Dining in the Dark

A blindfolded photo attempt of my meal, served and eaten in near darkness. Thankfully it turns out that my aim with my fork was better than my aim with my cellphone camera.

Two weeks ago our longtime client Olmsted Center for Sight (formerly the lengthily-named Elizabeth Pierce Olmsted, M.D. Center for the Visually Impaired) held a benefit dinner titled “Dining in the Dark.” The concept was quite simple and given away by its name — attendees would enjoy a meal in total darkness. Not only did my company co-sponsor the event, I attended it and had the pleasure of dining with Olmsted's president.

The meal started off with wine and salad, which you were allowed to eat in light. Then we were presented with bibs and blindfolds, and the lighting was turned down to just the candles on the table (the servers needed to see, after all). And so in darkness we set upon the main course followed by the dessert course and wrapped up with coffee service. During the main course an Olmsted representative guided us through techniques to get the lay of the land, identify foods, cut meat, find drinks and so on. I ignored all this and dove in with my characteristic nonchalance about my meal and found myself stymied by the simplest things — it takes a couple tries to realize your knife is upside down and that you are cutting with the blunt edge and not the sharp edge.

I have spent over a decade working with Olmsted Center for Sight. I have had the opportunity to see how its clientele/constituency uses computers and surfs the web. I have attended seminars, spoken at events, been a part of lawmaking discussions, implemented software and web sites, all in my time consulting with Olmsted. I have been working with low-vision and blind users for most of my professional career, but nearly always in the form of technology. Though I had some time running concerts for thousands of attendees and making sure outdoor and non-standard venues were handicapped accessible, this dinner afforded the chance for me to experience some of the day-to-day tasks that I take for granted, but this time without sight.

This post may seem to be a little outside of my generally technical discussions here, but I believe that experiences like this are important for anybody who cares about inclusive design or accessibility. Some day everyone reading this will have reduced vision, mobility, hearing, and so on. Learning now how to design and build to support those changes serves to position future generations of developers to design and build to support the future you. That's just a good investment in your long term well-being.

Consider spending an hour blindfolded and try to do a mundane task like get dressed, eat a meal, or even use the web to look up a menu on a web site (you've already seen me rant about how awful that experience is for average users). Consider limiting your movement, restricting yourself to a chair, putting in earplugs, and so on. You may find your get far more insight into daily life as well as software and web development than you expected.

If you're still reading and also care about accessibility, then in keeping with the low vision theme of this post here are some resources to use when developing sites for the blind. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but there are links to many others within.

• Screen reader demos, research and resources by Alistair Duggin. Written the day after my dinner.
• Web Accessibility Toolbar 2012 from The Paciello Group. A handy resource to validate and review any page you are viewing.
• The NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader (MS WIndows) is a free resource (for which you should donate) that can help you understand how a site is "heard" by a blind user.

This handy video shows you how blind people use the iPhone 4S. It's worth a couple minutes of your time.

This link isn't a resource, instead it's a story of a police department using its forensic techniques to help save 26 pages of hand-written content after the blind writer's pen ran out of ink.

Make a Better Restaurant Site

Last night I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion for the Buffalo chapter of Social Media Club. The panel consisted of a food blogger, a restaurant review site owner, a restaurant / cooking school owner, and a local food writer / reviewer / event planner.

As I asked questions of the panel I held off on my own question about why restaurant web sites are so stultifyingly awful, only to find the question came from the crowd itself:

This is a topic with which I have struggled mightily — not as a web developer, but as a consumer:

On far too many occasions I have been away from a computer, armed only with a smartphone, trying to make a decision on a restaurant by looking up information online. On far too many occasions I have been unable to get directions, hours, a phone number, menus, or even see photos (it's good to know if I am under- or over-dressed).

This isn't much different from the days before smartphones when I visited a restaurant web site at my work computer and had to scramble to turn down its background music, or had to close the page because its massive Flash movie brought everything to a crawl.

I was pleased to see — no, pleased is the wrong word — I was grimly satisfied to see that all four panelists reacted immediately, passionately, and in near unison when I asked what restaurants can do to improve their web sites.

What Restaurants Can Do

The takeaway, before the discussion transformed into one about general expectation management, was pretty straightforward:

1. Dump the Flash;
2. Lose the background music;
3. Forget the splash page;
4. Get your menu current;
5. Replace the PDF menu with HTML;
6. Put the hours on the home page;
7. Put the address on the home page;
8. Put the phone number on the home page;
9. Get some quality food photos;
10. Don't waste my time telling me your ethos;
11. Make sure it works on my mobile device.

