An hour without a mouse

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I’ve seen people try to use the web with just a keyboard for a full day, or even a week, but I thought a good place to start would just be a single hour. It doesn’t sound too tough at first, but you quickly realize — how do I switch tabs with my keyboard? Or change to a different application entirely?

It gets worse from there. But first, why?

Why try this at all?

You may have seen some of my recent posts related to accessibility, and this test is along that same vein. I want to better understand how impaired users (whether in mobility, vision, or otherwise) use the web, and going keyboard-only is a great place to start.

It’s hard to find exact numbers, but it seems that roughly 7% of users have “severe dexterity difficulties” that would preclude the use of a mouse, and it’s estimated that 1-2% of users have to rely on a screen reader. Screen reading software uses the same type of interface as a keyboard user would, so we’re talking about nearly 10% of users that aren’t using a mouse when they browse. That’s a lot of people!

By working through this, even for just an hour, I made additional changes to this site and GreenMellen (and will be updating our client sites as well) to make them more keyboard-friendly.

How to get started

I did my test using my Chromebook (at my new standing desk), and whatever type of operating system you’re using I suspect that most of your day is in the browser. For that, I’d suggest printing out two things:

  1. A list of Chrome keyboard shortcuts (or a similar list for a browser of your choice).
  2. A list of keyboard shortcuts for any of your main programs, like this info for Gmail.

From there, see what happens and where you get stuck.

Try it yourself

You don’t have to do it for a week, a day, or even an hour. Maybe just set aside 10 minutes, put the mouse in a drawer, and see what you can do. It should help you gain some empathy for users, and depending on your role it may encourage you to put in some work to make it easier for them (and everyone, really) to access the content that you’re working to share.

Zwifting along

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I’m sharing this largely because I wish I had known about it a few years ago, so maybe I can save someone else from that.

In short, Zwift is an app that puts you in a virtual world connected to your treadmill or your stationary bike. It’s kind of like being in “Second Life”, in a virtual world with virtual characters.

There are various ways to watch it while you run, but I just run it from my iPad and the iPad sits on my treadmill.

Here’s a promo video they made for it when it first launched in 2015 (when it was only for cycling):

A few things make it pretty neat:

Matched Speed: It can connect to your treadmill (or you can buy sensors if you have an older treadmill) and your character in the game paces at exactly your speed. With that, you can move through the world and it’ll track your pace, distance, etc.

Real people: While you’re exercising, the world is filled with other real people in the app at the same time. Zwift started as a biking app, so there are more bikes than runners, but having all of these people moving around helps to bring the world to life. They even do events like virtual 5K races at specific times, and you’ll see a bunch of virtual people lined up at the starting line.

Training plans: They have a few training plans to help get you started. They’ll tell you when to speed up, when to slow down, and encourage you as you go. It seems that they don’t have very many, but it’s a great way to help get started.

Gamification: As you exercise more, you earn points and levels and the kinds of things you get from a game. I don’t fully understand this yet, but I’m earning a lot of points!

All of that said, it doesn’t do much — just watching your character run can get boring after a while, even with the goodies I mentioned above. That’s ok, though. While the game has some ambient sounds, it doesn’t make much noise. As a result, you can still listen to music/books or watch TV while you work out, but have the added bonus of an interactive world in front of you instead of an LCD panel that is always creeping to higher numbers. 🙂

If you have a treadmill or stationary bike that you work out with, give Zwift a try. They have a seven day trial to play with it, and then it’s $15/mo after that.

How does interstitial journaling work?

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A few months ago I said that I think blogging beats journaling, for a number of reasons. I still stand by that, but that’s certainly not to say that journaling is a bad thing.

I recently read an article from Anne-Laure Le Cuff about the idea of interstitial journaling, and it seems to work well with my daily flow.

The basic idea is that you combine your note-taking, tasks and time tracking in one workflow, and using Roam Research is perfect for that. In my case, I already have my daily calendar in Roam, along with note-taking and tasks, so I was somewhat doing this already.

Here’s a quick video to show you more of what I’m doing with this:

Monologue vs Dialogue

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Is your marketing more monologue or an actual dialogue?

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of monologue — buy a TV or radio ad, spread the message, and see what happens. Increasingly, though, customers are wanting more of a dialogue with the companies they do business with, and it’s important not to confuse the two.

