Learning Lots

June 16, 2010
I felt tired by meeting so many new people. Takes some time to process but sometimes don’t have that going from one thing (work) to the next (event). I was blessed though by those who were good listeners as I tried to be too. Someone else got lost Coming to the Google event, and went in the opposite Art Deco building. (they probably got that a lot because they instantly knew what I was talking about) And then Leaving I got so caught up in talking that I didn’t watch where I was going and forgot where the Metro was and Yair and others pointed me in the right direction. He told me about some neat things like the Replicator? Printer that can print a 3-D model of itself. I hope to follow up and learn more from him as a resource. I am reminded of what I did in work this week. I am still getting trained so I didn’t get to do hands-on, but I did learn a lot by following the lead tech around. He had been bugging me nicely to come over to the Help Desk, so I followed through. First someone’s hard drive wasn’t working so we went back and forth between her computer and setting up a session to ‘drop’ the image onto her computer from the network. He also tried a new toy to see if he could recover her data from her hard drive but it didn’t work so he had to give her a new hard drive too. We heard rumors of ice cream and turned out we only had to go downstairs and it was given out for our work on the laptop rollout. I had mint with extra whip cream, which I would eat solo if I could. Then I went back up for more shadowing. After lunch I saw a variety of users with different gadgets. Someone had lost part of a laser pointer, and that caused some frustration but the techs moved on with work. People came directly to the help desk like one woman who thought her printer was there, which isn’t surprising since they all have long numbers and hers was 71 and ours was 17 something. The tech walked with her and showed her where it was, and also she needed it changed back to the default. We got back and someone else came in wanting to scan a paper, and though the tech said he didn’t do it for people, he sat down and did it explaining as he went. The guy helped was happy because he wanted to save the page for his records because it was a case that went well. I think there was a lot going on so it could have been overwhelming but it was interesting to learn. I hope that I can explain so other people will get a feeling for what I’m doing. And I will try next time to include the boring parts, but this week wasn’t really. Ask me if you see me and I will try to be honest. Oh and also about the plotter printer, cuz that was cool.

How's my website accessibility?

Hi, my name is Yair Silbermintz & I'm a Computer Science student at Yeshiva University. I will be interning at ITI as a web developer this summer, focusing on making their website & the websites for their disability initiatives more accessible.

I have to admit, I was a bit weary about taking on this task. Making websites accessible seems easy at first, but if not watched closely a minor oversight in programming or design can lead to major problems. There are plenty of accessibility guides on the web, but they are geared toward government workers and often too dry and technical for a new web developer to read. Even when I did buckle down and look into 508 compliance, what I found was mostly too outdated to apply to the modern interactive web. I quickly became determined to make researching web accessibility issues a prime focus of my internship.

The past few days in D.C. have been extremely interesting. During orientation I had the opportunity to meet many interesting people, including my fellow interns, the AAPD staff, AAPD internship alumni & members, and other people in the disability community. The most interesting portion of the orientation, for me, was an information session on disability rights and history. It started off with an overview of how people with disabilities were treated in the past, went on to cover the disability rights movement, and gradually morphed into an overview of the disability laws currently in force. While this was going on, I was able to keep track of a senate hearing on possible updates to these laws thanks to AAPDs Jenifer Simpson constantly posting updates to twitter (If your interested in what happened at the hearing, you can check out the COAT twitter page or watch an archive video of the hearing). Hearing for the first time about both the efforts originally made and the efforts currently going on for disability rights was particularly inspiring.

I want to end my first post here with a question for anyone who uses assistive technology to view the web. What would you consider the toughest & most common problem you have when trying to use the internet daily? Please post your issues in the comments below, and I will make sure to look into them over the course of my internship.