Why Ubuntu? The main reason is that Sam Ruby is using it on his company Thinkpad, and still keeps getting great stuff done. The fact that its funded by South African billionaire and all-round good-guy, Mark Shuttleworth is notable, but it's the general usability and what seems like brilliant community support from Ubuntu forums that are far better reasons.

Dieing breath of XP

My main home laptop running XP became too much of a hassle to use any more. Weekly reboots became daily reboots became thrice daily reboots. Then Firefox stopped loading and URLs with query strings. Quickly opening Internet Explorer, noticing how infested that browser was, and noticing it too couldn't load and URLs with query strings, I realised the XP install was too sick to continue.

Copied all my data off the laptop onto a USB enclosure took hours, so that ran overnight.

Trying out Ubuntu Live

On Monday, I took a look at the cover DVD from the latest issue of Linux Format (May 2008). I noticed one of the distributions was Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, so I burnt that to a CD, and started up the laptop with the live disk.

It's one of the really clever things about Ubuntu, the install disk is actually a live distribution, so you can try it out, see if the Gnome Desktop, networking and USB works okay before committing to an install.

Playing around Tuesday evening, the basics seemed to be working. The sites that I permanently have open in tabs worked. The web interface to Twitter worked, but the text-field and character counter were quite unresponsive. I was a little surprised that Ubuntu came bundled with Firefox 3 beta 5 as the default browser, instead of the production stable Firefox 2.

Installing Ubuntu and applications

With nothing really to lose I went ahead and installed Ubuntu, which took no time at all. Its ironic that installing Ubuntu today felt as smooth as installing Windows 98 back in the last century, and installing Windows 2000 afresh a few weeks ago felt like installing a 0.5 version of Slackware back from 1995. How times have changed. Well less than an hour later I was logged into Ubuntu running natively on my laptop.

Since the base system installed so quickly, that left most of Wednesday evening going through all of the additional packages picking out bits of software I wanted. This is the biggest collection of software I have ever seen - so it took a few hours. Unlike my previous non-serious installs of Linux installations, I thought I would just get the software items that I felt I genuinely needed right now, (except for a few urges, like Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based wargame that I remember Tom blogging about a while back, and LinCity).

The main reason I've felt locked into Windows was Chessbase and its engines. I normally run Shredder 7 on this particular laptop, using it to work through and summarise SuperGM chess tournaments on my blog Chess Vault. This might be the main sticking point if I couldn't find a decent replacement on Ubuntu. I'd prefer not to have a third laptop just for that.

I let the application and package install run overnight. When I woke up the next morning the install popped up a dialog box for dokuwiki, asking for the URL path I wanted it running on. I accepted the default, but the installer seemed to just hang a few minutes later. After waiting about ten minutes for a sign of further progress I Alt-Ctrl-Backspaced out, and rebooted the laptop. (Turns out the dokuwiki installer was just expecting me to press Enter a few times.)

Everything seemed to start okay. I reopened the package manager which immediately spotted that the last install run had failed and it provided me with a terminal command to attempt to repair this. I opened the terminal window, and sudo'ed the command, only to find that sudo was broken. (Which seemed odd, since the GUI version accepted my password when I opened the package manager). A Google search revealed that sudo was indeed broken on the default install, and it had to do with the network settings, which didn't contain a mapping of my laptop hostname to 127.0.0.1. That took a few goes fixing through the Networking Dialogue, which is not very intuitive when adding/changing host lookups. But I eventually got the configuration added (I couldn't do it on the command line because it needed sudo).

With sudo fixed, running the repair command ran through cleanly, and I had Ubuntu running with Apache, web development tools, subversion, LinCity, Oolite, plus XBoard and Crafty (for chess), and the Pidgin IM client which had no problems connecting using my Yahoo IM profile.

Tweaking the install

I spent the next couple of days using Ubuntu like that, just getting used to its look and feel (including the 'fade-out' of various applications that were slow in responding). Just building confidence and trust with the system.

Saturday I tried out XBoard, and that responded fine. I decided to install scid - an open source chess database, and that again, just worked, even Crafty was configured by default as one of the analysis engines. That allowed me to finish off a chess blog post I was halfway through writing before XP failed on me.

