This is something I’m personally really excited by! Starting this week we will tell the incredible stories of hundreds of visually impaired persons as they navigate work and life. Here’s a little something to get it started – click on the video and you’ll be taken to the channel where the stories are published:

Rise in pageviews on inclusiveplanet.com in the last 2 weeks

* The trough towards the end is not a reversal of fortunes because that’s the weekend which is almost always a trough.

And this steady uptick of page views has happened BEFORE our pilot projects* kicked in. So we’re excited! The upsurge in activity on the platform is not driven by a single channel or piece of content or hyperactive user. It is driven by multiple new channels, a marked increase in user participation, an upsurge in new users and other good omens. This is the best news we could have got at the start of the year.

So now we’re all the more motivated to do excellent pilots and answer all those questions we need to answer to build a coherent growth strategy, and in this process push new member acquisition and member activity even higher. The distinct pilots are (a) good original content by way of personal stories around work, (b) encouraging more social interaction through some new feature sets, (c) a really good accessible game, and (d) a renewed emphasis on engaging better with new members to help them ‘find’ what inclusiveplanet.com can do for them.

Figuring out what you want to do is never enough by itself – it’s critical to measure responses so we had to figure out ‘what to measure?’, ‘how to measure?’ and ‘what it means?’ as well.

A couple of the personal stories go up later today – so I’ll make sure we post the links here as well. I’ve seen the uncut versions and there is just so much great insight there!

* [In the last post I had mentioned that"we need to complete a round of pilots to really understand what can best attract visually impaired persons to the site and, more importantly, cause social and sharing behaviour. Was it great content – say on much-sought areas like employment? Is it great social features? Is it games? All questions we have to answer, and soon, to create a good seeding strategy."]

This is an email I sent out earlier this year to our community of well-wishers. It’s akin to an update on where Inclusive Planet is at. Am now putting it out there to the broader community of well-wishers

What’s happening at Inclusive Planet?

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? At some point in the last two years you gave us some love. It could have been something small, maybe just a conversation, or a suggestion, or something larger, like carving out a few hours of your life to make something happen for us. Whatever it was, it was important to us. And because it was special I thought that you’d enjoy learning where things are with the project.

A quick refresher on what the project is all about. It is, and always was, really simple. The 200 million+ visually impaired have a number of problems but none greater than the access to content (learning, work-related, entertainment, information, and the list goes on) because most content is on printed material, which is inaccessible to the visually impaired, OR on websites which could have been accessible but aren’t. So how do you fix this problem that leads to only 1% of all content being available to the visually impaired? We at Inclusive Planet saw the answer as simple - enable the visually impaired to share with each other the solutions (content, information, ways of using tech etc.) they have created for their own private needs. The result would be an incredible community that would really be a cauldron of solutions.

We launched inclusiveplanet.com in November of 2009 and since then it’s grown to 5000+ members, who’ve shared 20000+ files of accessible content, started 300+ topical channels, and had 100,000+ conversations. And, let’s never ever forget those 50,000+ super precious social connections. We’ve been recognised by the pivotal World Blind Union, by INK in association with TED, and several press and media stories. But it’s still very very early days.

Before we go all out to get more members in the Indian sub-continent, and then identify partners to replicate the model in different countries (remember, the vision is a global network of communities!) we need to complete a round of pilots to really understand what can best attract visually impaired persons to the site and, more importantly, cause social and sharing behaviour. Is it great content – say on much-sought areas like employment? Is it great social features? Is it games? All questions we have to answer, and soon, to create a good seeding strategy.

So, right now, we’re working on content creation,feature development, word-of-mouth andcommunity management. In the medium term (2-3 months) we look at fund-raising and hiring people who understand online communitiesand have an international perpective. If we can get any more love from you in any of these areas do reach out. Also, send this email out as far as you can.

Finally – have a wonderful year! Break those energy-depleting cycles we all slip into, and take great care of your health so that you always feel light on your feet.

