Zazzle has been around for a while. Selection is pretty good and given that I wanted to make posters and not deal with CafePress’s premium shop nonsense, that didn’t leave very many alternatives. The value t-shirt option is very cheap, but apart from that, things get very expensive, very quick IMHO. You’re welcome to pay more if you want though — I am charging a percentage-based royalty after all.

MySoti is a newer print-on-demand site. The prices for their American Apparel branded shirts are cheaper than the same at Zazzle’s. Also, word on the Internet is that their print quality is better than Zazzle’s, but they have a rather long turn-around time. Their FAQ says not to call them until after 28 days. The selection is a bit more limited too, hence, why I currently only have three shirt designs up here.

Anyhow, I’m going to wait for feedback and some sample merchandise before passing further judgment. For now, you’re welcome to try your luck buying from either supplier.

• The transcript used to include things like “—–” to separate panels of the comic. Screen-readers, however, read this as “dash dash dash dash dash,” which I imagine gets really annoying over time. That’s been replaced with the phrase “next panel.”
• The transcripts were not clearly marked, and in order to get there, a screen reader would have to jump past the image, notes, and all sorts of markup before getting to the transcript. There is a now a hidden link near the beginning of the page that allows screen-readers to jump straight to the transcript.
• The alt text and title text were mixed up. They’re separated now.

There are still minor things here and there that might annoy people using screen-readers of course. For example, I use the « and » symbols in a few places as “arrows” pointing left and right. Some screen readers will not read them as arrows however, but as “left double angle bracket” and “right double angle bracket.” I know that might be annoying, but I’m fan of how they look and given that they’re frequently used (see, e.g., Gmail), I think the burden here should actually be on the makers of screen-readers to come up a better textual description of that symbol.

I’d also like to point out that the W3C’s accessibility guidelines aren’t exactly great reading material. Much thanks to 456 Berea St. for something that was easier to follow.

In any case, I’m not even sure if I have any visually impaired readers, but given that my Written and Oral Advocacy class is arguing about whether certain websites count as “places of public accommodation” covered by Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, making Tort Bunnies accessible seemed appropriate.

That said, I don’t think it’d actually be a good idea for Title III of the ADA to mandate that private websites be forced by law to be made accessible to the blind. Regardless of what the law actually says (and I sincerely believe that Title III does not cover websites with no nexus to a physical location), extending Title III to websites is bad policy.

So Many Places

First, Title III, or at least the part that would apply to websites, was designed to regulate “places.” While we might consider websites to be places in cyberspace, there are important attributes of physical places that break down with virtual ones. For example, many websites include Javascript / iFrame widgets that include code from other websites — e.g. a comment box from Disqus (which Tort Bunnies uses), a Twitter badge, or a CAPTCHA to screen out spammers (see reCAPTCHA for a CAPTCHA that is accessible). To the end-user, all of these widgets appear to be part of the page itself, but in reality, they’re hosted and served from somewhere completely different. What appears to be one page is really an amalgamation of several pages, all operated and controlled by different actors. If one of these widgets in inaccessible, who’s legally liable? The widget-maker or the page designer who decided to include the widget in the first place? What if all the widgets are independently accessible but when used in conjunction with each other become inaccessible? How about if at the time the page was first designed, the widgets were accessible, but a year later, the widget-maker pushed a change that made the widget inaccessible?

Physical places tend to be physically exclusive. You’re generally in one place at a time. With webpages however, the idea that you are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere actually makes some sense. This is hardly an insolvable problem, but it illustrates why I’m nervous about letting non-tech-savvy lawyers, judges, politicians, and jurors try to work this out. Their natural instinct is to look for a physical metaphor (“Amazon.com is like a brick-and-mortar bookstore”), even though physical metaphors don’t really work.

Code First, Ask Later

Second, a large part of what has made the Internet what it is today is that there’s a very low barrier to entry to putting up a website on the Internet. Unlike physical structures, where you often need a large team of contractors, a professional architect, and all sorts of bureaucratic approval, a website is something that can be built on the cheap by some kid in a basement who taught herself how to code by reading online tutorials and checking out web forums. The mere fear that the website you spent a year toiling away in your spare time might get you hauled into court to explain why you chose to use Flash might deter many would-be Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins.

