Let’s introduce you to
Color By Function. The vision of Color By Function is that you color the
controls in you app by function and not or not only by control type or the
place that makes the layout most beautiful.
Specifying functions by category
First you have to separate
functions of an application. You need to make categories of functions.
There can be similar tasks in each category.
Here an examples:
Category ‘navigate to another page’. Different
tasks in this category:
– Navigate to Settings Page.
– Navigate to About Page
Our Main categories
We have currently
following categories:
We have button’s that read-aloud some text. This is called text-to-speech. (Yellow)
We have buttons or other controls that navigate within a dataset. In fact you change the content of some controls but you stay in the same view. (Dark Gray)
We have buttons or other controls that navigate you to another view/page in the application. (Blue)
At this time I made
apps with 3 these main categories. If I need an application with another main
control function I have to link another color.
Multiple app approach
It’s also important if
you plan to develop different apps for people with disabilities always make the
same color by function color choices.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway. It was my first conference this Fall. And I know.. Officially Fall start next Monday but for me, last week Fall is kicked-off for me. This Fall I do a lot of conferences as a speaker and at least one conference as an attendee.
So let’s talk Java?
Most of you know that I am a Microsoft MVP and developing on the Microsoft stack (in .NET and Azure). Right! I am still the same Dennie, the same Microsoft MVP and developer on the Microsoft stack. But I really want a big reach on accessibility and quality of life for people with intellectual disabilities and / or autism. At JavaZone I presented a session about autism and communication.
And what for session? My first co-talk with my lovely mom, Ivette Marchand. We have found ways for communicating about work, limits and borders. This starts from my autism and is helpful for a lot of people.
Although even as a .NET developer I visited some talks that are really helpful. Here below I do a little series “What does a .Net developer at a Java conference?” As you will see I learned lot!
What does a .Net developer at a Java
Conference:
I went to the psychologist!
What’s better to start the conference with a visit to the psychologist? Rosanne Joosten is a psychologist that transformed into a programmer. Rosanne talked about the link between how developers write code and their personality. Some parts were really confronting…
I learned about Web Assembly
Web assembly is a
project started form the browser companies. Web assembly is a way for native
code in the browser. Blazor, Microsoft’s implementation of Web Assembly was
also covered, of course this was between the other Web Assembly solutions.
Accessibility!
And yes, there were sessions about accessibility! And this makes me happy! I saw 2 refreshing talks. I like accessibility talks with people with disabilities involved as a presenter. Tom is a person who’s blind. He was surrounded with 2 other speakers (Lotte and Tor-Martin). If I see how a blind person is learning other people how to make the web accessible then I shiver from respect! I saw interesting Aria ideas and other refreshing ideas for navigation.
Another session about accessibility was on the 2nd day from Kamilla. Kamilla did a lighting talk about accessibility. I loved that she was including a variety of disabilities and not just the most spoken ones!
I learned to hack a cat
Nial Merrigan is also a Microsoft MVP, he’s a specialist into security. He presented a cross code /cross platform introduction into security. Where do you need to be aware off? He gave us insights beyond traditional attack vendors. Sometimes the talk was scary, sometimes it was laughing out loud! I like this kind of talks!
I went on a survival
Patricia Aas presented “Survival Tips For Women in Tech”. This talk was my opportunity to go to a talk together with my mom. A no – code talk about woman! As an inclusive developer I like to go to a lot of talks about diversity and inclusion in the broad scene. This talk showed me how difficult it can be for women in tech as a minority. The talk opened my eyes but I saw also equal situations as for me as a person with autism in tech. The way Patricia introduced this talk, and why she needs this introduction is very equal to my intros. I love the openness how she talked about a lot of topics in being different to “white man between 30 – 50 in Tech”!
And then.. Finally.. Our talk!
I presented “How do I help my son?” the inaugural of my mom! Our first co- talk! We had a blast and ended with a standing ovation! I loved it!
In this talk I was
very open about my past, why I am a volunteer in tech? We also talked a lot
about the fact that I was bullied a lot in the past. How bullying, educational
choices and a hard period in a factory lead to a volunteering job in tech?
