Know your banker. That kind of changed in the era of electronic banking. I didn’t need to actually go into the bank did I? We have drive thru banking/ATMs everywhere. Just let me stay in my car, drive thru and carry on with my day — I’m extremely busy, dontcha know?

The Inconvenience of Convenience

It all worked well. Until ATM deposits started having a hold on the funds until they could actually be verified.

This bothered me to no end — the electronic transactions that are supposed to travel at the speed of electrons were actually slowing things down. It meant that I got access to money later rather than sooner.

So I talked to my bank’s manager about it one day, and she explained to me how it worked. And now, every time I have a cheque, I take in to see the real, live people that work at the bank. Because they know who I am. They can see my banking history. They can ask me if I’ve had cheques from that particular client before or if they are a new account. They can look me in the eyes and we can TALK.

That’s something that a machine can’t do.

Going Backward to Move Forward

The electronic has become (or maybe always has been) impersonal.

So I need to take it back to the beginning. Talk with my banker. Take an extra 30 minutes to have a face to face chat with clients about new ideas for their businesses and ours. Take 30 minutes to pick up the phone and talk with friends that run other businesses — yes, some will be with friends that in similar businesses to us, but some will be with those that are most definitely NOT in the web design/development or UX business.

As a business owner, as part of my business strategy, one of my big goals for 2010 is simply this: spend more time talking with people face to face or over the telephone instead of via email.

Your life needs more whitespace. You told me so in your comments on “What Gives?” When you have no whitespace in your life — like a design — it doesn’t feel right. Crowded. Sub-optimal. You can get the job done, but something just doesn’t feel right.

To create more whitespace in a design, we take things away. We create margins. Padding. We add more line-spacing. How can we do that in our lives?

Quit working through lunch. I’m not talking about time here. I’m talking about the activity. Stop eating your lunch at your computer. You may need to eat at your computer once in a while, but when it becomes every meal of every day, a vital part of your whitespace is gone.

Meetings take up your whitespace. Get rid of any that you can. Yes, other people have written this before. I write it here because I feel the sharp pains of them being right. And if you can’t get rid of them, work hard to avoid back to back to back meetings.

Boxes must go. You know how you want to draw attention to something in a design? You draw a box around it. Then, you want to draw attention to something else and you draw a box around it too. Pretty soon everything has a box around it. And when everything has a box around it, nothing does. Don’t draw attention to or separate various aspects of your life with boxes. Separate them with whitespace.

The beauty of whitespace is contrast. Whitespace accentuates contrasting elements and allows them to stand out based on what they are and aren’t, rather than what visual treatment they have to make them stand out.

Like the elements of a great design the elements of your life don’t need a visual treatment. They just need some room to stand on their own. The elements of your life need more whitespace.

A few weeks ago I was feeling particularly rough about what direction life was headed between work, friends, our crazy passion for endurance events as a hobby, family, and everything else that needs to find a place in our lives. I actually felt like things might have been unraveling at the seams.

So I asked a very simple question on Twitter — are we all just burning out?

The responses people posted had one common thread: YES. Either people were feeling that they were burning out, or that they were already there, or were actually engaged in achieving multiple burnout.

Like it is normal. An expectation of our industry.

That is not acceptable.

I’m tired of seeing my friends across the globe at the wrong times. I shouldn’t be awake and neither should they! My friends on the west coast of North America? If you’re still awake and working at 3am when I’m waking up at 6 or 7 am, then something is wrong. Those in the UK and Europe? When I’m doing a bit of extra work at 9pm at night and its 3am for you? Not cool. My Kiwi and Aussie friends? Get. To. Bed.

I was honoured to speak at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand in February this year. I was incredibly motivated by Mike Brown’s words. I’m paraphrasing, but Mike’s  opening address resonated with me:

The work we are doing on the web is critically important. We’re working at building the most important communications network in history. What we do today matters. It matters for today, for tomorrow, forever – and it deserves our very best work. We owe it to each other, to ourselves, to everyone.

Doing our best means not burning out. That should be the accepted norm in our industry.

If you’re burning out (yes, I’m talking to you) something has to give — because if it doesn’t, we won’t be producing our best work. Be conscious in your choice of what gives though — if it is family, personal health and well-being, or our relationships with friends, we’re in a lot of trouble. Those are supposed to be the most important things. It seems that they are the ones that we take for granted or sacrifice first.

Over the past few months I’ve realized that the sacrifices I have made haven’t always been the right ones — partly because I’m conflicted. I’m sure we all feel this pressure in some way: in order to provide for my family I feel more pressure for the business to do more — take on more work, expand what we’re doing, have more income so that I can provide more comfort, more food, more whatever. more. more. more. But at the end of the day, it just feels like less and less and less.

I don’t know what everyone else is feeling right now, but I know where I am. So the question is, what gives? I have no clue. But it can’t be family or me. Those are the wrong things to compromise. I owe family and me, my very best, because what I do with them, matters.

• I believe that accessibility helps us to innovate and create.
• I believe that accessibility is something that must be provided.
• I believe that accessibility is different than interoperability.
• I believe that accessibility is not a hindrance to progress.

There is much kerfuffle over Bespin, a <canvas> based tool that was put out by Mozilla Labs. (Incidentally, I’m really hoping it is Bespin as an homage to Star Wars’ Bespin and not BeSpin, as in the conjoining of the two words “be” and “spin”)

Many people are crying foul saying that <canvas> is inherently inaccessible at this point, and therefore the accessibility problem must be solved before the launch of the product/project. This fits perfectly well with the notion that technologies/projects/products need to be accessible from the get go. Generally, I support this sentiment.

Reading the emails, blog posts and twitter reactions has me questioning one particular aspect of this accessibility challenge. The question is not whether or not a technology should be made accessible, but when?

