The American Foundation for the Blind has an important and thoughtful alert talking about the need for the public to comment on proposed updates to the regulations for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As you would expect, the alert highlights issues of interest to people who are blind or have low vision. The deadline for comments is August 18. Take a read of the alert and follow the instructions for commenting.
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Aimee and I were in San Francisco last weekend for a short break visiting a good friend. On Sunday the three of us opted to head out to the city with no real agenda beyond visiting Mission Dolores and then to see where Bay area transit and our feet would take us.
As we left the mission we started hearing some sort of announcements coming from loud speakers down the street. I’m drawn to these kinds of public sounds I guess because there’s a part of me that’s always curious about what’s going on.
As it turned out, this happened to be an annual event from the San Francisco Symphony where a free outdoor concert is put on in Dolores Park. What a great serendipitous discovery and quite the pleasant afternoon.
The first half of the concert featured a trumpet soloist by the name of Alison Balsom. Here’s a bit of the music we heard that afternoon.
I’m definitely going to have to hear more of this artist. I won’t claim to be any kind of expert but I really enjoyed Balsom’s interpretation on the music and found the way she coaxed a softer sound out of the trumpet particularly intriguing. You always hear the big bold brassy sounds from trumpet players with the rapid flourishes and such and Balsom handled those smoothly. I was really impressed with the way she softened the trumpet’s sound at times though and I’d like to hear more of her work.
Leave a CommentSometimes what the news has to say is no secret. I caught a news article in several arenas lately talking about how expensive it is to fly to Madison, Wisconsin. Surprise me not!
When returning to Wisconsin, Madison is our first choice if at all possible because the city was once home and is closer to relatives. But according to this article, flying to Madison is the third most expensive city one can fly to in the U.S.
The Dane County Regional Airport had the nation’s third-highest average daily airfare among the top 100 airports during the first quarter of 2008, according to a report this week by the federal Transportation Department’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Leave a CommentThe Madison airport, which ranks 98th based on the volume of originating passengers, had an average daily fare of $454.91, which also was more than $100 higher than average fares at the competing Milwaukee and Chicago O’Hare airports. The average daily fare at all of the 100 largest airports was $332.
The folks over at All inPlay have another fun game for you to try. TAG, short for The Anagram Game, is currently a free public beta version where you can challenge your word making abilities against folks from around the net. Links to download and play the game along with instructions and mailing list subscription info are available at http://www.allinplay.com/games/beta.php.
Game play is straight forward after you download and install the 1.7 meg software. Choose a table from All inPlay’s web page and the game itself launches. You play with others from around the net and are given 20 seconds to review the phrase for that game. You are then told to begin making words and hear the point total for each word you make. As with other All inPlay games, you can quickly check how others in the game are doing and get some fun sounds as you play. There are various difficulty levels and levels of social chat available from the game tables. There’s even an option to challenge yourself and get familiar with how the game works. I found the game entertaining and a fun challenge during the time I took it for a test drive.
Leave a CommentWell, I’m not sure if 50 degrees and winds of something between 10 and 20 MPH qualify as summer, but we took in a summer evening of music on a bit of a road trip to see Crosby Stills and Nash. We were unable to get tickets to the local version of the show, so opted to drive about three hours away to see the group’s summer tour at the Maryhill Winery.
Crosby Stills and Nash or the other variation of the group, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, is one of my favorite musical groups. The music’s been a part of the fabric of society for decades and ranges from old classics that we can all sing by heart to some of the best political protest music of this era.
It was eight years ago that we saw CSNY in their Y2K tour in Portland. Hands down of the numerous concerts I’ve been to, that show was the top. It was passionate, filled with great music and there was an energy in the Rose Garden that you could feel during the full show. CSNY have some of the best harmonizing going in music and their musicianship is incredible.
I mention the older tour because had last evening been my first experience seeing CSN live, I think I would have been disappointed. The show wasn’t bad, but unlike the show from eight years ago, the group’s age showed at times. Harmonies were a bit off, especially on the first number of each set and the event had more of a feeling of nostalgia as much as anything else. The Seattle Times ran a review from the concert in Seattle and it strikes pretty close to what I’d say about the one we saw.
The Maryhill winery itself seems like it could be a nice place for a summer concert. The weather when we went was chilly and windy but the setting itself by the Columbia River was pleasant. It offers an amphitheater with a little more than 1,000 reserved seats with hill seating for a few more thousand. Overall acoustics at the venue are reasonable for an outdoor facility but when there’s a strong breeze, sound from the stage gets a bit wavy.
On the way home we stopped off at the Boulder Creek National Recreation Trail for a bit of a hike. It was a great hike along the edge of a creek down to a cave that’s thousands of years old. The path winds through a forest and the sound of the wind through the pines and the smells and sounds of the forest remind me how much beauty Washington has to offer.
I enjoy these sorts of hikes also because they are a great way to exercise mobility skills. There’s nothing like walking along a trail with a cliff on the edge to heighten you’re the attention you pay to where you are walking. This trail offered many twists and turns and moderate hills and it was especially nice to be able to handle the hike with success with some of the vestibular issues I’ve been working on for the past year.
Leave a CommentI work in the software industry. I also have a large circle of people who rely on me for computer support. I’m occasionally reminded of the things I take for granted as common knowledge that really do not fit that category.
