RuthEllison.com

Wow, what a year! 2011 has certainly speed past in a blur. When I started putting this post together, I never realised how much of a truly epic year it has been. There’s been lots of food, travel, conferences, adventures and did I mention food?! Continue reading →

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

This year, I’ve decided to write about someone who is relatively unknown in the broader web community but is very knowledgeable in the accessibility field. She would never blow her own horn, which means that only those of us who have had the pleasure of working with her knows how good she is. She’s a shy and quiet type, and is truly one of the nicest and most generous person I know. She has been working in the tech and user experience field for a while. She’s smart, passionate and she knows her accessibility stuff.

I want you to meet my friend and colleague, Kim Chatterjee. What I love about Kim is her willingness to share her knowledge and time to help everyone, even if it means very little sleep for her! She has a detailed understanding of accessibility and has spent quite a few years doing some cool accessibility work in Government. She’s also really great at communicating complex concepts through interesting and lovely visuals. She’s really humble about her achievements so if you do get to meet her, she won’t tell you how good she is but if you get to chat to her, you’ll soon realise the depth and breadth of her accessibility knowledge.

While others are out and about talking the talk, Kim is busy with the actual doing. She’s helped to inspire a number of people about accessibility, who have now gone on into other organisations either carrying a passion for accessibility or having an increased awareness of accessibility. Now that’s inspirational.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

From the Ada Lovelace Day pledge site:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I have many female friends who are doing wonderful work in the technology industry – too many to name but here’s a few Aussie females that I’ll like to sing out about.

• Donna – she is a great information architect, the Queen of Card Sorting and contributes much of her time to the web community. She’s always happy to share her knowledge and experience.
• Caronne – I love her passion for the work we do. She’s an extremely supportive person and manages to balance work, life, web community stuff and life with two teens. She does amazing stuff with advocating great user experiences in Government agencies that many people don’t hear about!
• Susan – one of the many challenging things of being a women is the ability to juggle multiple stressful components of our life. Susan is amazing – she loves the work she does and some how, manages to balance work, family, photography, blogging and web stuff!
• Viv – a special person I used to work with who is passionate about accessibility and user experience. She’s a solid rock for any team that she’s on and is always quietly working away in the background getting stuff done. It’s people like Viv who work so hard and never seem to get recognition for the hard work they do – so here’s my shout out to you Viv!
• Lisa – is amazing. She knows a lot of things about accessibility, usability and user experience. We have a very similiar approach to the work we do. She’s a very calming influence and I admire her passion for the work we do.

There are many other females out there who also doing great work (I’m looking at you Teresa, Amie, Suze, Lana!).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

On Friday, I said goodbye to my workmates of 14 months. I was really touched by the effort everyone went into organising a great farewell, in particular Viv who did a lot of baking and organising! I was sent off with a very delicious morning tea (lots of divine homemade goodies), beautiful flowers and a fantastic present. This was followed up with drinks at Old Parliament House. I was humbled by all the comments and gestures from various people through out the day, with emails, phone calls and face-to-face conversations.

I learned a lot over my 14 months and got to work on interesting projects. Met lots of interesting people and made some good friends. I will miss my workmates and hope that people keep thinking about creating great user experiences.

As of tomorrow (Monday), I will be working at Stamford Interactive. I’m looking forward to a set of new challenges!

Tonight, hubby and I watched the hilarious Weird Al Yankovic performance at the Canberra Theatre. Weird Al is a very talented American musician/satirist/parodist who is best known for his parodies of some of the biggest names in the music business – Michael Jackson, Eminem, Nirvana, Madonna, James Blunt, etc.

Some of the songs performed tonight to a very enthusiastic audience included White and Nerdy, I’ll Sue You, You’re Pitiful, Canadian Idiot, Amish Paradise, Pretty Fly For A Rabbi, Fat, and my two absolute favourites, Yoda and The Saga Begins. I also loved the Weird Al TV interviews that played through out the night, inbetween songs.