None of this is new stuff. This is the exact same thing that many of us have said for years. There are comics about it, like this one from The Oatmeal:

There is even a web site dedicated to expounding the right way to build a restaurant web site (yeah, it's kind of meta):

When today I saw that the guy who built that resource was interviewed for .net Magazine ("Noel Tock on better restaurant websites," primarily to promote his product for building restaurant web sites), coupled with last night's food panel, I thought it might be about time to write something up.

Resistance?

What's that, your favorite restaurant doesn't have the budget to build a web site devoid of all those hyper-expensive features? No worries, those items I listed above can be done in plain HTML for free.

Don't have the skill? No worries there, either. With the small army of restaurant review and collection sites like Yelp, location-based services like Foursquare, the ubiquity of Facebook, and free services like Blogger, you can get the information out there for cheap, maybe doing nothing more than redirecting your own domain name to one of those platforms.

Sure there is a risk, but that's just about proper time management:

As consumers, we should be willing to tell a restaurant when its web site sucks. When you make the reservation, when you pay your bill, when the manager is playing nice with the crowd. You may feel like you're being mean, but it's truly a very nice thing to do if you really like a place. Help them not suck in the one way where we can all coach them.

Related

• Why All the Food Photos? at my site and at evolt.org.
• Buffalo Foodie Panel (it was last night) announcement on my blog.
• 13 Best Practices for Restaurants on Facebook on Mashable.
• A local site I built some time ago, but which they maintain with skill: Shango Bistro.

Some proof that I moderated last night and presented some stats (see the article linked above) about social media engagement with food retailers:

Update: January 14, 2014

Web Standards Sherpa (yes, I am a writer for it, but not this piece) has some examples of good HTML for using on menus: Question about HTML for Restaurant Menus

Buffalo Foodie Panel

In just under one week's time, the Buffalo chapter of Social Media Club will be hosting a panel discussion featuring local food bloggers, restaurant reviewers, and food business owners who have found success using social media. Here's the scoop:

Wednesday, February 22, 2012
6:00pm — 8:30pm
Artisan Kitchen and Baths at 200 Amherst Street, Buffalo, NY 14207
Go get your tickets now, before it's too late.

The panelists:

• Christa Seychew: Food editor at Buffalo Spree, producer of Nickel City Chef series, and overall expert on local Buffalo food scene, which you can verify on her own site.
• Donnie Burtless: Creator of BuffaloEats, one of the area's premier restaurant review websites.
• Beth Manos Brickey: Creator of Tasty-Yummies, a popular blog featuring mouth-watering recipes and beautiful food photography.
• Deborah Clark: Owner of Delish Cooking School and Pastry shop, and advocate for social media.

Two of our local food trucks, The Whole Hog and Roaming Buffalo, will be there to start serving tasty bits at 6pm and the panel discussion, moderated by yours truly, will start at 6:30pm. Get your tickets at BuffaloFoodies.EventBrite.com. You can also participate in the panel in advance by posing questions on Twitter using the hashtag #BUFfoodies.

You can get the full-sized flyer as a PDF and hang it around your office or on your fridge. Since the food photos are mine, I've already done that.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you might recall my article from early January "Why All the Food Photos?" (also available at evolt.org) where I discuss how social media and food seem to have found a natural bond. This event will help bear out some of my assertions and give you a chance to hear it from the sources themselves.

For more details:

• Eventbrite page (to buy tickets);
• Facebook event page;
• Social Media Club Buffalo events page;
• Social Media Club Buffalo press release;
• Buffalo Rising article "Buffalo Foodie Panel: Food and The Web."
• "Buffalo web foodies" as covered by Buffalo.com.

If you just happen to be curious about those lovely food photos in the flyer, I can tell you that the first image is from a local restaurant, the second image is from my own kitchen, and the third image is from a recent visit to Florence, Italy.

Why All the Food Photos? (at evolt.org)

How can you not share something so tasty?

The Internet has a thing for cats. There's really no denying it, at least when taken in the whole of the internet.

