Ben Fletcher

I was talking with a friend today, he’s got a severe case of visual and hearing loss, meaning he needs support to travel.

There’s a scheme called Direct Payments, that enables him to pay for someone to be his guide (normally around £7.50 an hour) to gets around – e.g., to keep well, to shop, to meet people, to find work, etc.

That does not cover travel expenses for the guide. In other words, he has to pay all the travel expenses for the guide, out of his own pocket. To get to the eye hospital in London, for example, (I’m sure you appreciate that it’s not easy to take a dog guide around London) he would have to pay:

1. his own travel expenses PLUS his guide’s travel expenses:

a) £36 each for Winchester to London (after railcard discount – a third off);

b) £3.60 each for the Underground (Oyster);

2. refreshments – e.g., tea/coffee, water, etc. – about £3 each for the whole trip.

£85.20 is the total.  All out of his own pocket.  If he was to be a sighted passenger, it’d have been only £42.60.

A large percentage of that is for the train fares.  On this Winchester to London route, unlike elsewhere in the UK, there is no cheaper advance ticket.

Am I the only one thinking that, if guide dogs for the blind can travel for free, shouldn’t guides in the form of human beings too?

If number of people with severe visual impairment and a guide travelling on the train is 1 out of 1,000 (honestly, I’ve never seen any myself), then is it not reasonable to expect the impact to train company’s revenues to be negligible.  Moreover, train companies have been able to introduce various discounts and therefore I feel it’s only fair that the person with a severe visual impairment (often with very low income) and a human being guide shouldn’t pay twice the fare.

Update:

If you agree, it’d be excellent if you could sign this: http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/37646.html

TYVM!

Bristol and, in particular, Deaf people around the world, is losing one of its best gem and light.

Save Deaf Studies video

That video rather very British Sign Language, I struggle to translate into written English, however there’s a lot of background to this video on the Save Deaf Studies website. Please visit.

For blind and, in particular, deafblind people, this has so much potential! and also for people with varous learning difficulties – e.g., stroke.

Morphing Computer for the Blind

For the rest of us, this is just as exciting – imagine feeling things using our hands instead of our eyes and/or ears!

Put simply, the best unconference I’ve attended so far!

The idea behind unconferences is best explained by a collaborative “Conference vs. Unconference” table here:

http://www.highcontext.com/hcarchives/2005/11/18/conference-vs-unconference/

such as “content planning” versus “content facilitation”, “wisdom of experts” versus “wisdom of crowds”, “panels” versus “conversations”. “best practices” versus “practicing”. “directive methods” versus “participatory methods”, and many more.  Have a look.

Laura Bergells explained her version of how the two differ here:

http://www.maniactive.com/states/2008/08/unconference-versus-conference.html

such as “A carefully set agenda. Slick brochures. Ads in trade journals. Secure web page sign up. Pricey.” versus “No set agenda. Word of Mouth spread. Wikis and FaceBook pages for sign-ups. Low- to no-cost sign up.”

A characteristic I’ve heard a lot of unconferences is that they are run on shoe-string budgets.  Barcamp 7 ran from Saturday 9.30am through to Sunday 4pm – overnight stay including.  How much did I spend?  0p.  How much did I spend on accommodation?  0p (some of us slept in the building in sleeping bags).  How much were the expenses for my employer?  0p.  Where did the budget come from?  From these:

Barcamp 7 Sponsors by Andy Piper

who sponsored the event.  What’s the average sponsorship?  About £500.  For a Barcamp, what would the average budget be?  About £2,500.  How much did Barcamp London 7 cost?  I don’t know.

Quality

That leaves the all-important question: with a shoe-string budget, how could the quality be so high?  I’d take a look at this stream of photos from Flickr:

and at the timetable of the talks for Saturday:

http://tommorris.org/files/barcamp_saturday.html

and at the list of participants, each of which was to start 1 or 2 sessions:

http://www.barcamplondon.org/whos-coming/

a number of who are from major firms who have caught the bug – IBM, Google, Guardian, Papal, lastFM, The Times, LastMinute, CloudMap, Nokia…

1-way sessions?

Was the sessions all 1-way?  With a Q&A towards the end?  This was my main concern, but, as it turned out, the sessions were very much varied!