Accessibility Investment

Many individuals and organizations take accessibility very seriously and invest a lot of time and effort into making their work accessible. These efforts and investment are not to be taken lightly; they are precious and should be undertaken wisely.

As an example, when faced with issues of limited budget, time and prioritization, we’ll often suggest that organizations ensure that when JavaScript is on, their applications work properly with assistive technology rather than ensuring that their applications work with both JavaScript on and off. JavaScript on/off is an issue of interoperability — if your app doesn’t work with JavaScript off it sucks for people with or without a disability. Interoperability is best practice, but it doesn’t discriminate based on disability.

So, given that significant investment needs to be made in accessibility in terms of time, effort and money, when is the appropriate time to make that investment?

Consider a couple of scenarios:

1. in dealing with an experimental technology such as Bespin, we don’t know if anyone is going to use it, let alone people with disabilities. What if it sucks for everyone? is there any reason to make that suckiness accessible to everyone?
2. in addition to not knowing if anyone will use it, we don’t necessarily know how they will use it. Accessibility is part of user experience. Simply providing an alternative may provide a basic level of technical accessibility but may be unusable by people with disabilities. I would suggest that it is at least possible that until we know how people are going to use something, we have no idea with the most appropriate alternative will be.

Other emerging technologies such as AIR and Silverlight did not address accessibility in their 1.0 release of their product. Should they have? What if the technology was fundamentally unusable? What if, after 1.0, they looked at the product and said “this stinks, we have to start over.” Would it have been worth the investment in accessibility for a product/project/platform that died on the vine?

Accessibility in Mind and Implementation

Is it possible to include accessibility support “too early?” I’m not saying it should be an add-on at the end of the process/project/product development cycle, but I’m very seriously wondering what the optimal time for integrating an actual accessibility implementation is? Is it enough to keep accessibility architecture in mind from the beginning, but not implement right away? Should we get the basics right first, and then build in accessibility support based on that previously envisioned architecture after we know we have a viable product? We continue to say that accessibility should happen throughout rather than just at the end, but would it actually be better if we left it out,  just for a little while, at the beginning?

Is it a better “business decision” to say very early on “we are committed to making this accessible, but we know we’ll fall short of the mark on our first cut; we want to get this right for everyone, and will, but in order to make it accessible, we need to get this out into the real world to see how people will use it, what they want from it, and then build in accessibility appropriately.”

My feeling — at least right now — is that our job is to ensure that accessibility and accessibility architecture is kept in mind from the outset of a project/product/technological exploration, but not necessarily implemented at the outset.

I’m just throwing these thoughts out there for discussion — there is nothing definitive in here, other than the fact that I don’t think there is going to be one correct answer for this. What do you think?

I took some water from the shower into my mouth and spat it out. It didn’t feel right. I did it again — still, didn’t feel right. I couldn’t quite place what was different, and carried on. As I exited the shower, Kathryn handed me a glass of juice. I brought the glass to my lips and took a sip, at which point I found myself covered in OJ. Something was wrong. I thought that maybe my face was just asleep — similar to when a foot, or hand falls asleep. I tried to tell Kathryn something was wrong, but I couldn’t speak properly.

The entire left side of my head from the neck up was completely paralyzed. No movement. Nothing at all.

I remembered at the visitation the night before telling my best friend in the entire world, Graham Turner, and my family that I felt a bizarre headache behind my left ear. It wasn’t like any headache I’d felt before, but I didn’t have any other way to describe it. And why was it behind my left ear? I attributed it simply to me being tired and stressed and thought nothing more of it. Until the next morning when I thought I had experienced a stroke.

It took me three months away from my full-time, high school teaching job to recover from what was termed Bell’s Palsy. The doctors said my immune system was vulnerable due to lack of sleep, and several other factors. When Granny passed away, my body wasn’t able to properly fight a viral infection I had picked up, and my 7th cranial nerve was completely destroyed — eaten through by what must have been the most carnivorous virus known to humans.

Eventually I got better and was able to return to teaching. But really, from that point on, I questioned everything about what was important in life and what I wanted to do with mine. With great clarity I pronounced that relative health is one of our most precious gifts, and that I was going to take steps to ensure that I held on to mine.

And with that I left teaching to start my own business — first, as a contract trainer (putting my teaching background to good use was a logical first step) and, second, as a web developer to scratch that itch I initially felt when I was building web based resources for colleagues and students starting in about 1994.

I simply wouldn’t be where I am today if Granny hadn’t passed away ten years ago, on January 20th, 1999. Her passing was, quite literally, a life-changing experience.

As I sit here, in Toronto, my father’s mother (we called her Nen-nen) having just passed away early in the morning on January 23rd, 2009 (almost 10 years to the day after Granny died) I can’t help but wonder what the next ten years will hold for each of us.

Miles asked to interview me for the book, and I was happy to oblige. In seeing Russ “I like to eat feet” Weakley’s review of the book, he says:

The book also includes interviews with some well-known freelancers such as Derek Featherstone, Mark Boulton, Molly Holzschlag and Stephen Collins.

Now then — I don’t consider myself a freelancer (though I once did, when I first left teaching to go out on my own). The question in my mind though, is “what are we, really?” And by we, I mean my web development and accessibility consultancy company, Further Ahead.

Identity Crisis

We have employees. We have people that work with us on contract. But I’m having a tough time distinguishing whether or not we are actually a company, or something else — like a “freelancer with a support crew.”

I don’t know if there is any difference, actually. We have all the corporate stuff taken care of — insurance, benefits, the corporation itself, office space. But I’m wondering to myself if there is anything that really says “company” about Further Ahead, or if we are really just seen as “freelancer with other people too.”

Either way, does it really matter?