Social media, on the other hand, seems to have a thing for food. While social media is just one aspect of the Internet, we can take comfort that social media's penchant for food is not about cat food or edible cats. It is hard to deny, however, that social media, with its friendliness to instant image uploads, constant quick commentary, and location-based tendency, is dominated by food.

Read the full article at evolt.org

I wrote an article for evolt.org yesterday that goes into a little detail on why people do this, along with some of my reasons. Go read the full article, including some of my own food photos, at evolt.org. If you are like me and post photos of your meals, snacks, or other random food bits, feel free to leave some comments here or there with your own reasons. I suspect some of the reasons I listed will look familiar to you.

Judge by how many of the Social Media Club chapter events center around food.

Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVinoII

Last night the local Social Media Club chapter here in Buffalo repeated last year's mid-holiday party success by putting on TacoVinoII. Similar to last year, the club teamed up with a local wine bar, Just Vino, and a local food truck, Lloyd Taco Truck.

Lloyd Taco Truck made a batch of its popular duck tacos for the crowd and Just Vino ran raffles all night for $25 gift cards to the bar. Attendees not only got to enjoy wine and duck tacos (along with other Lloyd staples), but they had the pleasure of pairing the two while chatting in real life with the very people they might only chat with online.

An event which started off with only 50 free tickets quickly filled up, and the ticket count got bumped up twice more to 150 people. Throughout the night it was pretty clear they all came through. The cold night certainly didn't stop anyone from waiting in line for tacos, either.

Buffalo.com sent a photographer to capture the evening and posted a gallery of 60 photos this morning for you to look through. My favorite photo in the bunch, of course, is the only one I am in — featuring my finger puns pew-pewing the Buffalo chapter president (#26 in the set).

If you are afraid you missed out on all the fun, you can verify that you did just by checking out the #TacoVinoII hashtag on Twitter.

Credit for this year's event goes to Erin Collins for organizing it and pulling it together, Nicole Schuman, Rachel Gottlieb and Jeremy Juhasz for manning the registration table and generally pimping the club, Kate Wolcott for the updated logo and signage, Ashlei Jachimowicz for on-site tweeting responsibilities, and Anthony Rizzo, who worked the crowd to sell raffle tickets.

Somewhat related —no Foursquare venue was created for TacoVino II, primarily because both Just Vino and Lloyd Taco Truck have their own venues on Foursquare. However, when you have a crowd of social media professionals and hobbyists, it's just a matter of time before one of them creates the venue for you. In this case the "matter of time" was about half an hour.

Previous Events

• Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVino, December 30, 2010.
• Twitter best practices panel, October 28, 2011.
• Social Media Day 2011 in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2011.
• Buffalo Launches Social Media Club Chapter, September 23, 2010.
• Event Profile: #smdayBUF & #smdayBUF 2.0, August 12, 2010 (posted at City Love Cloting).
• Social Media Day in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2010.

Thanksgiving, Social Media and Tech Support

Does this Foursquare map of holiday travel look like a turkey to anyone but me?

Three years ago I hosted Thanksgiving at my house, tweeting photos of the bird and small brush fire. Two years ago I wrote a post Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media and then wrapped my car around a lamppost instead of enjoying it. Last year I ran with the topic again and wrote Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux, had a lovely meal without crashing, and mourned the coming doom of my favorite photo sharing site.

This year people are trying to make it different, and I don't know that I like all of the suggestions.

My not-so-local grocery store is using social media to help people who might be in a bind, offering to help folks who tweet it with the #Turkey911 hashtag, something that is happening across the country. Having quick access to someone who can help you is far better than calling the real 911, and is something that we just couldn't do very easily a few years ago. At least not without calling the one family member that maybe you don't want to tell that you are struggling.

Wait, what's that typeface? You want to be taken seriously?

Much as I'd like to talk about the typeface used in the photo I lovingly stole from the Atlantic article, Forget Shopping, Friday Is Update Your Parents' Browser Day!, I'm not going to. Instead I am going to marvel in awe at the suggestion that younglings sneak off to their parents' computers (insert grandparents, aunts and uncles, elder host, etc.) and fiddle with them. The article at least counsels the intended saviors (but instead unwitting harbingers of doom) not to move their parents to a new browser, but to at least try to keep them using what they are used to. There are two key problems with this:

1. The browser will work differently, whether within the UI or just from how pages look;
2. Some machines just can't be upgraded without slowing them or upgrading them;
3. Most IE6 offenders (who I suspect the article is truly targeting) are corporate users who can't change it (and aren't hosting you in their office).

