote for it now!

Bug fighting Drupal drop by Senpai

ACLU of Washington is currently in the thick of a Drupal redesign, made all the more complicated by the fact that we’re nuts about privacy and accessibility, so we’re going to have to modify Drupal quite a bit to account for those things. We’ve put resources into creating a very technical detailed case study of how this project was (will have been?) accomplished, so that others may learn from our vast wisdom (many more others if you go vote for the panel. See those stars at the top? Click on the fifth one. Tell your friends!).

[Edited to add: Also give some love to my friend Tim Hwang of ROFLCon fame, and the fabulous nonprofit tech folks!]

While I don’t disagree with the philosophical premise of the lyrics, I do think that it makes RMS’ hippie reputation somewhat justified. I’m tempted to write up some free software songs of my own and start up a youtube channel, if only to restore our good name!

“You can touch my boobs,” she said to all of us in the hallway. “It’s no big deal.”

Livejournal is in a rage today over this post and this clarification.

Apparently there was a mixed-gender group of people at ConFusion and then later PenguinCon who put forth the idea that people who support open content and open software might be amenable to consensual open sexuality, specifically getting felt up.

As I have two X chromosomes and I’m attending LinuxFest Northwest this weekend, I feel obliged to comment.

There is definitely a lack of diversity within the American open source community, particularly gender diversity. There is certainly awkwardness and avoidance around the topic of sexuality. I don’t think either of those things are healthy. Humanity is diverse and sexual. The open source community would do well to accept this fact and attempt to rectify some of it’s shortcomings.

I think that many women agree with open source principles, if only because women tend to be more liberal and idealistic than men. And what is open source if not liberal and idealistic? Women do not, however, feel (generally) that their time is best spent debugging code for hours on end. What the open source community has failed to emphasize is the plethora of non-coding work that needs to be done. We need graphic designers, god help us. We need people to manage projects, to come up with new features, to do usability testing.

I have known very few other women who code. I have known many women, however, who enjoy spending their volunteer time building community tools. We, as the open source community, must reach out to these women and invite them into our projects and our conventions.

As far as sexuality is concerned, I think this problem is not specific to the open source community. This is a problem with America in general. We focus on sexuality as the pinnacle of self-worth, and the bottomless pit of sin. The open source community is built of smart people, and my hope is that they will outpace the general public in ridding themselves of these perceptions, but I think diversity of gender and sexual orientation must be a precursor to that exorcism.

We went around the room and talked about why we are interested in open source, including:

• community participation
• financial cost
• ease of use
• scalability
• customization
• ethical benefits toward community
• use in academia
• sustainability
• better crm and cms tools

Question:
If someone distributes open source software, who does the support?

Answer:
That’s one of the problems with open source, there is no way to ensure support for every product. However, large products have huge support communities, and there are companies popping up recently to provide support for open source at a charge.

Question:
What is Drupal?

Answer:
Drupal is a content management system with a huge community around it. More information is available at drupal.org.

Question:
Is there a site that compares open source cms tools?

Answer:
Yes! Social Source Commons, Opensourcecms.com and cmsmatrix.org

Question:
Why do people feel that choosing open source software is a philosophical decision?

Answer:
Support for community. Open standards. Global community. Best practices come from a multitude of voices.

Question:
Is there an open source solution to targeted email advocacy?

Answer:
Not yet. Most proprietary solutions are using CapWiz, which is also proprietary.

Question:
Is there an open source solution to virtualization?

Answer:
Virtual Box

Question:
Why does open source have such poor documentation?

Answer:
There is a misconception that in order to contribute to the open source movement, you have to be a developer, but in fact, they need writers, marketers, and especially people who can translate between geek and English.

Question:
Is the Asterisk phone system time consuming?

Answer:
Yes it is, but once you’ve got it up and running, it works very well for call centers or automated phone systems. And there are companies that provide paid support, so you have a backup if something goes wrong.

Question:
Is there an open source version of Skype?

Answer:
There is OpenWengo, but it’s not very stable yet.

Question:
How do you pick an open source solution?

Answer:
Play with it, read the NOSI Primer, and get to know the community and make sure you like them.

Community ownership of software is also in itself consonant with the missions of many nonprofit organizations, whose role is in strengthening community. By using tools that are owned by everyone, you know that you aren’t building your work in a way that depends on or benefits any one corporation or institution, but building your work in a way that benefits everyone.

This is a well written and well researched opus that will benefit the nonprofit community hugely in the years to come. Bravo!

Cross-posted to Freedom for IP