It also runs contrary to the idea that coders build for themselves. One strong indicator of success that I’ve noticed among startups that succeed is that the founders all set out to build products that they themselves wanted to use — i.e. they wanted to make dog food that they themselves would enjoy eating. See also Paul Graham’s note about how programmers build for the platforms they use themselves. If you make these people build for other people (and not pay them), a lot of that enthusiasm and innovation just goes out the window. To put it another way, is a sighted programmer really the best advocate for the blind? You can force her to make her webpage accessible, but if you do, you’ll probably just get a half-assed product.

Solutions

Ultimately, I think the way forward for the blind is not to force others to make their websites accessible, through legislative means or otherwise, but to get personally involved in creating what they themselves want to see on the Internet. Instead of hiring lawyers to sue some store for not having an accessible website, you could hire a team of developers to build an alternative website or browser custom-designed for the blind through which you could interact with the original store’s website (the beauty of the Internet is that you could probably do this without asking permission from the original store). Or instead of lobbying Congress to extend the reach of the ADA, perhaps the blind could have Congress allocate money for research into technology that would make all of this a moot point — e.g. find the digital equivalent of a wheelchair that can climb stairs.

Anyhow, just my two cents.

Quick thoughts on the app experience: It looks as if it’s going to be way different than the iPhone. The iPhone treats applications as isolated silos. The home-screen is a nice metaphor for this — little self-contained boxes lined up in a grid. With the 7 Series, Microsoft seems to have put an awful lot of time into the home-screen and other “first impression” user experiences. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that Microsoft’s goal is to treat apps less as isolated tidbits and things that modify the core user experience. That is, they’re going to be focusing heavily on things like unified inboxes, apps that modify the home-screen, etc.

This line of thought isn’t new. It’s basically what Palm was arguing with Synergy, but more relevantly, it’s what Microsoft used to sell the Xbox 360. 360 games are not just isolated worlds, but things that are integrated deeply with the Xbox 360 “OS”. All 360 games share a uniform gamer profile and Achievement system. They share the same friends list and use the same messaging system. “Virtual goods” are all purchased through the same Xbox Live Marketplace. There’s a level of vertical integration here that would make Apple jealous.

And now, hopefully, they’re bringing that to the phone. There are obviously a lot of risks here. People don’t necessarily think of apps that way post- (and maybe pre-) iPhone. Compared to a grid of apps, a more integrated UI also looks like it could get very confusing, very quickly (I personally find the 360′s dashboard to be somewhat unintuitive at times, even if it is pretty). It could also get messy (see MySpace).

Still, there is hope, and for once, people seem to be rooting for Microsoft.

On one hand, it’s much more limited than a computer. You can’t use Flash or multitask. The latter is a real bummer for me. In class, I like being able to quickly hop from taking notes on a word-processor to a PDF of the reading we’re discussing to asking a classmate on chat what I missed while I was busy looking up something on Wikipedia. I see a lot of netbooks in class these days — probably because students don’t want to carry a full-size laptop around to take notes — and a tablet might be perfect for them, but the inability to multitask is a real deal breaker.

On the other hand, it’s much too big for me to stick in my pocket. The nice thing about the iPhone is that I can quickly whip it out to check restaurant reviews on Yelp, update my Facebook status, or locate something on Google Maps — all while walking down the street with a cup of coffee in my hand. I can’t do that as conveniently with an iPad.

That’s not to say I don’t get the value of a slate-like touchscreen device. I think there’s a lot of potential value. Software like Photoshop is begging for touchscreen integration. And slate-like devices are generally great for those situations where I want full laptop (or at least netbook) functionality but where the the laptop form factor would be inconvenient — e.g. on a 6-hour plane ride in coach. Microsoft has long been doing all sorts of stuff with tablet computers, but one gets the sense it doesn’t take the idea seriously. It’d be great if Apple did. On a side note, I’m really hoping someone does more on this detachable screen tablet idea.

It’s just that this value isn’t recognized in the iPad.

