Life was good, and there I was humming along with my new Microsoft Office 2008 for the MAC… having a grand ole time inserting the new MACish clip art into a new artsy PowerPoint template. Things were going great, and I was actually thinking about praising Microsoft for a creating decent product for a change.

Then this weekend it hit me. There is no option to add alternate text for images in Microsoft Word 2008. What the hell? Do they expect that MAC people are all artsy-fartsy types who don’t care about making accessible technology and only care about making pretty pictures? I am teaching a course on Accessible Electronic & Information Technologies, and Microsoft is forcing me to revert back to my old, decrepit PC in order to make accessible Word documents.

Microsoft Word 2008: Good for Artsy-fartsy shit / bad for Accessible technology development

I cannot believe this negligent oversight that has occurred. Is technology moving backwards? Microsoft Office 2007 for PC has these accessibility options, but a year later they can’t get it right for another OS? I feel like they rushed the development of this software to push it out the door. I feel cheated. Not only is Microsoft cheating me and other accessible technology developers, but they are also cheating the disabled users utilize the inaccessible documents that are created by this substandard product.

E3 … Sausage Fest? (Image © Jens Jäpel)

I experienced the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles this year. Wading through geeks and LA Lakers fans on my walk to the convention center, I anticipated seeing what all this hype was about. In proper nerd fashion, the Ecto 1 Ghostbusters car greeted me at the door.

At first glance this expo was a total sausage fest—dudes everywhere. What else did I expect? This was a gaming convention. Pulsating electronic music radiated from the center stage where the dj’s took the spotlight and set the club-like mood for the event. The space was primarily split between white and black, good and evil, Nintendo and Sony PSP. I wandered the floor aimlessly, soaking everything in.

Then I found an advertisement targeted toward members of club X-chromosome: “Girlz PLAY Too!” The new handheld device, Sony PSP Go, will come in lavender for the ladies. (I have to say that I was impressed to see this color as opposed to predictable pink.) From that point on, my mission of the day was to document all things related to “girl gaming.”

From Hello Kitty DS bags to iCarly Wii-mote skins and gear, I was excited to see the increased target marketing toward girl gamers ages 4 and up. Not only will the little chicks be saved from boring navy blue or maroon game accessories, they will also gain the sense of inclusiveness in the gaming world.

When I was a girl, games did not interest me in the slightest. Games were for boys, or tomboys. I was never one to follow such typical, society-driven notions, but games in the 80’s were mostly violent war games, silly elf escapades or car racing. When my neighborhood guy friend and I would play Nintendo, I could fight in Mike Tyson punchout for a few rounds, but then I’d lose interest. I would never attain the motor skills or the thumb blisters that my male counterparts did. My tomgirl friend, however, would hit the arcade for hours, blowing every last dime she had while I shopped for cheap costume jewelry at the store across the mall hallway.

Now girly-girls have the opportunity to become excited about games, too. Fuzzy online pets like Webkins are all the rage these days with tweens. The Sony PSP Go has a new game called Petz Dog Family. This Webkinz-like game is portable and can provide entertainment to girls even when they’re offline. Another PSP Go game on display was the G-Force game, which looks like some good guinea pig action-fighting fun. The cute little critters wiggle around like they would in real, Rodentia life.

The iCarly game accessories by I-Concepts feature images of the characters on the popular Nickelodeon TV series. Carly is the teen star of her own web show, and tween girls idolize her and her friends. Girls are also drawn to the iCarly website where they evitably learn more about technology and how it relates to their world through the interfaces of games, blogs and other interactive utilities. To make the girls go crazy this fall, Nickelodeon has teamed with Activision to produce an iCarly video game for the DS and the Wii.

Many girl-gaming skeptics feel that these girly-accessories and games feed the stereotype of what it means to be feminine. I tend to disagree. Each girl explores life, trying on this hat or that, to find her own idea of what it means to be a female. Without these games that offer “girl content,” many girls would still be left behind in the analog world.

It is my hope that girls in gaming will lead to increase numbers of women in technology careers. If and when I return to E3 in the future, I trust that the attendees will include a higher number of women, disrupting the long history of male dominated computer culture.

What the Flock? Flock is a “social web browser” designed to display the user’s social interaction for several different social media applications, like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Instead of flipping back and forth between browser tabs favorite social media apps, the user can take quick glances to see what’s going on in his/her online social world.

Upon installing Flock, I eagerly logged into all of my choice social apps to see how they would integrate into the browser. Twitter transitioned smoothly; however, the Flock/Twitter sidebar does not display the most recent posts nor does it order the posts chronologically. I would prefer to see a mirror image to the Twitter site; the tweets are hideously out of date. One sweet thing that the Flock/Twitter sidebar DOES do is “post a link” from the page that you are visiting on the browser side. By selecting “post a link,” the link is automatically inserted into your next tweet–no copy/pasting links into Twitter posts anymore.

Flickr seems to integrate nicely. The left sidebar has handy tools to upload new photos, while a top bar, or media stream, appears with a filmstrip of photos when “my media” is selected. I could get used to this.

Overall, the Flock browser is a great idea, especially for socialites and shutterbugs. I’ll probably remain a Firefox luddite for now since its web developer add-ons are so difficult to pry away from my W3C /508 fingers.