So today I do my penance, writing for you, and for The Spirit World. I’m also doing penance in that the 26 pounds of stuff I acquired at tales is not here with me. I schlepped it to FedEx on Saturday for shipment home. I put the box on the slow boat, so it will be here Friday. I do have recordings and pictures from Tales, and a few books I bought. I should be able to make something of that.

Oh, among the topics I’m planning to write about are these: differences between tech and cocktail conferences/media, 21st century gin and the passionate people who talk about it, absinthe then and now, and mixer appreciation. I also picked a couple of product announcements that need writing up, and some iPhone apps that will find their way onto App Store Pundit over the next few episodes.

I’ll be filing posts for The Spirit World, as well as offering observations and photos right here. So watch this space.

Chuck Joiner graciously invited me to join him on MacVoices for a little explainer on iPhone 3GS accessibility. It was a lot of fun, and I felt like we covered the bases pretty well. I also had the pleasure of joining Josh and Shane on The Maccast for a discussion of similar subjects, with some extra history and Mac accessibility perspective.

Here are my own collected contributions to the iPhone 3GS discussion. I explained and demo’d VoiceOver, zoom, and black on white for the App Store Pundit audience, and wrote here and here about the new iPhone before I had even seen it. Adam refers fairly often in our Maccast conversation to the first of these posts.

The iPod Touch, my beloved iPhone substitute, was released, and updated to version 2.0 in conjunction with other iPod announcements, not during iPhone launches. So even if we are to see a hardware-updated iPod Touch, it will most likely be a few months. This makes me sad, but I’m going to check out the iPhone 3.0 software update; hoping against hope that some accessibility features have found their way in there. I’m guessing they will not.

Checked out iPhone service pricing from AT&T. Having extended our existing phone contracts earlier this year when we replaced dead phones, switching would be an expensive proposition for me. I need someone to offer me a spectacular job, the perks of which include an iPhone. You know where to find me.

And since I’ve been paying more attention, I’m noticing the AT&T customer grumbling a lot more lately. When Bay Area tech pundits grumble, I tune them out, because I realize that they realize that their voices are loud and influential. It tends to make them sound whiny. But AT&T has network issues in many places. Friends in Atlanta have major issues. If I do jump to the iPhone, I’ll be borrowing one, and evaluating coverage in and around my home.

The fact remains that buying an iPhone, especially when paired with expensive, shoddy AT&T service, goes against a firmly held principle of mine. When you buy a consumer product, don’t allow yourself to become a sucker; so dependent upon overpriced, poor service, or exclusive terms that you cannot escape. I’m not sure how I’ll resolve that one for myself.

And rejoicing was heard in the land?

We’ll see what we’ll see.

The new phone, debuted at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, and due for release on June 19, includes a version of Apple’s VoicOver, the screen reader built into Mac OS X. Since we learned at its launch two years ago that the iPhone is an OS X device, lots of accessibility advocates, including me, have suggested that lighting up VoiceOver features in the phone was obviously doable. Now it’s happened.

Since I haven’t seen the phone, I can only report what Apple has told us about 3G S accessibility, and pose some questions. I’ll get the suspense over with right now, and tell you that after two years of resisting both the phone’s monthly cost, and lack of accessibility, I’m pretty eager to get one.

First off, let’s get our definitions straight. The iPhone 3G S will become available almost simultaneously with iPhone 3.0, a software release that works on both the new phone and existing iPhones and iPod Touch devices. VoiceOver, and another new feature with accessibility implications, Voice Control, require the iPhone 3G S. Though I haven’t confirmed this with Apple, I’m making an educated guess that the new features require the faster processor in the iPhone 3G S. iPhone 3.0, a free update for existing iPhone owners, and $9.95 for iPod Touch, does not appear to include specific accessibility enhancements. Apple has not announced any new iPod Touch hardware, so you’ll need to buy a phone to get VoiceOver and Voice Control.

Apple’s iPhone vision accessibility page touts VoiceOver as the same screen reader available in its Mac OS X computers. The accessibility toolbox also includes a couple of other options that are familiar to OS X users; zoom and white on black.

Apple uses the term “gesture” to refer to the many ways in which you tap, double-tap, drag, or pinch to use the touch screen. This nomenclature may not be familiar to blind users, for whom a tactile keyboard is the usual means of interacting with a screen reader. With VoiceOver turned on, the iPhone, whose glass screen is completely devoid of tactile reference points, save a button at the bottom, will speak the names of items over which a finger passes. Open the item with a double-tap, or use other gestures to manipulate it. Another detail for the uninitiated visually impaired user; the iPhone’s home screen does not contain the usual vertical menu of functions, but a grid with square icons representing your applications. Apple’s description touts contextual information provided in VoiceOver, and the freeform ability to interact with the screen reader. In a computer environment, screen readers deliver information in a specific order, as set out by navigation commands and arrow keys. On the iPhone, you can drag your finger to another part of the screen, getting audio feedback as you go. Speech rates and voices are customaizable. The device will even duck other audio, such as iTunes music, when VoiceOver is speaking

Like the innovative pinch gesture that makes it possible to zoom into and out of Web pages on an iPhone, the rotor, new in iPhone 3G S, appears to be an ingenious navigation aid that will make moving around, and keeping your place a lot easier for VoiceOver users. From Apple’s accessibility page: “Turning the rotor— by rotating two fingers on the screen as if you were turning an actual dial — changes the way VoiceOver moves through a document based on a setting you choose.For example, a flick up or down might move through text word by word. But when you choose the “character” setting, each time you flick up or down VoiceOver will move through the text character by character — perfect when you’re proofreading or editing text.”

