Sometimes You See More Clearly When You’re Blind

Posted by Brooks in Misc, User Experience on Jan 5th, 2009 | 0 comments

Snatched up this little gem via a JD tweet:

Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see...he prefers to ask, How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen

I love standing a problem / argument on its head. Leave it to a blind guy to take a different tack that helps us see a universal humanist approach to accessibility. I’m still not sure how I feel about mandates (I worry about getting bogged down in the web’s infancy) or specific tech like screen readers, but I do think we’re getting closer to having the technology pieces that will help us build a richer and more accessible web (I’m thinking of the ocr stuff that Evernote does, the amazing video /image recognition research, the speech to text capabilites that Premiere has and the emergence of XMP).

The Ethics of Screencasting in the Read-Write Web Era

Posted by Brooks in Misc, New Media, Screencasting, Social Media on Dec 3rd, 2008 | 9 comments

While watching a Charlie Rose interview of Lawrence Lessig I was particularly struck by the description of our uneven legal / ethical handling of copyrighted text content vs digital media.

Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.

Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.

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