About Blacktelephone
Accessibility Calling™! We are a confederation of Web accessibility experts blogging away on our favorite subject. We all agree: accessibility is the bomb! Some of us have different needs. Some of us have family members with different needs or just know that 15 to 20 percent of the population has ability differences. Whatever. We all know that Web accessibility is the Right Thing™. You must join us for rollicking good, old time, Section 508 thumping discussions about what’s right and wrong and left and right about Web accessibility.
Oh, you might want to know: Blacktelephone… what’s up with that? Well here goes. In the early 1970’s, before personal computers, before fax machines, even before VHS(!), there was film criticism. Film criticism is different than today’s “movie reviews.” Today’s movie reviews are actually turned out by lightly trained chimps. Take publicity email from movie company, mash banana on desk, cut and paste, and voila, you’ve just revealed the entire plot in minute detail and, most importantly, talked about the opening weekend box office take. Do the chimp grin and a couple of somersaults around the cubicle! High five!
This is not film criticism! Film criticism was deep, penetrating, thoughtful, and is hardly practiced anywhere at all today except perhaps in “Cahiers du Cinema.” There was a school of film criticism way back then that went like this: there are black telephone movies, and there are white telephone movies. Black telephone movies had black telephones in them, and white telephone movies… well, you get the drift. Black telephone movies: Public Enemy, Open City, Bicycle Thief. White telephone movies: Dinner at Eight, Gigi, anything with Doris Day… even when Ms. Day was talking on an avocado-green Princess Phone. We’re not making this stuff up, folks, it’s a fact. Telefoni bianchi, as they were known in Italy, was a sub-genre, one in which upper middle class virtues were gently mocked. Sort of a self-referential process. Deep but entertaining.
So what does black telephone cinema have to do with accessibility? Black telephone movies were gritty and real, full of angst and sturm und drang, full of the essence of life. For people with ability differences, accessibility is a gritty and real need, and there is angst and sturm und drang without it. Meanwhile, the essence of life is squandered in trying to make sense of nested tables, missing alternate text, and incomprehensible “objects” (like Flash) that fly by mysteriously. Imagine that you have low vision and that you want to buy something on Target.com. Fugheddaboudit! There are those in the disability rights community who say they don’t need no steenking accessibility, they’ll get along just fine without it, but we maintain that we must use standards and accessibility to tunnel out of the mess that the Web is in now towards their position. If we meet up halfway, it’ll be wonderful.