cloudsoup

We’re flying at 11am (UK time) to San Francisco, picking up a car and driving around anywhere that takes our fancy for three weeks. Blogging will be light.

It’s an eleven hour flight!

Axlog on BBC accessibility is not too impressed by the Graf report. I think he’s right to be annoyed. I’d have been more pissed-off myself but Zeldman cautions against crowing in the case of the accessible Odeon site designed by Matthew Somerville.

I don’t think, pace Zeldman, that Marketing Departments do ask for accessible websites but then, they don’t ask for PHP-based websites or .NET-based websites; nor do they ask for cookies as a means of simulating client sessions. They don’t do technical and at the moment accessibility issues are still stuck in the world of technical. It’s the developers who are aware of the problem and of the solutions and it has to be their job, until we all get clued-up, to let everyone else know about it.

The question presently is how organisations respond when the problem is pointed out to them. In the case of the Odeon website they’ve done nothing for years. Is that a reasonable response? Of course not.

In the case I’ve been connected with, the redevelopment of the Welsh Assembly website, the Welsh Assembly claimed it would be producing a level AAA website as part of its redesign. As soon as their spokesperson calimed they’d be going for triple-A I guessed they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about and, indeed, the new Assembly website redesign doesn’t comply with the most basic accessibility requirements. They have a legal obligation to produce an accessible site and, as a Government website they have a social and moral duty, too. But they just don’t bother

Axlog points out that the Graf report on BBCi accessiblity was politically motivated. Same goes, in spades, for the Welsh Assembly website too. Civil servants – and to be fair, bureaucrats in general – can be cynical about ticking the right boxes and they quickly turn poor measures of performance into the job itself.

Peter Solowka, ex The Wedding Present, turned to his parents’ roots for his next band, The Ukranians. Here’s a brief MP3 extract of the traditional song, Rospryahaite.

They do marvellous covers, too, including a slow, tuneful Venus in Furs (originally by The Velvet Underground). Very highly recommended.

Since our posts about how Freud is rubbish and since setting up the Psychowiki, we’re attracting psychology-related search terms. Yesterday it was:

• pavlov’s hierarchy of needs
• senile dementia late adulthood
• obedience to authority in wwii
• extinction in shaping behaviour

Looks like we’ll have to do more work.

The National Library of Wales is surpassing itself in idle nosiness. Last month, we had 3,129 individual page requests from librarians with time on their hands. This month, by the 24th, they’re already up to 3,655. What about all the books that need to be stamped? Eh?

I’ve always had good results wih Nikon Coolpix models. This is a closeup in macro mode of my cat’s nose, taken with the 4300.

Named for Valley Girl (Southern California’s San Fernando) idiom. Here’s a sample program:

LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
   IF PIZZA = LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY = LIKE TUBULAR AND
VALLEY GIRL = LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN
FOR I = LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
DO*WAH - (DITTY**2)
BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
SURE
LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM
REALLY
LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW)
IM*SURE
GOTO THE MALL

A musical interlude. Helen’s building iPod playlists and has put together a few for the States. The first item is Brazilian songsmith Caetano Veloso’s ‘Soy Loco Por Ti, América’. You may have caught Veloso in Almodovar’s Talk to Her, accompanying himself on the guitar as he sang to a small crowd on the evening passeggiata.

The music for Talk to Her supported the film beautifully; Helen dashed out and bought the soundtrack straight away. Another film I’ve just seen that has a memorable soundtrack is the highly recommended Pieces of April with Stephin Merritt songs sprinkled through it and the marvellous, You, You, You, You, You (sung by Katherine Whalen) over the end credits:

I just want to go to sleep and dream again
‘Cos every dream I dream’s a dream of dreamy little you…

Merritt stands comparison with Cole Porter for his witty lyrics and singable tunes. There’s a bit in Reno, Dakota that goes,

Reno, Dakota, there’s not an iota of kindness in you
Alas and alack you just don’t call me back, you make me feel blue
Pantone 292

I checked out Pantone 292 and it is a shade of blue.

Yesterday, Helen was ironing along to Vivaldi (Four Seasons, I know, it’s cheesey). She was listening to the remaster of the 1970 Neville Mariner version and for comparison we swapped between it and an old LP she had, conducted and played by someone else. The Mariner version was at least twice as fast. Putting on a vinyl record seemed very strange.

I’ve always been scared of heights and of flying but I don’t understand why that should be if a Behaviourist approach to phobias works.

The best way of keeping calm during a flight, I find, is to look at the bored faces of the staff. If they’re not scared, this must be ordinary. It worked for my last flight over the Atlantic and for a very bumpy ride into Barcelona a couple of years ago. I’m hoping it’ll work still for the trip to San Francisco but I don’t understand why I’m still scared.

Behaviourist psychology in practice treats phobias either with flooding or with progressive desensitsation. As I understand it, the idea with both is that confronting the object or source of your fear and being allowed to relax retrains you.

But I’ve already been on a six-hour flight to Atlanta and I feel just as bad about heights now. I still couldn’t climb up the spire in Freiburg, for example, something Helen did without turning a hair, or climb to the top walkway of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, or zoom up the Berlin Fernsehturm with ease. I still hate heights even though I’ve been exposed to them time and again. Doesn’t this suggest that the much-vaunted Behaviourist success with phobias is a pile of pants?

Avast me bilge rats! ‘Tis International Speak Like a Pirate Day on September 19th so ye lubbers got some time t’ learn yerselves the lingo! Arrrr! Be sure ye do it smartly else ye’ll be castaway

I’m a pirate! That I be!
I sail me ship upon the sea!
I stay up late – till half past three!
And that’s a peg below me knee!

Matthew Somerville tries to persuade people of the benefits of accessibility by creating accessible versions of well-know websites. He’s created an accessible version of the National Rail Enquiries Site and of the Odeon Cinema site. Now Odeon Cinemas are threatening to sue him; this despite the fact they are breaking the 1995 Disability and Discrimination Act themselves in having an inaccessible site in the first place.

You can see Matthew’s website or go straight to his accessible versions of:

• UK Train timetables
• Live Departure Boards
• Odeon
• The Hutton Enquiry
• BBC News front page
• BBC News front page

See also the polite letter from Matt Jones and Phil Guyford’s Inaccessible Odeon

Boycott Odeon cinemas until they see sense.