Category: Accessibility

Kindle for PC, software that’s supposed to allow you to read the more than 360,000 books Amazon touts as being available for the Kindle is now available from the online retail giant. Disappointing, albeit not surprising, accessibility seems to be lacking.

 

Trying the application with JAWS,
Window-Eyes, NVDA and even Narrator produced nothing meaningful. JAWS was silent as I tabbed around beyond announcing a title of the opening screen telling me to register the software. Using any method of access there was nothing else perceivable to me from the application. Window-Eyes only announced “custom control” as I tabbed around. NVDA simply said “pane”. Narrator announced a few more window names when I did a full screen read with crl+shift+space but this was still of no meaningful value as tabbing or trying any other interaction still produced silence.

 

Hunting around on Amazon’s web site I found no mention of accessibility for the software. Again disappointing but not surprising I suppose.

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Working from home today I had an experience that is really a microcosm of today’s computing accessibility experiences. I’ve often thought I should take the time to do a kind of day in the life of accessibility as it were but given that I haven’t yet, 15 minutes or so will have to do. Given that I work for Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team, I’m going to toss in the disclaimer that these comments reflect my personal opinions.

I have a notebook computer that has some sort of a problem that crops up from time to time where some of the drivers necessary for speech and keyboard functionality do not load correctly at boot. I’m working with the manufacturer to understand the nature of the problem and get it fixed. When the problem happens it is pretty frustrating because it means I’m not able to use the machine until I find some sighted assistance. It is odd because if I boot the machine into Windows Safe Mode, sign in and then boot back into windows normally, everything works correctly. But booting into Safe mode and such requires sighted assistance.

Part of me finds the problem interesting in that solving the mysteries of computing like this is sometimes like being a detective tasked to solve a vexing puzzle. Still this afternoon my goal wasn’t to play riddle solver but rather to finish some work so I was a bit annoyed that the problem happened today.

I’m fortunate that I have a brother who’s often willing to answer questions or otherwise lend a hand for situations like this where he’s able. That said, assisting from 2,000 miles away isn’t the most practical thing when it requires looking at a physical computer screen.

But then again, we do live in the era of webcams, internet and what seems like 24X7 connectedness. So I figure I’ll dust off this old webcam I received when I signed up for my first high speed DSL account many years ago. I’ve used it with success for situations like this before.

Bummer dude, plugging the camera into another machine running Windows 7 gives me the sad sound that device installation failed. No drivers. But wait! There is a friendly message popping up that points to a driver download from Logitech’s web site. Happy times are here again or so I think.

I find some text on the web page that tells me to select my operating system. I hunt and hunt around for some sort of way to actually make this selection. Those familiar with web accessibility can likely guess where this is heading because I’m never able to make the actual selection.

When I run into these kinds of problems, it is back to the detective role to figure out what’s going on and where accessibility could be improved on the page in question. This is where I’ve really come to enjoy the ease that one of the features we built into IE8 has brought to such investigations. Specifically the IE8 Developer Tools have made hunting through the source code of problem web pages a much smoother experience for me.

Simply press F12 and the developer toolbar appears. I’m not going to go into all the different features available but will say that the page source is presented in a very screen reader and keyboard friendly treeview control. Better yet, a search box let’s you enter text and the tree is scrolled and expanded to the location where the search hit is located. I’ve found it makes locating the accessibility issues much faster than hunting through loads of extraneous info in full page source in a program like Notepad.

In just a couple minutes I found the issue with Logitech’s page and sent a note to the company. Who knows if it will actually make a difference. I did say after all that this was to be about 15 minutes of accessibility and well I think we all know web accessibility is more like a marathon or dare I say triathlon since those seem to be all the rage these days.

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A press release from the U.S. government talks about an updated and revamped one-stop shop for federal info on disabilities.

 

 

WASHINGTON — In conjunction with the 19th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the U.S. Department of Labor has re-named and re-launched DisabilityInfo.gov as Disability.gov. Available at http://www.disability.gov, the site offers comprehensive information about programs and services to better serve more than 50 million Americans with disabilities, their family members, veterans, employers, educators, caregivers and anyone interested in disability-related information.

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I have loads of info and experience in most aspects of technology accessibility. This, however, is an area where I’m seeking to learn from others.
An impending change by Comcast to eliminate most analog signals means that my current solution for video recording of a Media Center PC with an analog TV tuner card will no longer work. In researching my options, I thought I’d see what anyone knew related to the state of the art, if any, there was in terms of direct access to the functionality of the set-top box?
I seem to recall some prototype software once that showed how the interface for accessibility on a set-top box might work. Did that go anyplace ever? In short is their anyone doing something good in terms of accessibility in this space I can share with Comcast and the manufacturers of the boxes?
For what it is worth, this change has nothing to do with the impending switch to digital TV for broadcasters. Instead Comcast is replacing most analog signals in their cable lineup to make room for more HD signals. My current proposed solution is looking like replacing my media center PC with a newer computer with a digital tuner card capable of handling a cable card required for decoding of digital cable signals. But at $1200 or so, it isn’t the most immediate solution I’d like to use.

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A recent posting on the Google Blog announced that Google’s toolbar for Internet Explorer added accessibility enhancements. The gist of the posting is that keyboard access to the various toolbar buttons as well as better support for Microsoft Active Accessibility has been added.