• some people arrived, discussed, and THEN came up with new topics… these topics were what to become some of the best sessions!
• collaborative sessions: where people all collaborated on a topic, e.g.:
  non-relational database alternatives through Etherpad.com;
• remote participants: where people from outside Barcamp could participate, live, in a session, e.g.:
  “Teach Me How to Run a Barcamp”, with real-time involvement from my Twitter followers who could not attend at the Barcamp, who could add questions to a real-time collaborative “notepad” that was projected in the session; and sugest answers.
• backchannels: where people Tweet their reactions real-time during a session, and discuss amongst themselves (and the speaker may get involved too), e.g.:
  “this Google wave…”
• participant-driven sessions: participants would Tweet thoughts and indeed questions, other participants would see them and run sessions about them, e.g.:
• lallyd: just seen that someone @ #bcl7 did a BSL session, would love to know who and how it went!
  bjfletcher: @lallyd i ran the BSL session.. went really well! i’m keen to run a barcamp for deaf people – mark this tweet, it’s going to be a hit! #bcl7
  oliciv: @bjfletcher Host a session tomorrow “Teach me how to run a Barcamp”
  bjfletcher: @oliciv that’s a brilliant suggestion, thanks! i’ve added “teach me how to run a barcamp” for 2.30pm tomorrow before the autism talk #bcl7
  

From a Deaf/BSL point of view

Some experiences and thoughts:

• I met some people who actually knew some BSL, and therefore had some deaf/BSL awareness;
• I met some people with vision issues, one ran a session about tunnel vision;
• I found the sessions to be more accessible that what would have been in conferences (rather than unconferences), due to the following:
• there are live “backchannels”, with which I can more or less get a feeling of what people are thinking;
  the sessions last only 20 minute, and there are about 8 sessions in each time slot, meaning:
• normally there are sessions which are more accessible than others – e.g., live demonstrations, “try it out” (e.g., augmented glasses), lots of slides (e.g., Andy Piper)… be smart and pick one that’s the most accessible;
• if I don’t like it, I’ll still be able to follow other sessions by accessing their slides over the ‘net and following their backchannels and Twitter #bcl7 (Barcamp London 7 hashtag) stream;
• I can plan which session to go to next by talking to the session proposers directly, asking them if it’ll be visual or all-waffle;
• people are free to leave halfway a session, recharge, ready for next session.
• participants are equal, and often are accessible through social networking tools such as Twitter, and I can easily ask them questions… plus they’re far more approachable given that we’re all present thoroughout the weekend including overnight.
• the community spirit makes it easier to ask… I can, e.g., ask on Twitter “what was that on the last slide?”, the community-driven bunch of campers would often be delighted to talk about them
• unconferences rely on collaborative technologies (wiki, for example) and therefore are supportive of social networking tools to share knowledge… and use them NOW AND THERE, instead of after;
• sessions often are highly visible and creative, unusually for a “conference” is that I didn’t feel tired afterwards

A question I had before the Barcamp London 7 event was that, given that this wasn’t a conference with a large budget, how could we arrange communication support?

I spent Saturday without an interpreter, and Sunday with an interpreter.  I feel I learnt just as much in both days.  Given the following:

1. no Barcamp experience;
2. Barcamp experience with no interpreter;
3. Barcamp experience with interpreter.

I’d always choose 2 and 3.  With 2, this was my opportunity to educate the community about BSL and look at ways for Barcamp to be more inclusive (I’ve listed some above, real-time collaborative tools, backchannels, emphasis on variety on session style, etc.) and fun!

Caveat: Barcamps that are run for non-technical people I suspect won’t do just as well.  The fact that Barcamp London 7 was full of savvy, very smart technical campers, as this post I hope has illustrated, helped.

To sign this post off with, here’s a brilliant piece of result from the weekend:

http://bf.etherpad.com/1

Watch this space!

(A signed video about this post.)

At my work, it is sometimes essential that a specific meaning of a verb is emphasised.  The question is: how can the sign language interpreter distinguish between “integration” and “integrator“, for example?

The technique used in British Sign Language is to adapt the sign to reflect the specific meaning – for example, for “integration”, the basic sign for “integrate” is first signed and then this is followed up with “processor” – in one fast flow, as if both were one whole sign.  For the other word, “integration”, this is signed using “integrate” and then following this up with “set”.

The sign for “integration” is “integrate” + “going on”.

The following video demonstrates, in this order: integrate, integrator, integration, and integrating.