Those first two will result in needless frustration on the part of your parents (elders) and deserved tech support hassle for you.

Gizmodo took this creepy photo from True American Dog.

For much of my family they only know that I "work with computers." While it is somewhat accurate (although nearly everyone works with computers nowadays), to them it means I can fix them along with any other electronic device ever invented. Since I tend not to wear my "No, I will not fix your computer" T-shirt to more formal events, I am often assaulted with the kind of help desk questions that make 11-year-olds cringe.

Gizmodo feels my pain and is trying to help with its article How to Keep Thanksgiving From Being a Family Tech Trainwreck. Though the article attempts to keep your hassle to a minimum, it also recommends you upgrade, nay, crossgrade your parents to a whole new browser. Don't be a twit, you'll get calls forever. Otherwise the article offers good advice — answer their questions for them, not for you. Pushing your parents to some new bleeding edge tech is just more hassle for you in the long run. Pay attention to what tech they complain about (is the TV remote to complicated? do they struggle with the computer set-up at their job?) and steer clear of creating an analogous situation.

If you really want to help, make notes of everything you do and pass them down to your children. Then when you are struggling with new technologies in your old age, you can justify your smugness at how new technology has it all wrong and your children can justify their pity for you.

MOAR!

Now go relax. Read The Oatmeal's comic on Thanksgiving as a Kid vs. as an Adult. Prepare for where you'll site using College Humor's Thanksgiving Seating Chart. Take this Map of Thanksgiving Dinner to plan your assault on Crudités Dam. Go over to the Opera site (the folks who make the browser, not the faster-than-light neutrino source) and weigh in on whether or not the lucky bird should live. In short, disregard your family and stare at your computer/phone all day, just like the moody teen we all truly are.

Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVino

Last night the local Social Media Club chapter here in Buffalo put on the event TacoVino, a wine tasting paired with a local taco truck who has social media to thank for some of its success. City Wine Merchant opened its doors, and bottles of wine, while Lloyd Taco Truck made a special menu of duck tacos along with its regular fare.

As you look at the photos below, please keep in mind I got there a little early to take photos before the crowd arrived, that's why they may seem a little empty. I wanted to spend my time there being social, not playing photographer. After all, that was kind of the point of the event.

The event had to be capped at 50 people owing to the size of the venue, making for a smaller crowd than previous events, but it also set the tone for conversations to flow more easily and people to connect with familiar faces from previous events. Unlike those previous events where the Tweet wall garnered a fair amount of attention, probably owing to the novelty, the two tweet walls set up for this event were largely ignored by the crowd in favor of human-to-human interaction. Given the social nature of the medium, I think that's a good sign as opposed to a silent room of 50 people with only the sound of thumbs on phone displays. Regardles, the #TacoVino hash tag saw a fair amount of activity throughout the night.

I am always a little surprised when people comment to me that they not only see my food tweets, but often look at the photos of that food. Moreso when those people represent some of the larger local companies who have established a social media presence. Of course, I was obligated to post some photos of the food. Mostly to make those who didn't register in time a little jealous for what they were missing.

Credit to pulling off the event goes to the SMCBuffalo president and vice president, Nicole Schuman (@Buffalogal) and Frank Gullo (@frankgullo); Kate Wolcott (@k8creative) for the creative; Susan Cope (@susanlynncope) and Terri Swiatek (@TerriSwiatek) for event planning help; and City Wine Merchant (@ericbuffalo) and Lloyd Taco Truck (@whereslloyd) for venue, wine and food.

Given the great press the Buffalo chapter of Social Media Club recently garnered (Social Media Club Puts Buffalo on Whole New Map), I hope we can pull together more of these events and help show the other chapters, and social media types, just how strong that community is here in Buffalo.

Previous Events

• Buffalo Launches Social Media Club Chapter, September 23, 2010.
• Event Profile: #smdayBUF & #smdayBUF 2.0, August 12, 2010 (posted at City Love Cloting).
• Social Media Day in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2010.

Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux

I finally get to eat.

Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite.

In addition to a free meal, my family also got to experience some of the potential of social media in the form of the Brightkite wall, which was a constant stream of posts and photos from Thanksgiving meals across the country. Amazingly, they sat transfixed as it scrolled across my TV and they got a kick out of seeing a slice of everyone else's holiday.