Despite a slight technical hitch towards the end of the show (involving some device freezing and the projector stopping at a particular frame), the entire show was really fun, really funny and worth the money.

After nearly missing my flight this morning, thanks to Canberra Cabs, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons:

1. Do not book a Canberra Cab using their online form – the cab will never arrive (discovered this one through my hubby, which was also verified by Russel)
2. Do not ring up and book a cab for the future (i.e. at least a day ahead) – that cab will never arrive either
3. What ever time you’ve allocated for the cab to arrive – give yourself at least another half an hour on top of that

So after two phone calls this morning, and a lot of panic attacks, a cab finally showed up. The driver had to significantly speed along the highway to get me to the airport so I could just make it on the plane. The passengers were already boarding when I made it to the airport. I’m entirely grateful to Qantas for their fairly usable self check-in system – I managed to check in for my flight (including my return flight) in under a minute. It took longer going through security (my shoes set off the metal detector) but I finally made it. I was one of the last few passengers on the plane, but I made it!!!

We (Russ and myself) visited both offices in Sydney to conduct our accessibility testing. Discovered lots of interesting stuff about various disabilities, particularly, Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) /Occupational overuse syndrome (OOS). It was great to get verification about the issues we thought were occurring, and very importantly, to start building up the relationships with our users of assistive technologies.

A piece of learning from the last few years is that, like usability evaluations, you have to consider the context of the user in terms of their environment, their experience levels (of the assistive tool as well as of the application), the amount of training they have received, whether they undertake other training, the frequency of that training, and the work culture.

It is ideal to conduct the accessibility evaluation with a range of users across different experience levels, and across the different assistive tools. It is also important to note that when analysing the feedback received from the users of assistive technologies, it should be balanced with the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph. For example, a user may have been using an assistive tool for many years, but if they were not given the opportunity to do much training (whether it is self training or through a trainer), their experience levels may not match another person with the same number of years experience who had more opportunity to get more familiar with their assistive tool.

I could go on, but ironically enough, my own RSI is playing up…..

So today is my last day (and also a friend’s – Caronne – last day) at one particular organisation where I’ve spent a significant portion of my time over the last few years. In that time:

• I’ve had my eyes opened to political intrigues
• Watched with great interest the myriad of human behaviours and interaction
• Developed into the extremely passionate-about-accessibility-and-usability person that I am today
• Researched, developed and maintained user interface standards (and the associated challenges that the whole process brings)
• Met a lot of interesting people (within and also external to the organisation)
• Run lots of interesting usability sessions
• Facilitated many collaborative design sessions
• Start my Human-Computer Interaction course at University of Queensland
• Helped integrate the user centred design methodology into current practices (still quite a way to go though)
• Lots of relationship building with various people
• Ate lots of cake and sweets (I can’t keep away from team morning teas)
• Did lots of fascinating User Centred Design “stuff”!

I was farewelled with a box of gorgeous flowers, a card with lovely words from many people, and Seasons One and Two of Little Britain (one of my favourite comedy series). Headed out to the B Bar in Kingston with couple of work mates from varying teams. I enjoyed some delicious cocktails (I love cocktails), got enjoyably tipsy and said random mushy stuff to my UCD team mates.

I was really pleased to see the turn out, and really appreciated the effort that people put in to make it (some had to drive out from a different part of Canberra). It gave me lots of warm fuzzies – a good way to end an era.

Good bye old organisation! Hello new organisation!

We’re on the last couple of days of the honeymoon. Didn’t quite make it as far north as anticipated, thanks to Cyclone Hubert. I was highly anticipating getting to Ningaloo Reef, but we only managed to get as far as Carnarvon. Perhaps next time, we’ll make it all the way there, plus further to Broome!

I have been writing up each day of our journey, but will post these entries once we get back to Perth.

In the meantime, I leave you with a photo from our wedding photo shoot:

Photo credits: © 2006 Samm Blake

The above photo was taken on the grounds of the University of Western Australia. It is part of a series shot at that location for our wedding. Our photographer was Samm Blake. See more of her work at www.sammblake.com.