Category: Uncategorized

If you’ve not yet tried Walk Score, it is to me a web site worth having in your favorites list.  You enter an address and the site gives you what is termed a walkability score for the address.  This score is based on proximity of things like shops, restaurants and such.  You get not only the score, but the list of businesses.  Site accessibility needs some improvement but you can generally make it work.  …

For the past several years, September has been the time for me to renew my subscription to the University of Wisconsin athletic broadcasts offered on Yahoo’s college sports broadcast services. This year I hunted and hunted but Badger broadcasts were not to be found. As it turned out, Bucky Badger decided to go with a different online partner for streaming media, namely CBS sports.   Well, the first football game day rolled around so I…

One of the arguments frequently made about why businesses should take accessibility seriously is that by failing to address accessibility significant money is left on the table. Time and again the basic argument goes something like the following:   There is this sizable untapped market of people with disabilities just waiting to spend money. If you make your web site comply with accessibility standard X, you too can tap this market and get part of…

A couple weeks ago I gave a presentation on Windows 7 at Accessible World for people who use screen reading technology. The audio of my prepared part of the presentation can be found at http://www.kellyford.org/audio/win7demo.mp3. A text transcript of the presentation is at http://www.kellyford.org/random/win7demo.txt.  

Well, this press release isn’t exactly my idea written about here previously of not buying printed books until the publishers make electronic copies available but it is definitely in the right direction. Public money needs to equal public accessibility.   LOS ANGELES, Oct. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Reading Rights Coalition (RRC), which consists of thirty-one organizations dedicated to equal access to the printed word by people who are blind or who have other print disabilities,…

The folks over at WebAim have launched a second survey on screen reader use and the web. Access the blog post talking about the survey at http://webaim.org/blog/screen-reader-user-survey/ and the survey itself at http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/.

Going with the random musings theme of my blog, here are a few tidbits.   Twitter and Facebook   Postings to the blog have been a bit slow of late. In part this is because I have been spending more of my online time on Twitter and Facebook. You can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kellylford. My Facebook profile is at http://www.facebook.com/klford. Twitter tends to be accessibility related info and Facebook more of a personal…

TechFlash is one of the blogs I read to stay current on happenings in the technology sector. An article talking about a $2.5 million site redesign for WhitePages.com caught my attention this afternoon.   Firing up my web browser of choice I navigated to the site. And wonder of wonder for $2.5 million I see the first link showing up to my screen reader as “images/AE5”. As anyone familiar with web accessibility can guess, this…

I’m not sure what it says about the social web that I’m writing a blog post about an exchange I had on Twitter. It feels a bit self-indulgent but that aside I wanted to expand briefly on some comments I made around accessibility of printed books.   I’ve written here previously about Bookshare. Basically the organization takes advantage of a 1996 change in U.S. copyright law to make accessible copies of books available to people…

A couple of interesting news items in the accessible web browsing world worth mentioning here.   Yahoo Funding NVDA Development   I noticed on the NVDA blog that Yahoo is now providing them some funding.  You can read the details at http://www.nvda-project.org/blog/YahooSupportsNVDA.   From the blog posting, initial work will be for some further ARIA support and table navigation in HTML documents.   Firefox 3.5 Accessibility Improvements   A blog post at http://www.marcozehe.de/2009/06/26/new-accessibility-features-in-firefox-3-5/ details many…