 

This release adds support for Windows Accessibility APIs (used by screen readers, etc.) and enables keyboard navigation and access. From inside a browser with Toolbar installed, the global shortcut Alt+G places your cursor in the Google Toolbar search box. If you’re using a screen reader, you’ll hear “Google Toolbar Search”. Pressing the Tab key brings keyboard focus to the button placed immediately after the search box, and right and left arrow keys move focus between buttons. More information on keyboard access is documented in the Toolbar Help Center.

 

Using the keyboard access in the toolbar is straight forward. From within Internet Explorer, press alt+g and focus is placed in a search edit box for searching Google. Press tab once and focus moves to a search button. From that point use left and right arrows to explore and access the various toolbar buttons. Enter typically activates the button with focus, while down arrow brings up options for that button. Finally the typical keyboard method for right click/context of shift+F10 or the application key on your keyboard brings up further options on many buttons. It seems like a nice job of improving keyboard access here.

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Colleagues at work frequently talk about del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These are just two web sites and services in the category of social browsing. The theory behind these kinds of web sites is simple. You find web pages that are interesting and mark them in some fashion. Then others who are users of the services can see what you find interesting and correspondingly you find what others with similar interests as you are browsing. It all sounds grand and I suppose anything from marginally interesting to quite handy depending on how much you want to tap the collective experiences of others browsing the web.

 

Signing up for StumpleUpon and del.icio.us is what’s largely the standard for new accounts with services on the web today. And it is here that we see yet another example of the unsocial web.

 

StumbleUpon and del.icio.us both use the typical CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) for web sites of requiring entry of the characters from a graphical version of a word to stop hackers, spammers and other ne’er-do-wells from causing problems. Unfortunately these tests have a tendency to lockout honest people too, especially if you are not able to see the characters to enter.

 

Solutions to the inaccessibility of these tests do exist that can improve the situation to some degree. The most typical is to offer an audio version of the characters. There is a more in depth discussion of the issues around the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA in this paper.

 

I have no firsthand knowledge as to why StumbleUpon or del.icio.us do not offer audio solutions for this problem. I suspect like most situations, the inaccessibility of these tests was not known to the individuals responsible for implementation at the particular companies.

 

Like many with disabilities who encounter these challenges, I’ve started the contact process to see if either of the companies in question here offer alternative sign-up solutions or are aware of the issues. We’ll see what kind of results happen.

 

My own reaction to the general class of problem here runs the gambit of emotions. I fully understand the reasons why these tests are in place and as a general practice will not fault individual web sites for needing them. Nor can I entirely blame the web sites for not knowing about the need to have some solutions to the accessibility challenges in place.

 

The simple fact is that societal awareness of disability and related issues is still generally low. It requires a relatively high degree of awareness to know that people who are blind can actually access the computer and web sites but also that this access is not magical and does not work perfectly.

 

All that said, it is annoying, frustrating, and sometimes downright anger-inducing to be on the wrong side of anything that blocks you from trying to do what you want. In this case I’ll give the contact and awareness routines some time to work themselves out with a taciturn acceptance that the social web is sometimes not as social as we think. I’d like to join the party too.

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As anyone who starts using Office 2007 likely knows, one of the more dramatic changes is the elimination of traditional menus and toolbars. These have been replaced with what Office calls the Ribbon. The short explanation of this new user interface is that more commands are displayed at a time without having to hunt through various submenus, dialogs and toolbars.

 

While the Office team has done work to try and support Office 2003 hotkeys through a method that let’s you type those keys and have them still work, commands themselves have been completely rearranged. For example if I remember that in Office 2003 the hotkey sequence to bring up the Paragraph Format dialog was alt+o,p, I can still press this sequence. However if I only remember that a particular feature I use was located on a certain menu, then it is a bit of an exploration expedition to find the new location.

 

The Office Online pages have some very handy documents to assist with this challenge. For each Office 2007 application that had an Office 2003 equivalent, there is an article explaining the new UI. Better yet each article has a link to an Excel workbook that lists each menu and toolbar from the Office 2003 version of the program and explains where to find the equivalent command in Office 2007. My Paragraph Format command for example can now be found on the ribbon under Home | Paragraph | Dialog Box Launcher.

 

Here are links to the articles and the Excel workbooks for the three Office programs I use the most, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

 

Word Article

Word Command Summary

Excel Article

Excel Command Summary

PowerPoint Article

PowerPoint Command Summary

    

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As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, at least one U.S. court has said that our currency needs to be made more accessible. Since that time things have heated up a bit.

 

The treasury department has appealed the court decision largely on what the treasury department sees as the cost of making currency accessible.

 

But in their petition to the appeals court, government lawyers argued that varying the size of denominations could cause significant burdens on the vending machine industry and cost the Bureau of Engraving and Printing an initial investment of $178 million and $37 million to $50 million in new printing plates.

 

The American Council of the Blind (ACB) who filed the original legal action has vowed to continue the fight.

 

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has sided with the government in the appeal of the court ruling on accessible currency. The NFB’s position is outlined in an editorial that ran in the New York Times.

 

NPR ran a story featuring both sides of the debate.

 

Finally there’s now an online petition directed to the U.S. congress in support of accessible currency. As of this writing the petition has close to 1800 signatures, mine included.

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