Sunday I was quickly frustrated by Twitter's web client's sluggish response. So I dived into the package manager and found Twitux, which looked like a decent Twitter client, and came with the option of running from the system toolbar. Also installed a simple Bittorrent client - one which does just one torrent at a time. That takes me a step backward from the comfort of the official BitTorrent client which can handle multiple torrents. I just need to dig out the official client from the package manager.

The main customisation of the desktop is to switch off the animation, which felt sluggish, and not necessary for me. And adding a third workspace to the workspace switcher. That gives me one workspace for Firefox and general surfing, one workspace for Scid, and one workspace with Bluefish. Bluefish is for writing my blogposts, and I'm thinking I'm comfortable enough to start using for my main web development tool. It feels like an adequate replacement of Textpad.

What I'm liking

I've plugged in two random USB Flash drives, as well as my USB hard drive enclosure, and they just seamlessly worked. Grabbed an mp3 and double clicked it, Totem realised it didn't have the necessary codecs to play so it fired up a search in package manager to find the Gstreamer codecs which installed quickly and the mp3 just worked.

Scid, and the Crafty analysis worked by default. Bluefish just worked. Pidgin Instant Messaging client just worked. Twitux just worked.

And I'm liking the Workspace switcher. That helps me multitask so much better. The CPU is churning away analysing a position, and I'm doing something else in the meantime, knowing the results are just a workspace away. My external LCD monitor feels a little redundant right now, its been off for several days now.

What I didn't like

The del.icio.us toolbar doesn't offer the option to install because Firefox 3 beta is too new. I guess I need to wait until Yahoo! update it. I suppose I can live with the del.icio.us bookmarklets for a while.

Sudo being broken by default (because of a hosts setting on networking), that was a little irritating. The fix took a while to apply because the networking dialogue wasn't intuitive. I was adding the host entry, saving, closing and reopening, and the entry was gone. The solution was to edit an existing entry with the 127.0.0.1 address, then save, and then disable and re-enable networking.

In Firefox I normally right-click on links and open them in a new tab. In Firefox 3 on Ubuntu, sometimes the context menu appears, but sometimes the "Save bookmark" dialogue, or Firebug opens, or Evolution (the email client) opens instead of the context menu. I haven't tracked down why this happens, my current gut feeling (untested) is that links without attached JavaScript events are okay, but those with attached events pull up Firebug. Maybe I should look into downgrading to Firefox 2 instead.

My online banking system doesn't support Firefox 3, or anything outside of a PC or Mac (according to their website). But that's because I have a crap bank than issues with Ubuntu or Firefox.

Conclusion

After a few very minor hiccups, Ubuntu is starting to grow on me. I haven't got dual monitors running yet - that's something I thought I would need to do at first, but I'm starting to feel fairly comfortable with the convenience of the workspace switcher. At the moment, Scid is chugging away analysing a position from Kramnik's game against Gelfand from Corus Wijk aan Zee earlier this year. I'm just blogging away with Bluefish, sometimes forgetting that the chess engine is still chugging away.

At the moment, it's satisfactory. Scid isn't completely up to the levels of Chessbase, I certainly haven't set it up properly yet. My next step is to get a stronger analysis engine, so to figure out how to get Fruit working with it (Fruit, a very strong chess engine, is yet another package that's already in the massive list of Ubuntu software list). Time will tell whether Ubuntu offers enough chessic software for me to forget about needing Shredder 7 installed. There's always the potential option of Chessbase and Wine.

Just after I'd installed the base system, the very next day Canonical announced that the 8.04 version - Hardy Heron, was now release-ready, and that it is the version that benefits from Long Term Support - guaranteed support for 3 years. Looks like I timed the leap to Ubuntu very well!

Unfortunately, Jeremy dodged the real accessibility issues of the date-time microformat pattern, instead preferring to create a strawman, and boisterously batter it to smithereens with his wooden sword. That is his choice, but it doesn't help to alleviate the accessibility issues of the date-time microformat pattern.

Twitter and ISO-8601 date-times

In a brilliantly informative talk about Twitter and ARIA, Steve Faulkner of The Paciello Group, took the audience through the various features of Twitter that posed accessibility issues in screen readers. Each barrier was explained in detail, solutions using current technology discussed and implemented, and suprisingly, demonstrating practical solutions using ARIA.