People love this
openness and it feels more comfortable to talk about bullying, maybe just a bit
more comfortable because my mom is on my side. Or not? In the past talks I
presented a few talks about autism, every time I was also about at lot of
things. But being bullied is not always a topic in my talk. With my mom on my
side it’s more easy!
So folks, my magic fall is started, up to the next one!
At this time many
people around the world are using apps, computers and smartphones. Most of this
people can do a lot of interesting stuff with this modern communication.
This modern communication made many people their life easier. So I going go tell you a story to show how modern and mobile technology helped our family and myself.
“We are 1995, I was a child and went on vacation with my parents to a family resort in my own country. There were business people and just working- life families. I was in the scene of a normal life family, my dad was working in the metal industry and my mom was selling pizza’s at a market. We walked to the swimming pool and we saw a business man calling with a mobile cell phone. We found it funny, my dad was laughing out loud with the ‘mobile phone’ and in our family we made a role – playing – theater about calling with mobile phones.
4 Years later, my parents had a mobile phone. 7 Year later I had a mobile phone. After a while I switched do a PDA. Internet enabled device. And since quite long time we all have an smartphone, and are continuously connected to the outer world. I even have a Twitter account and via digital media I worked myself into a worldwide well known conference speaker.”
Dennie Declercq
Without this technology my speaker life wasn’t there. I have a lot of QoL (Quality of Life) improvements due to this modern technology.
So let me make the
link through people with disabilities. Not all the people with disabilities
have a smartphone yet. I have proven that it’s possible to make special-made
apps that are user friendly for people who can’t read or have difficulties with
most of the apps in Market Place / App Store.
Shouldn’t it be nice
if we can open up the world also for those people. If we can not only make the
impossible possible for people without disabilities, but also for people with
disabilities?
This is the point were “Inclusion” comes in. People with disabilities (PWD) are living the same life as people without disabilities. All people together have a good life and a good QoL. This is inclusion this is my pride!
How do you to this?
Well on this http://accessibledreams.home.blog I post a lot of blog about accessible
software. I even share my speaker schedule. I am going to do a lot of blog
posts ant talks about accessible software.
To give you a sneak
preview: I talk a lot about Simplify the Layout, Color By
Function and Text To Speech. More about this terms in
following posts.
Some people prefer a dark color scheme, some people prefer a light color scheme. And some people are just weird (people just like me). More and more Microsoft and third party software provides the option to have a dark color mode and a light color mode. As I teased in the 2nd sentence: some people are just weird (like me), I point that fact due to my autism that of course is also a disability. Most of the time I prefer the color scheme that is the basic and first color scheme of the software application. There is a special part in my brain telling me that this is the preferred layout- scheme by the developer team. For me it sounds irreligious to change this color scheme. It can take weeks or months of worrying if I should switch the color scheme. Of course in this timespan I have to learn myself that the developer team wanted to give me the choice, otherwise the option wouldn’t be in the product.
Since I am working in
accessibility I talk to a lot of people with disabilities about their preferred
color scheme. Most of the people with autism prefer a dark color scheme and
most of the people with learning disabilities (in the past I used the term
intellectual disabilities) prefer the light color scheme.
People with autism are telling me that the dark color scheme limits incentives from the outer world. incentives from the outer world can hurt people with autism. In this example it’s a visual incentive and it can hurt the eyes of the person. Some people with autism really feel physical pain due to the incentives.
I also hear that the
dark color scheme is easier for the mind. Some people have headache with bright
screen light and with a dark color scheme you limit the screen light.
If I talk about people with learning disabilities the situation is reversed. Most of the users with learning disabilities prefer a light color scheme. This is because it’s the color scheme as closest to the ‘normal-paper-analog-world’. The more similarities between the analog paper world and the digital world, the easier it seems to be for this people.
Let’s talk about my preferred color scheme. Most of the time I prefer a light color scheme. In the beginning of this post I talked about the irreligious fact to change the color scheme. I changed the color scheme for some applications: Visual Studio Code, and Microsoft Learn.
Visual Studio Code has as default the dark color scheme I changed it after a long time of worrying to the light color scheme. I made this choice for 2 reasons:
1st of all I prefer the light color scheme.
2nd for me it more aligns to the Microsoft Visual Studio experience
The other application is Microsoft Learn, here I changed to dark mode.
