The Idea Place Posts

I have written a few times here about different topics on virtual machine use. Here is a hint on how you might be able to take advantage of images distributed as Hyper-V virtual images, even though there are some issues when trying to boot from these images with a screen reader. As far as I know and in my direct experience, if you try and use Hyper-V for virtual machine use, there is no audio…

Here at The Idea Place, I don’t sell products but rather ideas and information. Better yet, the ideas are free for the taking and available anytime. This year, I’ll climb on the Black Friday deal train and offer a few free bonus ideas for your holiday accessibility pleasure. Promote the Future, Along with the Past Accessibility conferences, key dates on the annual calendar of accessibility happenings and more are filled with announcements of this or…

If you’ve ever opened a book to a random page and jumped into the middle of action where you know little about the characters, plot, or anything else, then this short posting might seem familiar. I work with a range of programs and technologies pretty much daily at Microsoft. One of the areas I’ve been working in a great deal lately is with the team responsible for Power BI. If you’ve never heard of this…

I’ve written a few times here about virtual machines. VMWare has just added a new entry into the tools available with a technical preview for VMWare Fusion running on Apple silicon hardware. Full details and a download are available in this blog post. So far my trial of the preview has been quite successful. The software itself works for me as well as it has on Intel-based Macs with VoiceOver. Creating VMs, management of the…

In the ways I monitor accessibility, it is clear that there is a greater awareness of the topic and more effort being put into making technology accessible. This is good. Yet, the vast majority of accessibility policies still fail at what for me is one of the most fundamental needs. Specifically what is a user supposed to do when an accessibility issue is encountered? I’m using the term “accessibility policy” here as a broad definition.…

Yesterday I read about the team at WebAIM releasing a version of their popular Wave toolbar as an Edge browser extension. I’m very familiar with the tool so wanted to see how it behaved in Edge. On the page with details about the extension, there is a section talking about how to use the tool. I noticed that it said you could press ctrl+shift+u, so after installing for Edge that’s what I dit. I pressed…

Earlier this month I was part of a panel presentation at the American Council of the Blind’s summer convention. The panel spoke on financial literacy. My portion of the session dealt with using Microsoft Excel to create pivot tables and using what are known as datatypes in Excel with a screen reader. I wanted to make the materials from that presentation available. Resources include: Audio of my part of the presentation. A Word document containing…

Monday will mark the 31st anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Each year as another year goes by and we celebrate the signing of the legislation, I am torn between feeling celebratory and sad. I do feel celebratory about the fact that the work of many allowed us to reach this point. As someone who has worked on various accessibility efforts over the years in a small way, I know…