Watching the Brightkite wall, waiting for guests.

Last year I wrote up a blog post, Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media, that detailed my previous year's experience and it was picked up by Brightkite on their blog: We are thankful for.... They were even kind enough to provide a link to a Brightkite wall with some search terms already selected (Brightkite only). That was back when Brightkite was still enjoying a fair amount of photo postings and had not been thoroughly overrun with spammers.

Mashable, the site for all things social media related, posted an article titled HOW TO: Plan the Perfect Thanksgiving With the Help of Social Media (although the title tag says "social web"). The article, however, has little to do with social media and instead talks about web sites focused on helping you prepare meals, travel, and generally survive the holiday chaos.

If you prefer the idea of a wall showing all the latest Thanksgiving tweets, many Twitter tools allow you to follow specific terms and hashtags, meaning you can build your own if you already have one of those tools. If you want something a little more interesting, the Brighkite wall still works and allows you to aggregate tweets in addition to posts from Brightkite. TwitterFall is another projection-friendly (or TV-screen-friendly) option for viewing tweets in a cascade down your screen. There will be more noise (spam) on it than two years ago, but it's at least a way to see live posts come through. Sadly, there is no way to aggregate all the photos that make it to Gowalla, the various Twitter image services, Facebook, and so on. But then, it's probably better to spend time with the family anyway.

I'm resisting the urge to turn this into a post about the TSA pat-down policies and the opt-out day that many are calling for on the web that coincides with the start of holiday travel, but if you want to cash in on the chaos via a new Foursquare badge, then you may just need to check in to an airport some time over the next couple days. We'll see if I get it when I do an airport run shortly...

Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media

A lot can be said about the value of social media, with arguments for real business value or ways to stay connected with friends and family or even that most of it is just egocentric drivel. As one of the purveyors of egocentric drivel in my Twitter stream, I can understand that it's not for everybody. I did find a way to garner at least some faint interest in naysayers, however.

Last year I hosted Thanksgiving dinner at my pocket-sized house and practically counter-free kitchen for a dozen people. Since I had been in the kitchen almost non-stop since the prior afternoon I wasn't in much of a position to entertain my guests, but I did have something they found fascinating. I had just discovered the Brightkite Wall.

For those who don't know, Brightkite is a microblogging service, like Twitter, that also has built-in support for photos and geolocation, allowing you to "check in" to a location and post messages and images about the place (or event, etc.). It predates Foursquare, but does not use the game model at all and allows you to check in from anywhere in the world, not a restricted list of pre-defined cities.

Watching the Brightkite wall, waiting for guests.

The Brightkite Wall essentially turns your display into a simple electronic billboard, showing a stream of posts (text and images) as they come through the service. Last year I fed this directly to my television and let my family watch people comment and post photos throughout the day, watching shot after shot of peoples' meals, kitchens, families, turkey failures, plate mishaps, and comments about naps. It seemed a little voyeuristic, but it was also a great way to experience Thanksgiving across the country as a whole, feeling some sort of connection with people I've never met. We watched meals ebb and flow with the timezones, people try to juggle more than one stop, and many missives about things for which people were thankful (and more than a few for what they were not thankful). It became quite an interactive affair in my house as everyone commented on their favorite images or updates and as they pressed me to post photos of our meal.

Some guests before dinner.

I finally get to eat.

This year I am not hosting, but I am bringing my laptop so, just in case anyone remembers, we can fire it up and watch this little slice of Americana play itself out throughout the day.

If you want to try this yourself, I have some configuration suggestions. First of all, you don't have to have a Brightkite account to use the wall. I recommend creating a Universe Stream instead of limiting it to one geographic area, one person, or one search term. Make sure you disable check-ins. You don't need to see that some guy named Ed checked in at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, you just want to see the comments and photos. If you want to see Twitter posts, you can enter Twitter search terms. These will help filter the tweets that get folded into the stream. You may need to adjust settings when you do it — when I ran this last year I didn't worry about Twitter spam or vulgarities.

Click for a full-size view of the configuration screen.

This little experiment made it much easier to explain what social media is and how it works, and I think it made for a richer Thanksgiving. I do recommend a big enough display that people can see from across the room, since nobody who's overeaten on Thanksgiving wants to be crowded by others around a laptop.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving and I look forward to your Brighkite posts (and tweets).