Here’s the mandatory PR statement:

Yahoo! TimeTraveler aggregates data from Yahoo! Travel and Flickr for a new travel experience. Users with a few hours to spare can use Yahoo! TimeTraveler in 29 cities worldwide to create a trip plan, directions and a map to guide the way through the coolest parts of their location. http://yhoo.it/JIV3pK

Thanks guys and congrats on your great inspiring work!

Until I got to meet in person Victor Tsaran, the Accessibility Lead in Yahoo.

Victor

source: YUI blog

Victor has been in the company for a long time and is renowned for being an advocate of improving accessibility support in our web products. His role is essential, as most product managers and developers have never seen a screenreader in action, let alone how to develop products with decent support of it. I strongly suggest anyone to check out Victor’s TED talk here and a clip recorded at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany of visually impaired people demoing how he uses the iPhone. It’s mind blowing.

With VoiceOver mode turned on, the iPhone empowers the visually impaired by augmenting their abilities to send commands to the device that might not be possible in the standard mode. A continuous stream of verbal feedback provides cues to users on the state of the app and results of their actions.

Example

Perhaps this is easier to understand with an example. Take a look at this app I put together below. It has a UIScrollView at the top showing a bunch of album arts and a UIWebView below that loads the last.fm page of the album when it is tapped. For a non-visually impaired user, a quick look and a few explorative swipe gestures would be enough to figure out what the app is about and how it is used.

The second clip below shows the exact same build of the app running with VoiceOver mode on (General > Accessibility > Enable Voice Over). You’d need to turn audio on to hear the verbal feedbacks from the device. Since the video was recorded after being airplay-mirrored from an iPad, you won’t be able to see any fingers or mouse cursors manipulating the screen. In any case, I was using Double-Tap and Three-Finger-scroll gestures to navigate between the UI elements.

How awful was that? VoiceOver declared the album arts simply as “buttons” without indicating what kind of buttons they are and what results tapping upon them might bring. Swiping in the scrollview brought an unhelpful “Page x of 5″ announcement. Nothing is reported to the user when the buttons have been tapped. The app is downright unusable to visually impaired users at this state. Let’s tackle those issues one by one.

The Fixes

The announcement over the album art (i.e. “buttons”) can be fixed by attaching UIAccessibilityLabel and UIAccessibilityHints to the UIButton, like so:

Now whenever the buttons are tapped or highlighted in VoiceOver mode, the Album Name (accessibility label) would be announced, along with a further instruction for action (accessibility hint).

The next thing we want is notice the users that the webview has finished loading and their album info is ready. For this, we make the ViewController a delegate of the webview, and in webViewDidFinishLoad, use a UIAccessibilityPostNotification to announce the event.

We’re almost there. One last improvement I wanted to make was to make sure the Three-Finger-Scroll wouldn’t cause the scrollview to jump to arbitrary positions. This meant implementing the accessibilityScroll:(UIAccessibilityScrollDirection)direction method, and controlling exactly how much to move the scrollview when the gesture was detected.

Let’s have these packed up and re-run the app:

The difference is so profound it felt someone was narrating the interaction. With just a few lines of code and a little bit of imagination, we have opened up our app to a new group of often neglected audience. With this, I hope that more mobile developers would take the extra hour or so to learn about the Accessibility API and add it to their apps. A little bit indeed goes a long long way.

Source code:
- AccessibilityScrollExample.zip (pre accessibility enhanced)
- AccessibilityScrollExample2.zip

“It is sometimes forgotten that all art is contemporary at the time it is made, and that the character of modern art is to continually challenge and reinvent the works that came before.“

Same goes for programming, and everything we do in life that is important, I reckon.

While reading Revolution in the Valley some years back, one of the things that moved me was how Apple evangelists would voluntarily go off to electronics stores and offer to “fix” the retail Apple experience – ensuring software was running properly, answering questions from customers and sales reps, and the like. They were the first generation Apple Geniuses.

At one time or another, each Mac user would undoubtedly come across the chance to do his bit of evangelizing. Mine was about three or four years ago, when our department was still flat-out filled with XP laptops (with the anti-virus kicking in and commanding 99% CPU hourly) and only a handful of folks owned Apple machines. Refused to be issued a Macbook by IT, I sought to bring in my own instead. That sparked a bit of interest among my team mates (and grunt from management), especially those planning to replace their notebooks.

After hearing remarks like how the “Mac OS looks like Windows”, I had an urge to set the record straight and tell the team about the story of Apple and Steve Jobs. I consider it essential knowledge for anyone who works in the field.

Here’re the slides I showed them that afternoon. A fitting end for an unforgettable week I guess.