The latest bullhorn

Nearly a decade ago, I did some tests with churches and car dealers to see how they were using Twitter. They all advertised their use of Twitter on their home pages, but how did they really use it? In most cases, it was simply a new bullhorn — they tweeted out news and info, but did absolutely no listening or replying. Many companies are still doing the same thing today.

Most of the current technology allows you to interact with those you wish to serve, and it’s up to you to choose to engage with them or not.

Faster doesn’t always mean faster

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This hit me as kind of interesting when I realized it — the coming 5G cell phone speeds will be identical to every previous cell technology (4G, 3G, etc) that came before it. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so there’s no getting any “faster”. The difference is in the throughput, or the amount of data being carried along those waves.

It reminds me of the old joke in computer science that says “never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes“. In other words, if you work it out to a “MB per sec” kind of number, a truck full of backup tapes might average a pretty good number.

Using a more current example, you can buy a 1TB Micro SD card and it weighs around 250mg. A semi truck can hold around 40,000lbs, so that means it could carry 72,574,780 of those cards, or around 72 Exabytes of data. That’s a lot!

If you were to drive that truck from Georgia to mid-Michigan (a journey I’ve made a few times), it’d take around 12 hours, which is 43,200 seconds. That means, on average, you delivered around 1.7 Petabyes/sec, or more than a million times faster than a fiber connection could manage!

Of course, the latency (the time between requests) would be nearly 24 hours (as opposed to the fraction of a second on a typical internet connection), making this clearly not a useful thing.

Google Sneakernet

Shockingly, Google actually does this kind of thing for some data transfers, when a company needs to move an immense amount of data onto Google’s cloud. In some cases it’s faster to ship the hardware to Google than to transfer it over the internet, so that’s what they do!

Why satellite internet can never be “fast”

This also highlights the issue with satellite internet. Going back to my original example of driving the truck to Michigan, while the average speeds are insane, you’d still be waiting 24 hours between trucks for each request you make.

With traditional satellite internet, it’s the same problem. They can potentially provide a ton of bandwidth, but the few seconds that it takes for each round trip can add up. Even with data travelling at the speed of light, it takes a couple of seconds to reach a satellite and come back. A typical webpage is made up of dozens or hundreds of files (this page you’re reading is around 120 files), so that back and forth can add up a lot.

Elon’s Starlink

Elon Musk is trying to solve that with a low-orbit satellite internet solution, which cuts that latency down to almost nothing. It solves most of the issues of traditional satellite internet, with the big caveat of needing many more satellites to make it work. Eventually, Musk hopes to have 42,000 of his satellites in space to create this network.

The speed of light is just too slow

In the end, for some things, the speed of light just isn’t fast enough. There are some theories about sending data faster than light, but they seem unlikely to ever come to fruition.

For now, we can be thankful for people like Elon Musk that are working to reduce distances and keep things fast.

If you ever need to send a huge amount of data somewhere, though, you can always consider using a truck full of tapes.

Hitting invisible targets

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On September 7, 1979, Bill Rasmussen launched ESPN and did two things not seen before:

  1. It was all sports, all the time.
  2. It was on 24/7, which was largely unheard of at the time.

They weren’t “the best” at either of those things — they were the first and only!

It reminds me of a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer:

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Rasmussen wasn’t aiming at the same target as the other TV networks; his target was invisible to the rest of them.

Blackberry to iPhone

In 2007, Blackberry was a great device and Schopenhauer would likely have called them a “talent”, as no one else could reach their target.

Then, of course, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and flipped everything around.

The best web portal?

Google did the same thing in 1998. Every major company out there was trying to have the best web portal, jammed with links and information to keep people on the site as long as possible. Yahoo was the leader, and everyone else was chasing them.

Except Google.

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Google didn’t want to make a portal, nor try to keep people trapped on their site. They made a powerful, ridiculously simple search engine and changed the web forever.

Hitting a popular target can help you become a solid company. Hitting a target that no one else can see is a revolution.

Some quick tips for an ADA-compliant website

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While a website can’t technically be “ADA-compliant”, as they have no specific rules for websites, following the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) will get you a long way toward it. I’m certainly not a lawyer, and you can dig much deeper than what I present here, but these tips will easily put you in the top 1% of websites in terms of accessibility.

With website accessibility-related lawsuits on a rapid rise, here are some quick things you can do to help.

Use a solid theme. Picking some fancy theme with 10,000 built-in features is just asking for trouble.

Use alt text. If you add an image to your page, put proper alt text on it.

Don’t set links to open in new tabs. That’s a good thing for you, not for your users.