The only area where I think the iPad excels is for passive content consumption — reading books, watching movies in bed, and reading a digital NY Times. Unfortunately, I think passive content consumption is a shrinking market. People don’t just want to read. They want to write. They want to comment. They want to edit. A giant iPhone doesn’t let them do that.

On one hand, we don’t limit political speech. It runs contrary to the first amendment. You might say that corporations warrant a special exception, but there’s a lot of “potentially political” speech out there that I think should be protected. The second Star Wars prequel, V for Vendetta, V the TV show, and Avatar all could be construed as not-so-subtle attacks on certain politicians and parties, yet all of these were creative works by corporations worthy of first amendment protection (well, maybe not Attack of the Clones, but the rest are pretty good).

On the other hand, we really don’t want the wealthy being able to buy influence with large contributions. So what do we do?

Traditionally, the way to counter speech you don’t like is to speak up yourself. In the past, it was pretty hard because there was only so much airtime on TV or pages in print media. Today however, it’s really a lot easier. The costs of putting your own 30-second campaign ad on YouTube are trivial. Tools like Digg and Reddit make it easy for people-driven movements to raise awareness or draw attention to your YouTube clip without any of them spending a penny (well, maybe they have to pay for Internet access, but you get the idea).

The reason you can buy influence with money is that speech, the kind that reach large numbers of people, is expensive. As the cost of speech goes down, the influence of wealth does as well.

Yes, today, you’ll probably reach a larger audience with a TV ad than you will with your YouTube clip. That’s likely to change in the next decade or so however. TV (as we know it) will die, and it should die.

So rather than griping about the decision, perhaps activists should spend more time trying to increase broadband access.

I’ve reposted the relevant bits of my comment on Scoble’s blog below:

[U]sing Tiananmen Square as a test query is misleading. Of course “天安门广场” is going to return images of, you know, the actual square! Here are the search results for “天安门广场” in Google.com, which is US-based and uncensored:

http://bit.ly/7C8EsD

Huh, not much there — but this time you can’t blame censorship for it.

Why? Well, English speakers are very likely to associate Tiananmen with the 1989 crackdown, so Google’s search algorithm associates the term “Tiananmen” with images of the tank guy.

On the other hand, for mainland Chinese, “天安门广场” has a meaning outside of the 1989 crackdown. It’s a place, and one that’s smack dab in the middle of Beijing. When someone in China mentions “天安门广场”, they’re probably using it in the context of “there’s a street vendor near the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square selling kites,” not “never forget the people killed here 21 years ago.” Most people on the Internet use it for boring everyday stuff, not to foment dissent over an event a lot of “netizens” are too young to remember. Google’s algorithm picks up on this kind of thing and organically ranks things related directly to the location itself over things related to the one incident that English speakers associate Tiananmen with.

“天安门广场 1989″ and “Tiananmen 1989″ are probably much better terms for proving your point.

That said, you’re right that Google.cn hasn’t implemented all or some of the de-censoring yet. You can tell, because on the bottom of the search results on Google.cn, you see “据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。”

That is, “According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown.”

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

What I’m interested in how you even handle this whole cyber-warfare issue. Hackers are trying to screw around with your network. This is normally a criminal problem. Yet what if the hackers are sanctioned, either directly or indirectly, by the Chinese government? Is this now a national security issue? Do certain laws go out the door and other ones come in? Whatever we choose, how do you reconcile your choice with how we handle terrorism?

If that person later wants to unsubscribe, there’s no way of doing so without first creating a Google account associated with that e-mail address. You can go to the group’s homepage, but it requires that you log in with a Google account (which you don’t have yet) before you can do anything. You can try e-mailing groupname+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com, but all this does is get a link sent back to you. If you click on the link, surprise surprise, you need to log in with a Google account.

To make it worse, this information really isn’t clear anywhere on Google Groups itself. The “How do I unsubscribe from a group?” page doesn’t mention that you need a Google account to unsubscribe. Neither does the “Do I need a Google Account to use Google Groups” page.

Furthermore, when you create a new group, by default, there’s no footer attached to your e-mails. Why does this matter? Because that footer is usually what has the information on how to unsubscribe.