We are currently trying to enrich the user experience when it comes to accessing content on inclusiveplanet.com. We realized that there is a lot of free content available on the net, but not all websites are accessible. So over the next couple of months we intend to get permission from individuals and organisations, who have already put up their content on the net. Our initiative will serve two purposes:-

1) Make the content easily accessible to the blind at one single place

2)Provide our members with a wider choice of rich content. This would especially help those who have just learnt computers, and aren’t aware of the plethora of reading options available on the net.

We are getting in touch with a range of content providers across different categories like news, religion, entertainment, education and so on. We are looking at getting their permission to put the content on our website so that it can be easily accessed by the blind. For this initiative, we intend to use the channels on Inclusiveplanet.com. Channels have the ability to import RSS feeds as well, so it immediately makes sharing of content possible. The channel would have the name of the content provider, and content will be attributed to them. The RSS feeds will pull in content from the content provider’s website to the inclusiveplanet.com channel, and thus make it “accessible” for the blind.

You can get involved in this initiative in the following ways:-

a) If you are a content provider, and would love to see your content on inclusiveplanet.com, then do get in touch with us.

b) If you are interested in volunteering, you can take up projects to aggregate different types of content onto Inclusive Planet

Do write to us at contact@inclusiveplanet.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Check out this video of 21 year old Vinod Thakur whose Dad is a truck driver, and mom is a housewife. He works in a mobile reparing shop to become financially independent so that he can fund his education. He doesn’t have legs but his passion is hip hop dancing. He has just started learning hip hop and has already set the stage on fire at the India’s Got Talent show.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sanQuIeW_7c]

We are glad to tell you that Inclusive Planet has been accredited as an observer to the WIPO – World Intellectual Property Organization.

Rahul Cherian is present at the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights happening at the moment in Switzerland.

Following is the statement of Inclusive Planet, India on the matter of the Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled, proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico  and Paraguay.

June 21, 2010

Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen , I thank the WIPO Secretariat for processing our accreditation to the WIPO as an observer and the decision of this Committee to accredit my organization. I represent Inclusive Planet Foundation, a non profit organisation based in India, focusing on policy reform in the disability space as a part of which we have been campaigning in India for appropriate amendments to Indian copyright law to create exceptions and limitations to enable persons with disabilities to access material in alternate formats. Our sister organisation, a for profit organization runs Inclusivelanet.com, one of the fastest growing social networks for persons with visual impairment, with users from 80 countries. Inclusive Planet’s Services division provides technology solutions and consultancy to organisations related to web and content accessibility.

Mr. Chairman, Inclusive Planet Foundation believes that the Treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay is essential to improve the lives of the millions of persons with disabilities in India and we are extremely supportive of the Treaty for the following reasons:

1. Firstly, We believe that in India and other developing countries where large funding for conversion and distribution is not available, and where there are no institutional intermediaries with the kind of reach, infrastructure and financial support as the intermediaries in the US and Europe, all stakeholders including NGOs, educational institutions, libraries, persons with disabilities , parents and volunteers must be allowed to convert and distribute and import and export material in accessible formats. The Treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay allows for this. Any proposal which limits these activities only to intermediaries that have the support of rightholders will not be of any great benefit to India or other developing countries.

2. Secondly, We believe it is important that persons with hearing impairment and persons with other disabilities who need alternate formats must not be discriminated against and be left behind. The Treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay covers not only persons with print disabilities but also persons with other disabilities who require alternate formats. Other proposals in the table have also good definitions of beneficiaries. We believe that any proposal which extends only to persons with print disabilities will be unjust.

3. Thirdly, We believe that non-commercial conversion and distribution should not require payment to rights holders keeping in mind the cost and effort taken in such conversion and distribution. We also believe that rights holders must be compensated for commercial conversion and distribution. The Treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay provides for these two options. We believe that this system will incentivize rights holders to convert and sell material in accessible formats at affordable prices, which we believe is the only long term solution to solving the book famine.