English: integrate + or, ion, e, ing…
BSL: integrate + “processor”, “set”, <nothing>, “going on”

Finally, it should be noted that adapting the basic sign to reflect the meaning needn’t be done if this needn’t be emphasised or can be taken as a given.

I hope all this makes any sense, but certainly, I hope, to demonstrate how rich British Sign Language can be.

I have a Java-based web server called Tomcat running on a remote machine (in my case, on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure called EC2).  I also run a Java-based video streaming server on the same remote machine called Wowza.

I do the development work using an integrated application called Eclipse, on which I do the various coding for the servers using Eclipse’s “dynamic web project” facility.  All this is done on my local machine (in my case, a laptop).

A rapid development “cycle” – where I can go through the steps of coding, deployment, testing, and back to coding, testing, deployment, and again for a number of cycles – is essential.  For the cycle to be rapid the actions that are needed to go from coding to testing need ideally be automated.

With the servers running locally, this is very easy, however with the servers running on a different machine, this often involves doing some work to automate the local to remote deployment process.

There is an Eclipse plug-in from Amazon to automate some of these however at present this requires the use of their predefined server configuration termed “machine image”.  This is an issue for me because this does not have Wowza present, and Wowza forbids installing Wowza on a non-Wowza server configuration on EC2.

I still use the plug-in Amazon for its other capabilities, namely the ability to list running machines (instances), starting and stopping them, amongst others, from within Eclipse.

To automate the deployment process to a server configuration with Wowza, I have taken the following approach:

• extract Tomcat Client Deployer (downloaded from Tomcat website) into the dynamic web project in my Eclipse workspace – I use Tomcat version 5.5;
• configure Tomcat Manager on the remote machine with a new username and password;
• configure the Ant script included in the deployer installation to point to the web project using the following properties (set in deployer.properties in the same directory as the script):

build=../build/
webapp=../WebContent/
path=/TalkToWife
url=http://ec2-174-129-110-38.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/manager
username=<username>
password=<password>The TalkToWife is the contextual path, in my case, is the name of the web application, and the address is where the Tomcat manager is located.  The address for this application would therefore be http://ec2-174-129-110-38.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/TalkToWife.  The username and password are as set with the Tomcat manager earlier.

In the dynamic web project, the servlets, by default, have their compiled classes put in build/classes, which I have modified to WebContent/WEB-INF/classes in order for the Ant script to include these in the deployment as follows (mileage may vary for Eclipse versions other than 3.4):

1. right-click on the project in Project Explorer and select Properties
2. in the left pane, select “Java Build Path”
3. in the right pane, tick “Allow output folders for source folders”
4. Edit the “src” folder’s properties to output to “WebContent/WEB-INF/classes”

Now the following tasks can be automated using Eclipse’s built in Ant support:
compile

• deploy web application to remote Tomcat server
• undeploy web application from remote Tomcat server
• start the web application on remote Tomcat server
• reload the web application
• stop the web application

… and now the cycles are automated.

With my thanks to the following, whose materials have helped me to realise this solution:

Patricia’s contribution produced here: http://linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/a1421.html

Sathya’s blog post here: http://arkblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/creating-a-deployable-war-file-from-eclipse-project/

A job of mine is to provide my interpreters with some idea of what context they’ll be interpreting in. A colleague at work developed a visualisation tool called Wordle with which I can copy and paste some text and, like magic, come out a “word cloud”. To give you an example, with text from Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009:

I would be delighted to hear from any reader of alternative training materials for the interpreter; I’m curious what else there is

(A signed video about this post.)

I have a possible vision for a national deaf organisation.

A quick glance at the list of messages on a “deaf” egroup tells me that there are many people who just don’t think on the same wavelength as each other – which can be counterproductive to making progress on common issues.

Fact is that for the Deaf community there cannot be a single voice that can claim to represent this community – apart from to champion diversity.

A quick glance at my Facebook list of notifications tells me that people work together very well, organise events, support each other, give each other encouragement, etc., all seeming very much like-minded people.  It’s all very amicable and productive.

The reason is clear: the “deaf” egroup is a place where _all_ deaf people are put together under the same roof, forcing people with very different backgrounds, ideas and opinions to listen to everyone else’s views, with disastrous results. In contrast, Facebook allows members to form groups, “go where your network is”.  These different networks work very well on their own.

