To all of you - Canvas a11y v. Doing it right

Because I know you're all watching:
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/j26j0/for_engineers/

FWD: Re: fwd:

Yes I got this in an e-mail.
A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, 
without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was 
set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will 
tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so 
precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the 
time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in 
a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks 
smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down 
the supermarket don’t get pissed off and buy someone else’s product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory 
got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a 
new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to 
solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was 
already too stretched to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor 
allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) 
later they had a fantastic solution on time, on budget, high quality and 
everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by 
using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash 
lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line 
would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out 
of it, pressing another button when done.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: 
amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after 
the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they 
were gaining market share. "That's some money well spent!" he says, 
before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after 
three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a 
dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He 
filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come 
back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren'’t 
picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the 
conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part 
of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before 
it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt 
and into a bin. "Oh, that" one of the guys put it there ’cause he was 
tired of walking over every time the bell rang, says one of the workers.

-----

Please, put up the $20 desk fan, finish our work on IAccessible so I can 
move on. I am so sick of talking about
the very basics of canvas a11y. It's been on since 2009, it's easy, cost 
efficient stuff to fix.

I'm sure over the next ~6 months you'll all attend to the accessibility 
stack, ARIA and WCAG. They're actually quite soothing; they inform 
"scope" one of the
most terrible aspects about software development and design.

Doug Schepers has requested a "new" graphics API. Having worked with 
five APIs to complete a software stack which both serializes and renders 
(deserializes)
I have to say, he's absolutely on target. I'm glad we have the low level 
APIs, I'd love a high level one that grants me all of the pleasures of 
the low level APIs.

While he works on that, and SVG2; please consider a $20 desk fan, so I 
can meet my WCAG 2.0 obligations in an API-clean manner.
ctx.setClickableRegion(element, [optional] zIndex);

Then, let's go ahead, and lets spend the next $8m making some awesome 
happen. Believe it, $8m will be spent
on the next graphics API. In the meantime, vendors can spend $7k each 
(MS, congrats on jumping in first), to close
out the current issues.


-Charles

Received on Friday, 29 July 2011 02:20:39 UTC