4. Lastly, We believe that for-profit entities who wish to undertake conversion on a not-for-profit basis must be permitted to do so. It has been our experience in India that large corporations wish to convert material into accessible formats as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives on a non-commercial basis. This must be encouraged. The Treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay provides for this. We believe that any proposal that does not recognize the roles that can be played by for-profit entities is limited and will not contribute to long term solutions.

In short Mr. Chairman, the ground realities in India and other developing countries are completely different from those in the United States and in Europe. In India and other developing countries, people with disabilities need all the help we can get, from all parties willing to help. Any proposal that recognizes only intermediaries as part of the solution will be of extremely limited impact in India. We believe that the Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled, proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay is THE proposal which addresses the needs of persons with disabilities in developing countries. We urge member states to support the treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay if any meaningful change is to be made to the lives of millions of persons with disabilities around the world and especially in developing countries including India.

To read more about the other treaties, see Comparison of the four proposals on disabilities at WIPO SCCR.

For the technology practitioner who works in the area of getting her solutions to work well for a diverse audience, there are a few related but often ambiguous terms that float around. Accessibility, usability, design …

For those of us who are particularly concerned about ensuring that web applications fit the needs of an audience with different faculties, there are a set of standards that are laid out that presumably will tell us how to do this. The question often comes up – is it worth the effort following standards like the W3C WCAG standard? There is a profusion of articles on the web that detail how standards compliance can be achieved and there are organizations who will help you, the web asset owner, get to standards compliance. What is often not that clear is the question of – what will WCAG compliance do for my users? How will my web asset benefit from this exercise? Does WCAG compliance mean that ALL users can use my web site ‘equitably’?

Focusing on the WCAG standard as an example, the standards body has stated that the goal of defining “how to make Web content more accessible to people with disabilities”. The standards body has decided, I believe consciously, to not precisely define accessibility. Also note the comparative term “more accessible” is chosen instead of a more absolute or superlative term. There is an air of tentativeness, which again, I would think, is a conscious choice.

There are a few more factors to consider:

1. Standards, in its final form often represent less than the state of the art in technology due to the long life cycle of the standards process itself. This is also clear from the facts that often even as a particular standard is in the stages of approval, work on the next standards commences.
2. Standards bodies often need to come up with a least common denominator in its specification and in the interest of expediency, generally have to choose to ignore complicated or controversial issues.
3. Some of the issues related to accessibility, are so entwined in issues of usability and design, that it is difficult to make concrete standards without making assumptions about the nature of use of the system, the faculty set of the user and other environmental factors. In the continuum of accessibility-usability-design, the standards are only able to address the safe generalities than the highly variable specifics.

The points above should not be read as criticisms of standards, but merely as an observation of the facts.

Now, switching over to the practice side, take the classic cases where a web or digital asset owner takes the steps towards ensuring diversity. She is often driven by one or more of the following:

• Social and values based reasons– CSR for companies, social pressure for individuals

• I care about diversity, and want to make sure that there are no barriers in my organization for people with a non-standard set of faculties

• I have a digital asset and want to come across to others as someone who cares about diversity

• Regulatory and Legal

• I need to comply to the accessibility rules/regulations/laws of my country/state/association in relation to and if I don’t there is a possible negative consequence

• Commercial

• I or one of my customers have or will have an audience or customers that is diverse and needs accessibility

• I or one of my customers need to show some others that we are accessible so that we can get some new business

• I or one of my customers deal exclusively with a segment that have a non-standard set of faculties that have accessibility implications and our offering needs to be precisely tailored for them

Consider the various cases above. While clearly not an exhaustive treatment of all possible cases, you can see 2 significant flavors:

1. I need to convince a certain constituency that my digital asset is accessible
2. I need to make my digital asset as accessible, usable and appropriate as possible to one or more specific class of users with non-standards faculties.