This is extremely annoying for non-Google-account members of Google Groups, and before folks start bashing people who don’t have Google accounts, keep in mind that this is not some tiny insignificant minority. I moderate the Google Group used by supporters of my high school speech and debate (forensics) team. Its membership consists largely of parents over 40 years old. Many of these folks barely know how to use e-mail. It’s simply unreasonable to expect them to go through the hassle of creating a new account and linking it to their primary e-mail address just to unsubscribe. Most of them probably won’t get past the thoroughly not-friendly-to-older-folks process of filling out a CAPTCHA.

It’s also annoying for me as a moderator, because these group members who are unable to unsubscribe hit reply-all and decide to fill up a thread with “UNSUBSCRIBE PLEASE” messages — that, or they mark the group as spam just to block it. Neither is good for the group and forces me to manually unsubscribe many of the people on the list. Given that the group now has several hundred members and as a high school – centric group, sees roughly a quarter of its membership turn over each year, this means a lot of work for the moderator.

It’s not as if unsubscribing without a Google account is a difficult technical feature to implement. Most newsletters let you unsubscribe without having to first sign up for something. They do so largely because they’re afraid of being marked as spam by companies like Google itself.

Given that you can sign someone without a Google account up for e-mails from a Google Group, Google probably already has some way of dealing with non-Google-account users internally. All they to do is set up a way for these users to remove themselves from a mailing list without having to first log in — e.g. (1) click the unsubscribe link automatically appended to the end of every e-mail, (2) enter your e-mail address in on the form that appears, and (3) click the link in the confirmation e-mail you get.

The fact that Google hasn’t implemented something so simple may be because they want to get people to sign up for a Google account (and thereby possibly turn over valuable personal information) who otherwise would not have. That sounds a bit like extortion, and it makes Google Groups look evil.

I use Windows 7 full-time now, but this post is not about Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux though (even though I, and every other computer user on the planet, have plenty to say about that).¹

Below the fold, a list of some of my five favorite tools on Windows. Most of these are things I downloaded to replicate functionality I missed from OS X or Linux.

AutoHotKey. I blogged about this before, but one of my top annoyances with Windows is the inability to change the keyboard shortcuts. AHK is a little difficult to grasp for beginners — it uses a pseudo-programming-language, but once you grasp it, it’s an extremely powerful tool.

Startup Monitor. Programs installing things that run on startup without asking for permission annoy me. I don’t mind if it takes an extra second for Acrobat or Quicktime to start, but it does bug me that some of my memory is being used by programs I use relatively infrequently. To block such annoyances, I’ve long relied on StartupMonitor. StartupMonitor gives you a little alert when a program installs something into startup and lets you block it if you want. Simple. Done.

NB1: The page says the program hasn’t been tested with Vista and up yet, but it works on Windows 7 for me.

NB2: The guy who wrote StartupMonitor, Mike Lin, also has other cool tools available. Check it out.

Switcher - One of things I missed from Mac OS X is Expose (in fact, seeing this in action was one of the reasons I started using Macs in the first place). Switcher is Expose for Windows — a fast Windows switching app that runs in the background that you can trigger with a hotkey or mouse movement.  In fact, it’s better than Expose IMHO, because of how customizable it is.

PowerMenu – Lets you right click on Windows and say “always on top” or “transparency 50%”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with 64-bit apps. For x64 users, you can get always on top with FileBox eXtender. For transparency, see Actual Transparent Window (you have to pay after 60 days though).

Launchy – It’s like Quicksilver or Gnome-do for Windows. Hit a hotkey and a box pops up. Type in a phrase and it’ll start searching for the app  you probably want. With the new search box in the start menu for Windows Vista and Windows 7, this is less useful now, but it’s still much more customizable. You can set it up to search certain folders, act as a simple calculator, and do other fun stuff.

¹ One little tidbit — I’ve gotten hooked on the Thinkpad’s trackpoint. Apple’s going to have to include either that or some crazy new UI paradigm for me to switch. For a mix of pointing and typing, it’s a much more efficient than the trackpad (you don’t need to move your entire hand just to move the mouse cursor). In that way, I think it’s like a Dvorak keyboard. Once you get over the learning curve, it’s annoying to switch back.