Photo courtesy of turtlemom_nancy @flickr

Like many others I was shocked by the news of Steve Job’s passing away when I woke up this morning. Sure, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time and his publicized resignation more or less paved way for what is to come, but that doesn’t make the news any easier to swallow when it strikes.

The world as we know it will never be the same. For many years to come, people will still be discovering how much they have truly lost, and occasionally pondering how Steve would have done things differently if he is still around.

Most people weigh upon his contributions by the products he helped to create, his innovative visions or business acumens. Those are impressive, but I’m more touched by the more human side of the man. His relentlessness in pursuing true greatness. The drive to create works of wonder that are in harmony with nature, people, the world. His refusal to be let down by the status quo. His eagerness to shine among the flock. And the sense of proudness and satisfaction when he sees people appreciating his work. To that end, this mentality is no different than that of a fourth grader at school striving hard to win the praises of parents and teachers.

Some people singled that out as a fault in Jobs’ character. That his biological parents put him up for adoption created a vacuum in his heart he spent a lifetime trying to reconcile. In my opinion, that aspect was a gift rather than a fault. It was probably one of the greatest source of strength in Steve’s life, and as a result the single most important aspiring quality contributing to the high levels of standard carried forward to most of Apple’s products.

If only could more people in the world retain this child-like innocence and act upon it in everything they do, the human race would benefit from more amazing breakthroughs than an array of new laptops and mobile phones every year. That, would be the greatest legacy that Steve Jobs could have left behind.

steve jobs 1955-2011

The changes were mostly personal ones. At age 33, I took the ever beaming, eccentrically adorable Maggie Chan as bride and finally started my own family. The other change is the decision to leave my birthplace for the third time and move to another country.

The course of events have been long in brewing, yet abrupt in occurrence. I want to take a moment here to thank the friends and family members that have helped me cross through this rite of passage with tremendous support and kindness. I couldn’t have made it that easily without you all.

Once crossed the line into the mobile word, however, these three factors lose their usefulness drastically. Text input on mobile devices is largely impractical and traditional web pages don’t render well, so media discovery and consumption on mobile devices is generally inferior compared to the same experience from printed mediums like newspapers and magazines. While big name players attempt to tackle the issue simply by snapping on extra features (Google Mobile Voice Search, Google Instant Preview for Mobile.etc.), the underlying problems remain resolved as its ranking algorithm is the same as its desktop counterpart. Flipboard is so great because, in my opinion, it has found and defined the new three pillars of relevancy for mobile content consumption and they are freshness, social, and readability* – and they work wonderfully.

With this in mind, I put some work to the server components of Cassius. From a simple script that turns a Tweet into a JSON feed, the pipeline now includes saving documents into a transitional store (MongoDB) and a series of quality measurement calculations. While the extra processing means we won’t be able to serve the feed in realtime, the cost should be worthwhile and I hope the results justify that.

How well does your article read?

In Zite or Flipboard, it’s not uncommon to run into articles with summary texts that resemble gibberish (see below). The issue is often a result of incorrect identification of raw HTML elements as meaningful content, and is very hard to avoid. I have seen attempts to solve this problem using NLP and machine learning classification methods, to varying degrees of success. Since those are beyond my capabilities, I opted to use some traditional methods to measure the quality of a piece of writing – by taking its readability metrics. From Wikipedia, readability evaluation refers to “the ease in which text can be read and understood“, and “…various factors to measure readability have been used, such as speed of perception, perceptibility at a distance, perceptibility in peripheral vision, visibility, the reflex blink technique, rate of work, eye movements, and fatigue in reading…“.  Readability metrics measurement tools are widely available, and embedded in word processors and email clients.

source: corporategeek.info

results of bad scraping

In a nutshell, the tools apply different statistical formulas on a piece of English writing, and the resulting scores form an impression of its understandability. The formulas typically break text into syntactic components such as words and sentences and count their distribution or frequency in relation to the text being analyzed. The most common readability formulas and descriptions are given below:

I found it more pleasing to read blog posts and articles on Flipboard/Zite that are about a page in length. Contents that span multiple pages are too demanding for casual reads, while short tweets or one liners aren’t worth the two clicks effort to expand and shrink them from the page (yes really). For simplicity, let’s take my reading habits as standard, and use the following thresholds for computation:

• Flesch – 50 (Times magazine has a score of about 52)
• Flesch-Kincaid – 13 (pre-college level)
• Gunning Fog – 12 (texts for wide audience have fog index of less than 12)
• SMOG - 13 (pre-college level)
• Coleman Liau - 13 (pre-college level)
• ARI - 13 (pre-college level)

In the next post we’ll continue to explore the three pillars, and look at some test results to see whether the additional aspect of readability would help us create a feed that is better optimized for the user’s final reading experience.