Let’s analyze myself why I prefer the Dark Mode for Microsoft Learn. For me it is first of all a bigger separation between the learning theory and my developing environment.
2nd It aligns more to PluralSight, the learning platform I used in my years as developer before. My autistic brain really links the first time that I use a product or a technology to further uses of this technologies and (competing) variations of the technology.
So that were my insights in Color Schemes! Feel free to share your experiences!
On Thursday 1st of August at 6 PM
I was shivering. I got a beautiful mail that I became an MVP Developer
Technologies.
A Microsoft MVP or Most Valuable Professional
is an award for your work in the community. Community work is by example:
running a user group, speaking at conferences, contributing to OSS and a few
more.
Most of the MVP’s have besides their MVP
status work as a paid job. For me being an MVP without a paid job is a real
honor for me. I know that I am with the little few. I promise to take my
responsibility for the community.
And want to thank you all. All of you
attended sessions from me at conferences or Meetups. Organizers of conferences
and meetups who gave me the chance to speak to their audience. Without the
opportunity to talk at a lot of conferences and meetups last year I wouldn’t be
an MVP.
I plan to speak a lot more conferences in the
next year (I mean from September until July). I hope to surprise you with new
topics within my expertise. I believe I can make a difference in Accessibility
and Diversity and Inclusion. But not only in these fields.
So I plan also a series of technical talks
where I do discuss technologies that I use to make our (DDSoft) ‘s accessible
software. I want to reach people that aren’t in the scope of accessibility but
that will benefit from my product/technology knowledge.
And I have a little surprise: in one of the coming blog posts, I do an announcement…
So as I make apps for people with
disabilities and my biggest user base at this time are people with intellectual
disabilities in Belgium means that an accessible and easy to digest UI is
really important on Android phones. Most of the people in this category live on
a fee and an iPhone is most of the times too expensive. But I have an iPhone
thanks to a beautiful sponsorship for our nonprofit from Rotary. So testing my
UI was in the past pretty difficult. Android emulators are mostly pretty slow,
even on a quite good laptop. So the time it takes to stop debugging, do some UI
changes and rebuild and reload on the emulator can take some time. Do we want
this?
I was choked from the 🔥🔄 announcement at the Xamarin Dev Summit. I wasn’t there in person but as a good Microsoft fan, I watch pretty much every live stream. Thanks to Maddy Leger I had the opportunity to go into the early access preview and in 1 week time, Hot Reload changed my life!
Adjusting little tweaks in UI, adjusting
bigger UI changes, it’s all in the speed of light. It’s pretty fast!
I can write hours about this, but maybe a video about me playing with 🔥🔄 will show you how easy you make an accessible UI:
Playing with 🔥🔄
What I am doing in
this recording:
-I add text to the
Emoji’s
-I change the text
color
-I change the
background color.
Here you have before and after:
So in less than 3 minutes, I made my application more accessible. Is this the end of this application? NO! It’s just a play around in 5 minutes. Before this recording, I’d played already with 🔥🔄 and I experimented with changing form a stack panel to a grid, and I played even with Shell and Visual! Hot Reload works pretty fast and fluid!
Thursday I
live-streamed a part of Xamarin Dev Summit in Houston. Honestly, I submitted a
proposal for some talks at this event. I wasn’t chosen. Pity but proposal
declines are a part of speaker’s life. You have to deal with it.
I saw the Keynote and
was very impressed about Hot Reload for
Xamarin.Forms, a really cool feature that will be in private preview very
soon. So I hope to be in the group of lucky ones for the preview. More official
Microsoft communication here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/xaml-hot-reload/.
I believe as a developer of accessible apps, where UI is very important this will be a major dev improvement for me. Testing as much little tweaks like back and foreground colors, sizes and font sizes of objects will be a very fluent job.
Since the keynote I felt big love, Xamarin Love. When I heard about the latest updates, I updated my Visual Studio 2019, some Android SDK’s and upgraded to the latest Xamarin.Forms 4.1.0.x and Xamarin Essentials 1.2.0. When all updates were ready (and this didn’t took much time!) I’ve started debugging my current project (DDGuard) and everything did run smoothly! This was like MAGIC!
