The Idea Place Posts

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…

Today’s announcement that the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind have joined forces to try and stop Arizona State University from taking part in a pilot program using Amazon’s Kindle to make electronic versions of textbooks makes for an interesting legal challenge. My reading of the situation is that it gets to the basic question that needs to be asked much more often when it comes to accessibility and…

A little more than a year ago I wrote about Pandora’s failure to understand the current state of Flash accessibility. The net impact is that you are unable to sign into the main web site to use your Pandora account. The Flash used on the web site has several other accessibility issues as well. As I wrote back then, Pandora’s main response was that Adobe needed to do more to make Flash accessible.   I…

The following message is making the rounds of various blindness-related e-mail lists. I know Oregon has been hit hard by the current economic situation but having lived in the state for five years and worked closely with several from the commission (both staff and consumers) I know the excellentwork done there and the positive impact on people as a result. This doesn’t strike me as the right way to resolve economic challenges.   ACTION ALERT:…

Good news for anyone who uses MLB’s Gameday Audio service. I recently received the following e-mail from Lainey Feingold. For those who are not familiar with Lainey’s work, she’s been behind numerous improvements around accessibility over the past several years in areas ranging from ATMs to web sites.   To everyone who has contacted me about this year’s Game Day Audio Player on mlb.com:   MLB has put up an accessible player for Game Day…

The release candidate for Windows 7 is available for general download as of now. I’ve been running Windows 7 builds with success on several machines for months using JAWS 10 and Window-Eyes 7.01. You can learn more about Windows 7 at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx and download the release candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx.  

Whether you are a believer or not, the Market Ghost Tour is worth a try should you ever visit Seattle. Aimee and I took the tour last evening with a friend of hers from work and despite being drenched by rain, the experience was entertaining.   The hour-long walking tour leads you through parts of Pike Place Market pointing out buildings that are supposedly haunted. While no ghosts were encountered on our stroll, I for…