100 years ago, a man wrote passionately about the incompetency that led to a terrible tragedy. The freshness of his words struck me when I first discovered them in 2001. Today, on the 100th anniversary of that tragedy – the sinking of the Titanic, I thought the words of that man – Thomas Fleming Day – were worth repeating. The Open Library makes it possible to do so. When I read this 1912 article in 2012, many questions come to mind. How are we designing today? How do we communicate simple safety procedures? How do we conduct training? How do we shoulder responsibility at all stages of a project? (As an uncomfortable parallel, read D.A. Winsor’s IEEE PCS article from 1988 called “Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators” (link opens PDF).) We are supposed to learn from past failures. Is that happening, or do…
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A mini-vacation and some random negative tweets stirred some dusty brain cells this week. As a result, I want to make a constructive call to action. Let’s work on constructive and positive approaches to spreading accessibility awareness everywhere. This is not being cheesy and cutesy. I’m not bringing out the unicorns and rainbows, even though they can correct accessibility errors in one sprinkling of fairy dust. The background Somewhere at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009, I saw Chris Heilman make a similar call. He said something about making positive changes. He proposed that we stop (negative) rants about some inaccessible something. Instead, he suggested taking constructive action. I took that to heart. I recall coming across a website for some spinal injury organization that had a useful-sounding brochure on exercises for people who had spine problems. The brochure was a PDF and it was inaccessible. I immediately…
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