The Idea Place Posts

With the loss of the Milwaukee Brewers to the eventual World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship series now behind me, I used a rainy Saturday afternoon to update my MLB At Bat app on the iPhone. It is never too early to dream of sunny Arizona skies and spring training 2012. A pleasant surprise greeted me when I launched the update.   One of the accessibility issues I detailed in…

Today I had the opportunity to answer some of my questions about how Amazon’s Kindle eBook lending program done in partnership with OverDrive and libraries would work. The program announced several months ago entered a beta stage with at least two libraries offering Kindle ebooks to library users. I have accounts with both the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library and opted to try some books from King County’s library. For the Kindle…

Yesterday I reported accessibility problems with the NFL’s Audio Pass service. While the majority of the Flash content remains inaccessible, the NFL has updated the table displaying games to provide links for launching home and away feeds for each game. This brings accessibility back to the level it was last year. This is a positive step but I’d still like to see the NFL fix the Flash content to support accessibility.

It is I suppose not surprising but still disappointing how frequently leading web destinations fail to pay attention to accessibility. After renewing my subscription to the NFL’s Audio Pass service to listen to NFL games I thought I’d listen to a little preseason action from the Packers yesterday. I’m sure anyone familiar with accessibility can guess the rest of the story. I’ll share the abridged version this time.   Using multiple screen readers I tried…

I’ve written more than once about frustrations with books from libraries and other sources that require Adobe’s Digital Editions to access the content. Today Adobe announced an update with some level of accessibility support in a 1.8 preview to this product. The announcement says in part:   Digital Editions 1.8 has enhanced keyboard support, provides additional text magnification, support for high-contrast mode color-switching, and interoperability with the UIAutomation accessibility API to allow screen readers to…

Several years ago I had the good fortune to take a trip to London. I recall how exciting it was to be able to walk around the city using an electronic copy of a travel guide I had downloaded while on my trip from my local library back in Washington State. For someone who has tried probably every method of accessing books around, this was an exciting time. True, the books were in the PDF…

Major League Baseball (MLB) released an update to their At Bat iPhone app today. All I can say is what a disappointment. While they did fix an issue with buttons to indicate radio stations when playing audio missing names for VoiceOver, as near as I can determine none of the other major accessibility bugs, such as those I detailed recently, have been addressed.   The ironic thing is that the issue of station buttons being…

I use several iPhone apps on a regular basis and there are services like AppleVis that do a good job of cataloging the accessibility of iPhone apps overall. That said in the past couple days I’ve started using a couple apps that I wanted to call out because of the potential they represent. VizWiz and Ariadne GPS both show promise at answering questions about what’s around you.   VisWiz   The basic premise behind VizWiz…

This year I opted to give MLB’s At Bat 11 iPhone app a try for live baseball game audio. The app works relatively well with VoiceOver on the iPhone and has been a nice way to stay in touch with my favorite teams.   While At Bat 11 has many positives, accessibility issues remain that range from the completely inaccessible to the inconvenient. It would be nice to see MLB address some of these before…