In both these cases, standards compliance is a requirement. For case 2 above, however, the asset owner would be ill-advised to stop at standards compliance and should consider additional steps to put forth the best possible offering – from accessibility, usability and design standpoints for the specific audience(s) in mind.

So here goes the stake in the ground:

We believe that standards compliance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ensuring best possible levels of accessibility.

We do believe that current standards ensure a high degree of accessibility. However, we believe that there are additional steps that can and should be taken to allow a person with a non-standard set of faculties the best possible experience with a web site or application.

Ever wondered how a person with a visual impairment uses a computer? Surf the web? Read a book or an article? I know many people who shy away from asking these questions. The important thing is to realise that there’s no harm in asking these questions. The real harm is in not bothering to find the answers to these questions. A request to our visually impaired readers: please pass this article on to all your sighted friends. And dear sighted readers, walk with me through this simple simulation of the experience of a visually impaired person.

The most popular, specialized software program used by people with visual impairments to consume electronic content - documents, web pages and other computer programs is a type of computer software known as a screen reader. The screen reader has two major functions – Navigation and Text-to-Speech (TTS).

A screen reader aids in navigation by guiding the user in moving from one page to the other, from one paragraph to the other and so on. It aids in TTS by converting electronic text to sound – basically it reads out text. The biggest stumbling block for screen reader software are programs and content that is difficult for navigation.
 
A large majority of computer programs and electronic content that are used by the visually impaired, are created by sighted people – programmers, content writers, editors etc. If you happen to fall into this category of very powerful people, and if you are unfamiliar with screen readers, I would definitely encourage you to try this little experiment. Now, if you don’t, you might still want to do it – because it can open your eyes a little bit into an unfamiliar world. All you need is a computer, working eyes and an old newspaper.

Here you go:

1. Turn on your computer
2. Browse to Google news or your favorite online haunt OR open a large word document
3. Now get an old newspaper – take one full sheet and open it up
4. Make a rectangular incision 3 inches long and half inch wide at the center of the paper
5. With both hands, hold this newspaper against and in front of your computer display, so that you can see the screen through the rectangular hole
6. Now start reading through the hole. Move the paper to the right to continue reading
7. Try to jump to sections that you are interested in by moving the paper around
8. Read the whole page
9. Rinse and repeat with familiar and unfamiliar pages
10. That’s it.

Hope you enjoyed the experience .. Now we need some feedback from you:

1. How easy was it to find something that you are looking to read?
2. What would have made it easier to find what you were looking for?
3. Is the experience different between familiar and unfamiliar pages?
4. How would you change the design of your document/site/application after your experience of carrying out this experiment?

Update as on May 1, 2010

After our last post on the Right to Read campaign on April 15th the copyright amendment was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on April 19^th. The bad news is that the amendment still contained the same disastrous wording which would effectively prevent NGOs, educational institutions and persons with disabilities from converting reading material including textbooks and reference material into audio, digital formats and other formats that can be used by persons with disabilities to “read” such material. The extremely cumbersome, restrictive and lengthy licensing procedure proposed by the Government for conversion to these formats would mean that students with print disabilities would be deprived of their Right to Education which has now become a fundamental right.

