News coverage today is filled with talk of the U. S. House of Representatives passage of $50 billion in “recovery” for states impacted by Hurricane Sandy. It would be great to see some enterprising media outlet use this as an opportunity to really get behind the details of this kind of government spending, instead of just covering the political back and forth that is commonplace in any government action today. Reading the bill, you see…
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I am sure that a campaign to eliminate the use of the term “a11y” is a campaign I’d lose, were I even to try and start it, but after reading the term “A11y” so many times in the accessibility world, I just have to say that I still think it is not the best way to represent accessibility to the broader community. I’m someone who’s been in and around the accessibility business for more than…
6 CommentsYears ago when I worked at the Trace R&D center, I had the opportunity to be on a panel of judges at least once for an engineering class taught by Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden for a competition looking at accessibility of consumer appliances. My recollection was that students hat to come up with a design for a stove to maximize accessibility. TV Lenny, of American TV fame, was the main judge. One of the main criteria…
One CommentAfter several years of using MovableType to run my blog, I’ve decided to kick the electronic tires as it were on a different blogging platform. WordPress seems to offer more of the functionality and ease of use I’m looking for with the level of blogging I do. Reading through blog archives, I also realize my blogging has really fallen off in the past couple years. Watch for that to change in the new year. As…
Leave a CommentA few weeks ago I wrote about accessibility issues in an iOSapp from The University of Wisconsin app for following Badger football. This is just a short update to say that the University has been very responsive around these issues and corrected the problems I detailed within a couple weeks. The latest update to the app has improved support for VoiceOver.
Leave a CommentAs I’ve written here previously, I’m an alum of the University of Wisconsin and take pride in having attended the school and my degree. I’m also a sports fan so enjoy following the Wisconsin Badgers and fall Saturdays still remind me of the many rich traditions in Madison that go along with Badger football. Today I noticed a tweet from @BadgerFootball talking about a new Wisconsin Football Gameday app to stay in touch with,…
Leave a CommentMuch has been written about the accessibility challenges posed by CAPTCHA systems on the internet. Today the most common solution to address accessibility for individuals who are blind is to have some sort of audio replacement for the typical visual verification of characters in an image. Shortcomings of this solution aside, this is the system that Ticketmaster uses when you attempt to purchase tickets. Recently I tried to buy tickets to a Seattle Mariners…
Leave a CommentBack in college I took a public opinion research course. One of the tasks in that class was the design and completion of a fairly substantial public opinion survey. Part of that involved completion of a minimum of 20 one-hour telephone surveys. I mention that as background because from time to time when callers ring today, I remember what it was like to need to get enough surveys and will take the time to answer…
Leave a CommentEvery March I do an annual hunt for an online site to complete an NCAA basketball tournament bracket in an accessible fashion. I’ve yet to see one of the major sports sites figure out how to make this experience accessible. Terrill Thompson’s accessible bracket work does deserve to be called out though as a positive example of what can be done. And of course if you know of other examples of good web accessibility here…
2 CommentsWhile it is old news now, about a month ago Adobe updated their accessible version of Digital Editions. You can read full details in a blog post from Adobe. According to Adobe, the main improvement is the ability to read continuously with a screen reader with this update. I have had no success at getting this update to work on multiple computers with JAWS or NVDA. I’ve left comments with Adobe and exchanged email.…
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