Add labels to form fields. Most form plugins will do this for you, but make sure.

Use headings. I don’t have many on this post, but I use H2, H3, etc as appropriate when writing.

Use text, not pictures of text. Include photos if you want, but don’t bury text in them.

Add an accessibility statement. If lawyers do come sniffing around, this will help deter them to search for easier prey. If you don’t know where to start, just steal and tweak mine.

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It’s beyond time to have any excuse to have a website that isn’t friendly to all of your visitors.

Bonus: All of these things are great for your search engine rankings too.

It’s not too late

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I was listening to a podcast recently where one of the hosts was lamenting the fact that they didn’t invent any of the great new apps that seem somewhat obvious to us now, like Uber and Slack. They wished they could go back in time about 10 years and fix that, but “it’s too late now”.

For those apps, he’s absolutely right, but most people will be able to say the same thing 10 years from now. The next 10 years will bring amazing new technologies and ideas, and that’s all still in front of us.

Tech giants rule

Even with that in mind, it can be tough when you look at the current landscape being mostly dominated by a few large companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc).

Can you build a phone next year to compete with the iPhone? Probably not.

Can you create a new search engine to topple Google? Unlikely.

Despite that, opportunities abound.

Two examples

Two fun examples of small, unique projects come to mind.

TogetherLetters is a way to connect a small group of people with weekly email updates. As social media fragments into different platforms, everyone (at least for now) has email. This is a creative way to use that to bring people together.

Nat is a unique tool that scans your email and determines who you frequently contact but have not talked to in a while, and encourages you to reconnect. It’s somewhat like Contactually used to be, but is much more focused on just helping you reconnect and is a great little site.

Both of these products are being built by creative people in their spare time, with the hopes of perhaps building them into big services some day.

Will they survive?

There’s a pretty decent chance that if you read this post in a few years, both of them will be closed up and the founders moved on — but maybe not. Almost every major product used today came from simple, humble beginnings.

Google was just a research project on how to better organize websites.

Slack was a chat feature inside of a game. The game failed, but Slack thrived.

Facebook was one of about 10 different projects that Mark Zuckerberg was messing around with at college.

You can lament that you didn’t cash in with Slack and their $28B acquisition or some other recent multi-million dollar success, but it’s never too late and it’s never been easier to give it a try.

If you have an idea, go for it and see what sticks, and people may wish they had been you 10 years ago.

What happens if Section 230 is repealed?

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Donald Trump has been pushing hard for Section 230 (part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act) to be repealed, but what happens if is it?

For starters, it’d make things much worse for Trump.

The bulk of Section 230 is this statement:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In other words, if users post something on a website, the owner of the site can’t be held liable for it (aside for things such as federal crimes). It’s kind of like if you send something illegal through the mail, the USPS doesn’t get in trouble for it. It’s a good thing.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has this to say about the potential of Section 230 being eliminated:

Given the sheer size of user-generated websites it would be infeasible for online intermediaries to prevent objectionable content from cropping up on their site

Rather than face potential liability for their users’ actions, most would likely not host any user content at all or would need to protect themselves by being actively engaged in censoring what we say, what we see, and what we do online.

So what happens if Section 230 is repealed? No one knows for sure, but here are some possibilities:

No more reviews

Amazon and Yelp thrive on Section 230, allowing reviews that they’re not held liable for. Either they’ll need to moderate every single review, but more likely they’d just get rid of them to avoid the risk.

Facebook and Twitter dominate

Facebook and other sites would possibly need to pre-approve every single post and comment. That would be bad enough, but Facebook and a few other large networks are the only ones with the money and staff to do it. There’d be essentially no way for a new social network to compete without a huge budget for staff and moderation.

In Trump’s case, instead of occasionally getting “fact-checked” on Twitter, every Tweet of his would have to be pre-approved and he would no longer have that instant communication channel to the world.

Bye-bye, Wikipedia

Wikipedia is all about user-generated content, so it would disappear very quickly. Basically, anywhere that you can post on someone else’s site (like on social media), your ability to do that would be considerably reduced or removed.

So what should happen?

There’s not an easy answer. A full repeal of 230 would be disaster, but things are pretty messy already when it comes to fake news and censorship. Some tweaks to 230 could be good, but sorting those out will be a painful process. My point today is that the calls to “Repeal 230!” are seemingly misguided, and it’s a much more nuanced discussion that needs to happen.

The next few years should be interesting to watch, and will have massive impacts on how the internet will look in the future.