On the night of 13th of July (CET +1) the 10x hype, or the 10x Engineer hype raised on Twitter! As some of you may know, I am not a fan of hypes. Or am I not? I don’t want to be a fan of hypes. But sometimes I am a fan of some hypes, and do participate in some hypes. Just to tease: I am planning to make a conference talk: “Mind the Hype”. This talk will be about the good, the bad and the ugly of hypes. If people are interested in this talk, please let me know!
So, let the
introduction behind, let’s talk about the I
am 10x, or the 10x Engineer hype!
Today I posted this tweet:
This tweet was based on the 10x engineer hype. I didn’t put in ‘engineer’ and I forgot the hashtag. Of course I didn’t forgot my own two hashtags. So I even could add: “I am too impulsive”. I see the Tweet and as fast as possible I want to make my own tweet without taking enough time to check if I added the correct hashtags or if I don’t have typo’s! If you see Tweets from me with typo’s it’s because I was too impulsive, a drawback of my autism.
But it’s not all negative. This tweet has a negative sound. But to be clear: autism also has a lot of advantages. So I could write:
Munich, Germany! Beside of USA, visiting Germany was for me a dream destination! Why? I like the German language and the ‘meat culture’. In June I had the opportunity to talk at Xamarin Expert Day in Munich, and.. I had a blast!
I start with the culture. Germany has as I said a ‘meat culture’ and a ‘beer culture’. For me, as a Belgian, maybe I say stupid things if I say: “I like the German beer culture.” Big glasses, beer gardens, and why don’t you combine your IL beers with some meat?
A German beer garden
Back on topic, Xamarin Expert Day! Start with the keynote! Jim Bennett – not a complete unknown Xamarin guy – was really rocking the stage! ‘Xamarin, past, present and future’ was his talk. It was a nice overview of the past, and the present. But the future was more teasing. Of course there are rules about “Microsoft’s’ internal kitchen” and MVP Summits. But for an autistic person, I was thinking the complete day about the future.. But I loved the talk and the energy!
Jim Bennett is rocking the stage!
Luce Carter gave a talk about Xamarin Shell, I really loved this concept and her explanation. I believe Xamarin Visual (a part of Shell) will help me for accessible apps!
Come Out Your Shell with Luce Carter
Ulrike and Sia made another Accessibility Talk, I liked their concepts. It’s nice that the field ‘accessibility’ is so big! In their talk ‘Beyond Accessibility’ I heard a lot of renewing concepts, really helpful concepts and this concepts fit all together with mine concepts. Nice that you can apply different ‘views’, ‘angles’ of accessibility to make the most accessible solution ever!
Beyond Accessibility Wtih Ulrike and Sia
Of course I had my talk, I presented for the first time “Improve People with disabilities’ lives with Xamarin.Essentials”. A talk how you can engage accessibility with API’s from Xamarin Essentials. I covered, Text To Speech, Settings, Device Info, App Info, Connectivity and a few more. Yes, all this API’s improve accessibility!
And my talk, spoke for the first time in a T-Shirt, a Xammagon T-Shirt 🙂
So I liked Munich and
I loved the German culture, Xamarin Expert Day Munich as a great conference
and I really had a blast and learned new
concepts!
By the end of 2018, I realized that 2019 will be the year of #7ThYearMagic, I invented this hashtag because I believed my life-dream was going to be reality.
Why was 2019 the era of #7ThYearMagic, there’ s no ‘7’ in 19? Well, well, in 2012, 7 years ago, I made the decision to give my programming talent as volunteer. If you are like me, quite spiritual, 7 is a magic number. It’s going to happen in 2019!
My life-dream was going to USA as speaker and visit the Microsoft Headquarters! But was this my only big dream? What if the dream is over? Last month ‘my dream’ finally happened! I visited Microsoft HQ in Redmond and spoke at my first US conference #ndcminnesota.
THE MICROSOFT REDMOND HEADQUARTERS
While I was living the dream, I noticed: “this is not the end, maybe just the beginning”. Do I have other dreams? Is it over? NO! I’d love to share my knowledge as public speaker. Traveling to tell the world to be inclusive for people with disabilities doesn’t end if I visited US Once!
The Missipi River St Paul
So proud to share next URI, my speaker site! It covers all my past and next talks. In this fall I have already 3 nice conferences! But my #7ThYearMagic dream doesn’t stop here!
Accessible Dreams 