Category: Uncategorized

Today’s announcement that the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind have joined forces to try and stop Arizona State University from taking part in a pilot program using Amazon’s Kindle to make electronic versions of textbooks makes for an interesting legal challenge. My reading of the situation is that it gets to the basic question that needs to be asked much more often when it comes to accessibility and…

A little more than a year ago I wrote about Pandora’s failure to understand the current state of Flash accessibility. The net impact is that you are unable to sign into the main web site to use your Pandora account. The Flash used on the web site has several other accessibility issues as well. As I wrote back then, Pandora’s main response was that Adobe needed to do more to make Flash accessible.   I…

The following message is making the rounds of various blindness-related e-mail lists. I know Oregon has been hit hard by the current economic situation but having lived in the state for five years and worked closely with several from the commission (both staff and consumers) I know the excellentwork done there and the positive impact on people as a result. This doesn’t strike me as the right way to resolve economic challenges.   ACTION ALERT:…

Good news for anyone who uses MLB’s Gameday Audio service. I recently received the following e-mail from Lainey Feingold. For those who are not familiar with Lainey’s work, she’s been behind numerous improvements around accessibility over the past several years in areas ranging from ATMs to web sites.   To everyone who has contacted me about this year’s Game Day Audio Player on mlb.com:   MLB has put up an accessible player for Game Day…

The release candidate for Windows 7 is available for general download as of now. I’ve been running Windows 7 builds with success on several machines for months using JAWS 10 and Window-Eyes 7.01. You can learn more about Windows 7 at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx and download the release candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx.  

Whether you are a believer or not, the Market Ghost Tour is worth a try should you ever visit Seattle. Aimee and I took the tour last evening with a friend of hers from work and despite being drenched by rain, the experience was entertaining.   The hour-long walking tour leads you through parts of Pike Place Market pointing out buildings that are supposedly haunted. While no ghosts were encountered on our stroll, I for…

A recent message on the WebAIM mailing list talked about a more accessible interface for YouTube. This was created by a student investigating the impact of web 2.0 apps on people who are blind.   This isn’t necessarily a finished product but does seem to work well. It is particularly nice if you are using a screen reader and browser that support ARIA live updating. This is a technology that allows web page changes to…

I use a social networking site for book enthusiasts known as Goodreads. The basic concept behind the site is that you share what you are reading with friends and they share with you and you all get to discover more good reads.   Maybe 18 months ago I mentioned an issue around missing alt text on book titles on the site. Goodreads fixed the issue in about a day. Recently a change broke the issue…

For those who haven’t heard about this in other arenas, I wanted to let readers know that the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has some key opportunities to help shape the future of an accessible web browsing experience. There are two documents that have been released recently that offer opportunities to comment.   WAI-ARIA Last Call   WAI-ARIA defines a way to enhance the accessibility of web applications and user interfaces that are commonplace on the…

The current episode of Freedom Scientific’s podcast called FSCast has an extensive discussion of ARIA (accessible rich internet applications). At a high level, ARIA is a way to ensure that the complexity of desktop applications being reproduced on the web remains accessible.   The podcast is worth a listen for anyone interested in web accessibility. Although JAWS is used in some of the demonstrations, the discussion of ARIA hits at the benefits and challenges of…