What is a ‘normal citizen’? Over the past century the perceived value someone can have on society has developed, however the inequalities that were present at the turn of the 20th Century are still resonating within today’s societies, especially within the digital world. By exploring the relationship between the development of working practices and the changes within society, this thesis will examine how economic value and social power has dictated the thinking of a mass culture to exclude certain groups. This is a problem that has started to be addressed by the governments of the developed world, however they have fallen behind with technological advancements, meaning that those creating goods for the digital world are not governed by the same legislation that those producing goods for the physical world are. The thesis continues by looking at these issues in relation to the internet and how the development of technology has started the dissemination of this power to create a more accessible experience for all.
Users of the internet are now becoming aware of the needs of the disabled users and this thesis explores the ways in which the online community is aiding them and how companies are harnessing this community effort to further their own offerings. It concludes with how the internet as a whole is progressing with greater accessibility in mind, and the current issues which surround this progression.
For the critical context module as a group we have decided to investigate the power that brands have on us and whether people are aware of the ethical proceedures behind the brands that we cannot fail to avoid in everyday life. For the group effort I am in charge of looking after the website and as such have created a CMS which allows everybody within the groups to have a section of the website dedicated to their own project therefore being able to show their project in the way they want with picture uploading and multiple blog posts. This was quite a feat but I feel that it allows the users the flexibility to do what they want it to with scheduling available to only reveal posts as and when that person wants. I am also responsible for creating the website from a design done by someone else within the group.
For my individual piece i am looking into the feelings people have of brands and to do this i am creating an interactive piece which will allow the user to text in their feelings about a brand and directly effect how that brands logo appears. I have now also incorporated the ability for the user to send in an mms message containing a new logo to send in. I hope to present the findings of the day in a presentation within the after show party. This investigates what people are thinking rather than highlighting issues with a particular brand or saying what one is better than the other as I feel it is only when we truly understand which brands are the most popular that we can then start to concieve ways to open peoples eyes to what those companies are truly doing. This will hopefully be live by the end of the week and I intend to show it both within the arena of the show and also on the plasma screen within Portland square as I feel the graphics used will also provide good advertising for the project.
All the efforts of the group will come together the wednesday after May day in the Levinsky building followed by an after show party with the location to be confirmed.
So for this module we are recieving lectures on such topics of rehtoric, authorship, how naratives are constructed etc.
We are now a few weeks into this lecture series and some of the points being made are very interesting and unlike many things within a university context I believe useful outside of that environment, especially rehtoric as within many presentation it is good to employ these techniques to keep your audience engaged and many good speakers will do it without thinking!
So onto my idea for this module. Drawing inspiration from a book Hugo showed us, the title of which escapes me currently, I will update with what it is soon, and more recently today with Geoff the book of 100 million poems I would like to create a project which questions authorship and the idea of a fixed narrative, in a similar way to the Dada movement with their poems.
I will create a digitally based project (read:website) that allows the user to create their own narrative from ones that have preceeded that user. I will provide a starting paragraph, however the user will be able to create their own starting paragraph if they so wish. The user will then create a narrative by either selecting paragraphs which another user has written/copied/stolen or create their own paragraph. Alternatively there will be a randomize button which will select the narrative for the user, however in doing this there will be the possible situation that a paragraph is missed creating a space where the user will have to 'fill in the blank'.
What I have not decided currently is whether to allow the user to select any paragraph that has been written and put them in any order they wish, or keep the order of the paragraphs in which they are written. This could be another possible option of the project and in this way would lean on the Dada poems more for inspiration.
This is just the start and we still have several weeks of lectures left however I quite like this idea currently and would like to run with it if possible, i will explain it to Hugo in more detail next week to make sure it conforms to the project assignment, I think this will probably take about a week to produce hopefully and we can then move on with the dissertation refinement.
As can be seen by following the link below, there are many types of visual dissability, for my final project I aim to replicate these for people to understand where the user with the impairment is coming from. There are some fantastic pictures of how these people see the world and it is these views that I am hoping to replicate.
So the purpose if this post is to outline what my final year project is, how it will be created and also the concept behind it.
First of all above you will see the project mind map and working flow diagram from which I have worked from to date (click to view original size).