This is why I think a national social deaf organisation like BDA should look into adopting a similar model to Facebook: where deaf people are encouraged to form their own groups or networks, with the organisation as an umbrella providing support, encouraging and enabling diversity within the deaf community.  This, I would imagine, would lead to the potential to really grow to become a successful deaf organisation – or community.

Dear fellow Deafies,

I have more American contributions to this blog than any other country – and I’d very much value your input.

Take this picture:

Does the caption in the photo above make any sense? (No, it does not!)

I have 21 further photos and videos showing more poor captioning (we call it subtitling in the UK) in the space of just 15 minutes in this prime-time Saturday evening programme. (Click on the links to see them.)

I’ve had the good fortune to use captioning services from America at work, where I am constantly in awe of the accuracy and speed of it even with a heavy usage of technology jargon. Here’s a video that I hope gives America some idea of how unbearably slow and vague the captioning is in the UK in comparison:

My question to my friends in America: is it possible for the accuracy and speed to be improved significantly?

My hope is that your answer is a resounding yes, and, even better, for you to point to references of how this is achieved, in order to demonstrate to the Brits including Deaf consumers, policy makers and regulators, that the poor quality of subtitling in the UK is a) unacceptable, and b) not a technology limitation.

I congratulate the same people on achieving a 100% subtitling rate however, given choice, I would seriously be happy to reduce the coverage and invest the the money saved to improve subtitling quality.

To the UK, am I the only one with this view?

I’m told, although being deaf, I can’t promise this is true, that there is the concept known as “small talk” like this:

Small Talk Practice 2: At the Office

that happens in the office that I, to be sociable, am supposed to overhear and get involved with!

Emergency! I’m deaf, I don’t get to hear the small talk?

Twitter to the rescue.  What? I see you say.

Twitter is the online version of social “small talk”, another of the social networking tools.  I get to overhear and, if I like, participate in “small talk” amongst my colleagues and this is really a great way of making new contacts at IBM.

With thanks to Twitter, I have made new colleagues and achieved a lot. To illustrate how, I will show you some examples. But first some background on Twitter.  Twitter is where people send and read other people’s updates about any subject – as long as each update is 140 characters in length.

These updates are checked like with emails, as pop-up boxes from the status bar on the computer, or through the mobile phone like texts.

Some example of updates I get from my colleagues, please note that the names are random and fictional!

ScottA: “any flash developers willing to discuss what is or isn’t possible with it? dm me a phone #”

JohnB: tired

MrBoss: Playing with Google Friend Connect : Seems good

An example of a small talk:

RemoteWorker: Great, Nitrox qualification arrived. Now, when’s my next diving holiday…?

AnotherWorker: @RemoteWorker hope you fare better than me. I haven’t dived in the two years since I got EAN certified and ended up selling all my gear.

Here’s an example of how Twitter’s small talk has directly helped my work:

bjfletcher: keen to join BCS, does anyone at IBM know how to as an IBMer? is there a page with a form or something?

almost immediately, I got a update from someone at my work that I hadn’t met before:

UnknownGuy: @bjfletcher There’s a fast track membership process for members of the IBM professions. Sent you a note with a link to the info.

and likewise but from someone I already knew:

KnownGuy: @bjfletcher just sign up through the bcs website, then claim the cost back..this may not be the best time..

some more updates within 5 minutes:

Thomas: @bjfletcher the hursley library have copies

LeeA: @bjfletcher BCS membership : more for you to look over… http://tinyurl.com/5fnarb – ;o)

Another example, there was a small chat about keeping an empty inbox. A colleague then instant messenged with me and mentioned a book.  I proceeded to order it and told Twitter:

bjfletcher: the “Getting Things Done” book is on order, thanks @thecolleague.. it’s also known as “Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance”

Later I received an update from someone I didn’t know based at an IBM office in Leeds who clearly noticed in my profile that I worked with Lotus products:

Yorkie @bjfletcher If you like GTD, you should try to get to LS09… (or at least get the slides!) http://snurl.com/6t7xj

Of course I thanked him:

@Yorkie thanks for the Getting Things Done heads up! Have added the link will eagerly check it out tonight!

Well, isn’t Twitter absolutely brilliant?  As a deaf contact, I now love my interactive small chats with people all around the world!  This is especially so given that IBM is global.