The iPhone uses a virtual QWERTY keyboard. VoiceOver will speak text as you type it; letter by letter, or as you complete a word. It’s unclear to me how the software assists a blind user in finding virtual keys in the first place. That’s among the first features I’ll be testing.

VoiceOver speaks 21 languages, and Apple says you can activate it without sighted assistance, along with your iPhone.

Let me mention a few non-VoiceOver accessibility upgrades. I make extensive use of what Apple calls “white on black” in Mac OS X. I call it “reverse video”, but that seemed to confuse some of my Twitter followers yesterday. This feature inverts your screen, so that text is light and the video background is dark. This essential (to me) feature is part of iPhone 3G S, along with more flexibility in controlling font sizes, and zoom that is available outside Safari. On a Mac, reverse video can be toggled on and off with a keyboard shortcut (control-option-command-8, if you want to see what it looks like). I hope the iPhone also provides a quick toggle.

There is one major caveat about VoiceOver, and accessibility in general. While Apple has made these tools available, and implemented them in applications it ships with the iPhone, there is no guarantee that app developers will fully support accessibility. An app could, for example, be completely invisible to VoiceOver, or choose not to allow you to adjust its font size. In most cases, small developers will make these choices either because they simply don’t realize that they have visually impaired customers, or because they believe that the time required to implement accessibility is prohibitive. It’s going to be up to iPhone users and potential iPhone users to educate developers. I’m hoping to talk to a few, and learn how much work it is to implement Apple’s new goodies. While advocacy is important, it’s also a good idea to understand what challenges a developer faces in making an app accessible. I’ll let you know what I learn, though it’s safe to say that since the iPhone 3G S has just been announced, learning the ins and outs will take a little while. I intend to be persistent, but patient. And rest assured that each and every app reviewed on my App Store Pundit podcast will be evaluated based on its accessibility.

They are, in a very real sense, also selling themselves. Tools like podcasting, Twitter, Facebook, fan art and the like are the grassiest of grass roots, and the most personal of mass media. There can be no cooler use for what has come to be called social media. Aside from posting links to words, audio, video an illustration, or engaging in conversation about their work, authors have come up with clever ways to promote wheat they’re doing to wider audiences. From cross-promotion with other content-makers to character naming rights, a lot of these methods are both free and engaging to their fan communities. And because book promotion is so often self-promotion, many authors bring the audience along when they have success; announcing book deals, reprints of past works, and even movie options. These events are not merely a press release for the author, but a cause for celebration in their fandoms and communities of social media followers. In this way, the reader’s early faith in an author is vindicated, and fans are more likely to spread the word far beyond their own social media networks that they know someone who as written a great book. And it’s available at a bookstore, web site or multiplex near you!

In the past few months, though, I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed by these homegrown publicity machines. If you’re already a part of a community where authors “work the room” a lot, you will have read or heard their messages and their success stories many times over. You’ll know not only that book x has been added to Amazon’s catalog, but that it’s improved in sales rank by 500 places in the past day. And the author’s success will be amplified again and a gain by friends sending “congrats” via Twitter and Facebook. Great stuff for the author, but grounds for me to say “enough already” even if I’m a supportive fan.

The challenge is for the author: how much is too much, and how can you make that determination in a world where the milestones you achieve are magnified many times over by your community of friends and fans? I’ve written a lot of books myself, and I don’t mind telling you that I would have LOVED to have access to social media tools when I published them between 1997 and 2005. But the point at which you begin overloading your fans, tempting them to unfollow you, and making it hard for them to feel like hitting that Retweet button, is a place you don’t want to be.

I tracked the story on Twitter, where I follow a local TV station and two newspapers. But I wasn’t able to put the timeline together until late in the day when I read a full account, posted on the TV station’s Web site. Aside from the fact that 140 character bursts aren’t much good when you’re trying to take a comprehensive view of multi-dimensional stories, it was also striking that this story, a crime story that took place in a rough neighborhood, and that featured the kind of violence that might affect people’s real lives, was not chronicled by on-site observers. No hashtags popped up. No grainy cell phone video appeared on uStream or blip.tv. In short, the Twitterati, so capable when it comes to covering movie openings, tech conferences and even the occasional airline delay, was utterly silent.

The next time you’re tempted to dance on the graves of newspapers, or even television stations with local news operations, ask yourself whether the work of your police department and those with whom they interact is newsworthy. And if it is, which iPhone-toting Twitterers will turn covering the police beat into a volunteer project or a business model.

Oh, and just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that social media geeks need to cover the police beat. That might not be the highest and best use of their skills. Rather, I’m saying that the police beat, along with a whole lot of other unsexy but essential beats, are best covered by professional journalists who don’t use words like “long tail” and “niche marketing”. We need them.