One of these is the method people use to navigate the web. For me, ctrl+o or alt+d and the web address of choice are second nature when web surfing. Yet I encounter numerous people with a different surfing method.
Tonight for example during a telephone support call, I learned that one person’s navigation strategy involved closing the browser after reading each web page. When asked why this method was used, the person replied, “I thought that’s how it worked.”
I really wonder how many other people think this. We need to do better in software design to help people understand even these basic uses. Here’s hoping the person I spoke with tonight, who now knows how to get to this blog, remembers how the address bar works.
One CommentPandora, available at http://www.pandora.com, is one of the more innovative music services I’ve found on the web. The basic premise behind the service is that there’s a genealogy to music. A FAQ for the service says in part:
Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you’ll love.
It’s powered by the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken, the Music Genome Project: a crazy project started back in early 2000 to capture the complex musical DNA of songs using a large team of highly-trained musicians.
From a musical perspective my experience with Pandora has been nothing less than outstanding. I’ve discovered countless new artists and music since I started using Pandora more than a year ago. It is the first online music service I’ve actually subscribed to as the $36-a-year fee to stream Pandora through my Squeezebox has been well worth the cost.
The web version of Pandora uses Adobe’s Flash technology. The Pandora help pages acknowledge that this can cause some problems for screen readers and give some hints about working around many of the issues. Perhaps the biggest hint is to use http://www.pandora.com/backstage to bypass some of the Flash. However, account creation, a one time sign in per computer where you want to use Pandora and things like station deletion are not available from this interface. Pandora support was helpful in the sense that they offered to assist me by phone with account creation and such which was a step in the right direction.
Still, I’ve used examples of very accessible Flash and started to engage Pandora support in a discussion around making the Flash interface work with screen readers. This is where the disconnect comes in.
Web accessibility frequently requires at least three things to happen to be successful. First off the base technology being used needs to support accessibility. Second, screen readers and other assistive technology must support whatever accessibility solution the given technology is using. Finally, web sites using the technology in question must use whatever accessibility mechanisms the technology requires.
Anyone familiar with Flash accessibility likely knows that this pattern is what’s had to happen for Flash to be usable. We started with no accessible Flash, accessibility support in the form of support for Microsoft Active Accessibility was added, screen readers added support for Flash and now at least some web sites are using Flash to support more accessibility. Adobe has a good resource center on Flash accessibility at http://www.adobe.com/resources/accessibility/flash8/.
The challenge with Pandora is that they seem unaware of the ability to make Flash accessible. Each time I interact with their support team, I’m told to urge Adobe to enhance Flash to support accessibility. Here’s one example of a reply from their customer service team.
You are correct– many features within Pandora such as deleting a station, do indeed require the Flash interface. It’s a tough balance to find a universal platform, like Flash, that will provide the experience many folks have come to expect from a modern website, while maintaining some level of functionality for folks using screen readers. Ultimately, we hope that the developers of Flash (the Adobe corporation) will incorporate more technology in the future to make Flash accessible for screen readers and similar tools. Feel free to write to them encouraging this kind of development work.
I’ve replied on several occasions alerting the folks at Pandora about Flash accessibility but never hear back from that point. Hopefully one of these times some progress will happen. I’m going to try leaving this same feedback on one of their blog posts. I hope other Pandora listeners will urge the company to embrace accessible Flash as well.
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Previously I blogged about the inaccessibility of the legally mandated annual credit reports that consumers are entitled to from the various credit reporting services. I’m pleased to report that progress has been made in this area and we should be able to obtain accessible credit reports by the end of October of this year.
Washington, D.C. (April 23, 2008) – The nation’s three major consumer credit reporting companies today unveiled a comprehensive program to provide improved access to important credit information for people who are blind or visually impaired. The initiative, crafted with the American Council of the Blind, its California affiliate and several individual members of the blind community, will help protect the credit information of individuals who cannot read a standard print credit report.
Under the plan announced today, Equifax (NYSE: EFX), Experian (EXPN.L), and TransUnion have begun working to make online credit reports and related information accessible through their jointly operated website, AnnualCreditReport.com, the official site to help consumers obtain free credit reports. Accessible credit reports for people with visual impairments will be available online by October 31 of this year. By the end of the year, the companies will also make credit reports available in Braille and other formats at no charge to qualified individuals who cannot access print information.
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This article in Computer World is pretty accurate with respect to where accessibility stands today for individuals who are blind. While I think the writer’s emphasis on the shortcomings of Narrator creates somewhat of a false impression of how full screen readers work, the main themes of the article are pretty accurate. People who are blind still have to work way too hard to use computing technology and far too often one upgrade or web site change can set things back. There are also far too many instances of blocking accessibility issues encountered almost daily.
The comments are also worth a read.
The article has also been making the rounds at Slashdot.
Leave a CommentAs some may know, a committee of folks from throughout the accessibility arena has been working on a report that recommends changes to the section 508 U.S. federal standards around accessibility. The report was recently made available. A news release talking about the report is available at http://www.access-board.gov/news/teitac-report.htm.
The report itself is at http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/refresh/report/. Details on the update process are available at http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/update-index.htm. I’d encourage anyone with an interest in accessibility to get familiar with this report and to watch for updates from the access board and opportunities to comment on proposed updates to Section 508.
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