OUTLINE
The driving force behind my project is one of awareness, to make mainly the creators of websites but also the general public aware of the issues that people with a visual disability have with accessing the website. With this in mind the first section of my project is a custom made headset that will, in-effect, give the wearer and experience of having a visual disability and therefore more aware of how someone with that disability would see the world and more importantly see the internet. The hope is that by making someone aware of how these people see is that designers and website creators will change their practices to make sure that these groups of people are also catered for as well as those with full sight.
Below is a visual representation of the how the device will work and how a user may see through the device with a certain disability!
For this part of the project there will hopefully be very little user interface, the hope would be that there would be none and the user of the device would feel as if they were naturally looking through their own eyes just with an impairment. The only interface that may come into it would be one to select the type of disability the device would implement however this piece of the project could be used in a performance art project where the user would wear the device for a set period of time and their eyesight would slowly degrade, this would be slow enough to make the user not realize that their eyesight was getting worse.
The second part of the project, to go with the device would be a custom built web browser where it give the user the ability to chance pieces of a particular website to allow the user to see more clearly, this altered web page would then be stored on a server so when someone else accesses that website they could load the more accessible version of the website and in turn slowly creating a more accessible web. The two things together would enable a designer to be able to create a more accessible page by understanding the disability and changing their website accordingly. The browser will have the ability to change the colors on the site and to also apply filters and overlays to hopefully make a website more visible to all.
So my final year project and dissertation is aimed at trying to make people more aware about the issues that the visually impaired face when trying to access the internet. This only came to my attention last year on placement how a well designed (I'm talking about design as in the way the code is layed out, not visually) site can instantly change the way a site is 'viewed' by those with am impairment. I believe this topic is very relevant at the moment due to the increasing rise in Rich Internet Applications (RIA's) such as google docs, even facebook to an extent and a lot of the functions within these applications relies on what are known as 'live regions' these are areas of a web page that get updated without the page refreshing and if this is not done correctly with accessibility in mind it can completely block a user from being able to use that part of the site. I believe more needs to be done to highlight this area as large corporations such at Target were even caught out when a law suit was raised against them for their website not providing an accessible way for impaired shoppers to use their website, however Target are to be commended as they have now taken steps to correct this and are working with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in America to ensure they are leaders in providing an accessible experience to all users.
My final year project is taking this passion to the people who make the decisions, the designers, they are the ones who would not even consider providing a less than perfect experience for full sighted people but this is mostly because designers can not see why a website should be accessible. I hope to rectify this situation by providing an experience to designers which makes them open their eyes to how people with an impairment will see their websites and to provide a way for them to see how small changes can greatly improve the experience to all users. In this vein i was thinking about creating a headset of some sort for a designer to wear and whilst looking at my feeds to day i came across this, it is not that closely related to my project however i thought it was quite a good way if she manages to do have a truly first person view of the world. Her plan is to replace her prosthetic eye with a form of webcam with bluetooth and things in it to transmit what she sees! Check it out, i think it is very cool and in a way on the same lines as what Stelarc's work with the prosthetic ear which he has grown on his forearm which i was lucky enough to see when he gave the kenote speech at an arts festival in Berlin, German 2007.
This has to be one of the biggest problems that I have come across during my time as a student at Plymouth University. The student portal that the university provide is the worst thing in the world. I don't know if its because the developers are too lazy or they just cant be bothered but something that is supposed to make our lives easier in fact makes things twice as difficult and after talking to a couple of my lecturers they completely agree from their side that the system is in now way intuitive and the simplest task can take ages to figure out how.
However this is not my biggest complaint about the system, THE biggest problem is that there is no way to subscribe to the service, if one of your lecturers posts a new article for the next day there is no way of knowing it is there unless you go to the trouble of logging in, and going through at least 2 links to get to where the thing has been posted and you have to do this process for every module, and then we also have to check our emails to make sure there isn't anything on there. All I'm asking for is a simple system that either ties into the email system or a way to get an RSS feed of a module so i don't have to check all of the folders at least twice a day and heaven forbid if you miss an important announcement for that day because you couldn't be bothered to jump though all the hoops of the system.
A bit of thought and a bit less Microsoft dependance could result in a really good system, I'm sure there are already open source solutions out there! Also please don't presume that everybody uses internet explorer there are a lot, and i mean a lot of people that choose not to be a slave to microsoft and actually use a decent brower. I dont know whether it is this love for IE that has lead to the view i am currently getting or the developers have just decided that the live domain is as gooder test bed as any.
Come on Plymouth, sort it out! You can spend enough on the physical world, now how about making our lives easier in the virtual one!