One accessibility barrier Steve covered was Twitter's use of the abbr to add machine-readable ISO-8601 timestamps, which is decently summarised in W3C's Date and Time Note. Marking up the publish times of twitter messages as an abbreviation meant that screenreader users with configurations set to expand abbreviations instead of getting a human friendly date, they received something that wasn't human friendly. This is what was in the markup:

	<abbr class="published" 
		title="2008-04-26T06:52:20+01:00">
		half a minute</abbr>

Instead of getting the human friendly message of half a minute, a screen reader user with expanded abbreviations configured would get something like two thousand and eight dash zero four dash twenty six tee six colon fifty two colon twenty plus one o'clock. Not a particularly friendly or intuitive expansion. In fact, it is materially incorrect. The time stated is 06:52, not one o'clock.

Jeremy took issue with Steve's criticisms in his blog, accusing Steve, amongst other things, of FUD. What Jeremy fails to realise is that Steve Faulkner has a long track-record of basing his findings on thorough screen reader testing. And Steve knows screen readers. Much of what we know about making Ajax accessible to screen-reader users comes from the work of Steve Faulkner and Gez Lemon, in their trademark style of collaborative deep thinking, designing and implementing their ideas, and rigorously testing their ideas, and documenting their findings, and publishing them openly for peer-review. Hardly the foundation of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Testing with screen reader users

The litmus test of accessibility is usability testing with people with disabilities. As it happens, some usability testing was done on the date-time pattern, as Jeremy Keith notes:

By the way, Robin [Christopherson] - who is sitting two seats away from me - was recently brought in to test BBC listings which had been marked up with hCalendar. He described the feared accessibility problems as unfounded. Most screen reader users do not change their default settings for abbreviations and by default, abbreviations are not expanded.

It is encouraging that accessibility testing was done, kudos to the BBC. However the conclusion drawn is flawed. I'm very surprised the Microformats community accepted the justification as Jeremy describes it:

Most screen reader users do not change their default settings for abbreviations and by default, abbreviations are not expanded.

There are two issues with this justification:

First, to my knowledge, there are no published studies or investigations available that document how most screen reader users have their screen readers configured. That's something we in the accessibility circles wish we had access to, but not have the resources to fund such a study. If the Microformats community have this information, I urge them to share it publicly.

What strikes me as very odd is that three screen reader users I have worked with over the last few years have all got abbreviations configured to be expanded. Do we just ignore that as a statistical anomaly or insignificant?

Second, there's no indication from Jeremy's comments that the microformats community asked the pertinent question, Why don't most users have their screen readers configured to expand abbreviations? (Surely the semantics of a properly marked up abbreviation offer value to a visitor?)

One major part of the reason is the lack of properly structured markup out on the real web. Screen reader users find very little benefit to having the configuration switched on because the reading of most pages is no noticeable improvement because there's hardly any abbreviations on the pages to actually expand. Why have a configuration turned on that adds practically no value?

Marking up abbreviations is part and parcel of building semantically structured documents. It is something espoused by microformats, especially Jeremy Keith, who takes special delight in semantic structure. It's ironic, then, that the justification for the date-time pattern as not being a barrier to screen reader users largely depends on screen reader users retaining the belief that there is no value in semantic markup, and thus it's not worthwhile for them to set their screen readers to expand abbreviations.

In short, the microformats community is doing itself, as well as screen reader users, a disservice by validating the predominant view that semantic structure has no value. If structured and semantic markup has no value, neither does microformats.

Readability of ISO-8601 timestamps

Jeremy goes on to claim that ISO-8601 timestamps are readable:

Besides, an internationalised way of writing a date is not just machine-readable data (I'm a human and I can read 2008-04-25 just fine). I'm not saying that the abbr pattern doesn't have problems (it does but they are semantic in nature) but Steve is mischaracterising the current situation.

Jeremy ignores Steve's actual example, and is actually being deceitful. He finds 2008-04-25 readable, but says nothing about the readability of 2008-04-25T17:33:52+01:00. It is true that both sequences are valid ISO-8601 date-times. But it was the second, longer form of the date-time that Steve Faulkner raised as an issue - one that Jeremy quietly ignores (maybe hoping it will go away?). Jeremy plays the strawman argument, arguing that a shortened date format is readable, but ignoring Steve's actual example which is being used on Twitter.

