Uneven Distribution.

PubCamp. Part I

June 22nd, 2008

I managed to make it to PubCamp last week. After such events I usually end up with a few Moleskine pages of scribblings. These notes usually comprise of a few notable quotes from speakers (half of which no longer make sense as I can’t recall the context), a few interesting thoughts that were piqued by speakers, and usually a few ideas completely unrelated to any theme of the day, but which appeared as a result of some tangential catalyst.

So below is a list of people I managed to catch, and the expanded jottings which appeared alongside them. I’ve mentioned all of this because it needs to be stressed that what is written below isn’t what these people said (unless I obviously quote them), nor is it always agreeing with, or following the same logic of whatever their topic/argument was.

Tim Noonan (bio here)

Tim quotes ABS statistics stating 19% of Australians have some form of disability. Even if the true number of ‘access impaired’ people is more like 5%, accessibility is still treated as a ‘nice to have’ feature, rather than a core consideration.

While I don’t disagree with the intent, I think that before we go hard-coding accessibility into our processes, we need to go one step further back and actually consider the access impaired audience as a slice of our target market/end user. Thinking of the last few campaigns I’ve worked on, I know that this market share simply wouldn’t be significant enough to warrant tailoring communication to them. But before you hit send on that hate mail (or unsubscribe on this feed), now this approach has been brought to my attention, where the access impaired market is significant (even when it’s far from the majority), accessibility will now be a far greater consideration in what I do.

-

In the future people will be consuming their media via their preferred sense, rather than the way in which the publisher chooses. In this case, the rest of us will be following the lead of people like Tim in creating experiences. Considering vision impaired people can’t ’see’ most advertising online, what outcome does this have for publishers who rely on advertising revenue, and advertisers who rely on online advertising? This really is just another (albeit extreme) future scenario that questions the role of marketing and advertising in our increasing online and increasingly filtered and customised lives. Can brands survive with nothing more than unpaid word of mouth, or do we need to continue to find engaging ways to offer positive brand or product experiences to the right people?

-

The increase in cloud computing means a new hardware interface should be possible for the vision impaired. Rather than look at the semantic structure of content, why not watch the visual experience and logic of a page and translate that? There is a visual language in most of the 2.0 web that is being overlooked by traditional approaches to screen reading.

JAWS (evidently the screen reading software of choice) is extremely expensive. Vision impaired people don’t see traditional advertising on the internet. At the same time, an entire industry of products for these people exists, and like any products, needs to be marketed. Why is there not a free ad-supported version of JAWS available?