Now for the good news. The BJP and the Left parties have gone on record  <!–[endif]–>that they will oppose the amendment unless the concerns of the visually impaired community are addressed. Members of the National Access Alliance including Sam Taraporevala, Kanchan Pamnani, S.K Rungta, Dipendra Manocha and Ketan Kothari met senior leaders of the BJP including Shri L.K. Advani, Shri Arun Jaitely and Smt. Sushma Swaraj who understood our concerns and were extremely sympathetic. Nirmita Narasimhan from the Centre for Internet and Society <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–> and I met Smt. Brinda Karat who was extremely sympathetic and supportive. Mrs. Karat spent close to an hour understanding the issues involved and fixed up a meeting for us with Shri. Oscar Fernandes, Congress MP and head of the standing committee that will examine the copyright amendment. She also informed us that she has spoken to Mr. Arun Jaitely on this issue and that they would jointly oppose the amendment. Shri Fernandes was also extremely sympathetic and supportive and assured us that we would get an opportunity to be heard when the matter came up for discussion. We also met two members of the standing committee Mr. Biju (CPI (M) MP from Kerala) and Mr. Penumalli Madhu (CPI (M) MP from Andhra Pradesh). Mr. Biju said he would definitely help when this matter comes up for discussion since he believed it is a just cause. Mr. Madhu was even more receptive to the idea and said he would circulate the note which we had given to all the members of the Standing Committee and also write a letter strongly recommending this
case to the Prime Minister and the Standing Committee.

Mr. Javed Abidi, India’s most famous and accomplished disability rights activist, took Nirmita and me to the Prime Minister’s Office where we met Joint Secretary Mr. Sanjay Mitra who promised to put our note to the Prime Minister.

Last but not least, over the last 2 weeks this initiative has got some great press coverage from socially conscious journalists from around the country. We now have to prepare for submitting evidence to the standing committee when the hearings start. We understand that this will happen within the next 3 months. Let us keep our fingers crossed. If you would like to contribute to this effort mail me at rahul.cherian@inclusiveplanet.com

Update as on May 1, 2010

After our last post on the Right to Read campaign on April 15th the copyright amendment was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on April 19^th. The bad news is that the amendment still contained the same disastrous wording which would effectively prevent NGOs, educational institutions and persons with disabilities from converting reading material including textbooks and reference material into audio, digital formats and other formats that can be used by persons with disabilities to “read” such material. The extremely cumbersome, restrictive and lengthy licensing procedure proposed by the Government for conversion to these formats would mean that students with print disabilities would be deprived of their Right to Education which has now become a fundamental right.

Now for the good news. The BJP and the Left parties have gone on the record that they will oppose the amendment unless the concerns of the visually impaired community are addressed. Members of the National Access Alliance including Sam Taraporevala, Kanchan Pamnani, S.K Rungta, Dipendra Manocha and Ketan Kothari met senior leaders of the BJP including Shri L.K. Advani, Shri Arun Jaitely and Smt. Sushma Swaraj who understood our concerns and were extremely sympathetic.  Nirmita Narasimhan from the Centre for Internet and Society and I met Smt. Brinda Karat who extremely sympathetic and supportive. Mrs. Karat spent close to an hour understanding the issues involved and fixed up a meeting for us with Shri. Oscar Fernandes, Congress MP and head of the standing committee that will examine the copyright amendment. She also informed us that she has spoken to Mr. Arun Jaitely on this issue and that they would jointly oppose the amendment. Shri Fernandes was also extremely sympathetic and supportive and assured us that we would get an opportunity to be heard when the matter came up for discussion. We also met two members of the standing committee Mr. Biju (CPI (M) MP from Kerala) and Mr. Penumalli Madhu (CPI (M) MP from Andhra Pradesh). Mr. Biju said he would definitely help when this matter comes up for discussion since he believed it is a just cause. Mr. Madhu was even more receptive to the idea and said he would circulate the note which we had given to all the members of the Standing Committee and also write a letter strongly recommending this
case to the Prime Minister and the Standing Committee.

Mr. Javed Abidi, India’s most famous and accomplished disability rights activist, took Nirmita and me to the Prime Minister’s Office where we met Joint Secretary Mr. Sanjay Mitra who promised to put our note to the Prime Minister.

Last but not least, over the last 2 weeks this initiative got some great press coverage from socially conscious journalists from around the country. We now have to prepare for submitting evidence to the standing committee when the hearings start. We understand that this will happen within the next 3 months. Let us keep our fingers crossed. If you would like to contribute to this effort mail me at rahul.cherian@inclusiveplanet.com