The first form, that Jeremy prefers is only of use for all-day or multi-day events, not the events predominant of calendars (hour-long meetings), or publish times on Twitter. Its the second, longer, form that's going to be more common, and this is no "semantic in nature" problem, it is a barrier for screen reader users who have expanded abbreviations configured.

This is a poor show from Jeremy Keith. I hope its not reflective of the rest of the Microformats community.

Panel criticisms

Furthermore, Jeremy criticises me for not being specific about which microformats, and claims the issue I have is with the date-time abbreviation pattern. This is incorrect and misleading. I directly pointed out the initial handling of the empty link include pattern as an example of where accessibility hadn't really been thought through.

Jeremy then chides that I should practice what I preach, which means he is unaware of the screen reader testing I did to test the empty link include pattern, which was fed back to the Microformats community. My work is referenced and acknowledged in the include pattern microformat wiki page. The testing involved two full-time screen reader users, a set of repeatable tests, and an internal peer review of my findings and conclusions. Also, none of the findings and conclusions have been effectively challenged or refuted. I stand by my work.

The third criticism, a re-iteration of the strawman argument that Jeremy finds 2008-04-25 readable, still doesn't mention whether the typical date-time format that is most likely to be used is readable. Screen reader testing and documentation by Steve Faulkner (in his presentation) and Jon Gibbins has demonstrated there is an issue when screen readers have expand abbreviations configured. Both quote test examples involving the most typical date-time format.

The argument that most screenreaders don't have abbreviations set to expanded, and thus a human-unfriendly title attribute on an abbr is acceptable betrays microformats' commitment to semantic and structured data. What possible value is there to promoting semantic markup if the net result is that the perceivability and usability of a semantic feature (the expansion of abbreviations) is seriously degraded because of the presence of human unfriendly blob of data? The date-time pattern is, in its current state, a barrier to screen reader users taking advantage of the abbreviation expansion features of their software.

Essentially, Jeremy Keith's credibility in accessibility has taken a serious knock. The outburst in the panel discussion did not help alleviate the documented problems about the date-time abbreviation format, or show a willingness to tackle the issues raised. And this is a concern.

Update 15:19 Jeremy Keith says that he got upset he was hearing "Microformats are inaccessible". I didn't say that on the panel, and I don't recall Steve Faulkner saying that in his presentation.

I'm also lucky to have the opportunity to work with engineers who rely on screenreaders. That is revealing new insights, and opportunities we can use to improve our sites. I'm learning, discovering and refining techniques that make sites more accessible.

I've started a new blog about practical web development tips for producing accessible websites. It's AccessibilityTips.com. The focus is on practical advice for real websites; advice web developers can use immediately to improve the accessibility of their sites.

The practical tips I cover are those we've uncovered in our day-to-day work on Yahoo! sites. The content is aimed at people who develop websites, and want to build more accessible and usable websites.

Tips I've covered so far:

• Positioning content offscreen
• Providing link text
• Avoiding visibility: hidden
• Deciding when display: none is appropriate
• Signpost forms with headers
• Avoid skipping header levels

The bulk of my presentation covered the same ground as my previous talk. With six months more experience and thought, as well as a great new case study - a currency calculator for our next finance site.

Christian Heilmann has uploaded my slides to slideshare. I'm finding his presentations watchable in an RSS aggregator, so this is my real-world test:

| View | View accessible outline | Upload your own

Thanks to AbilityNet for inviting me. Although I'm not a natural speaker, and it still terrifies me, this is something I want to do regularly.

(Picture courtesy of Dirk Ginader)

AbilityNet's workshops bring in the right people we accessibility people need to be talking to - those at the grassroots building or commissioning the build of websites. Their efforts will make websites as a whole more accessible, and its our responsibility and in our interests to make sure they have the best information to make educated and informed decisions about web accessibility.

AbilityNet are hosting Accessibility 2.0: A million flowers bloom, a one day accessibility conference on April 25th in London. Speakers include Steve Faulkner, Christian Heilmann, Robin Christopherson and Julie Howell - that is the cream of web accessibility talent and experience in the UK.