The Idea Place Posts

Colleagues at work frequently talk about del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These are just two web sites and services in the category of social browsing. The theory behind these kinds of web sites is simple. You find web pages that are interesting and mark them in some fashion. Then others who are users of the services can see what you find interesting and correspondingly you find what others with similar interests as you are browsing. It all sounds grand and I suppose anything from marginally interesting to quite handy depending on how much you want to tap the collective experiences of others browsing the web.

Signing up for StumpleUpon and del.icio.us is what’s largely the standard for new accounts with services on the web today. And it is here that we see yet another example of the unsocial web.

StumbleUpon and del.icio.us both use the typical CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) for web sites of requiring entry of the characters from a graphical version of a word to stop hackers, spammers and other ne’er-do-wells from causing problems. Unfortunately these tests have a tendency to lockout honest people too, especially if you are not able to see the characters to enter.

Solutions to the inaccessibility of these tests do exist that can improve the situation to some degree. The most typical is to offer an audio version of the characters. There is a more in depth discussion of the issues around the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA in this paper.

I have no firsthand knowledge as to why StumbleUpon or del.icio.us do not offer audio solutions for this problem. I suspect like most situations, the inaccessibility of these tests was not known to the individuals responsible for implementation at the particular companies.

Like many with disabilities who encounter these challenges, I’ve started the contact process to see if either of the companies in question here offer alternative sign-up solutions or are aware of the issues. We’ll see what kind of results happen.

My own reaction to the general class of problem here runs the gambit of emotions. I fully understand the reasons why these tests are in place and as a general practice will not fault individual web sites for needing them. Nor can I entirely blame the web sites for not knowing about the need to have some solutions to the accessibility challenges in place.

The simple fact is that societal awareness of disability and related issues is still generally low. It requires a relatively high degree of awareness to know that people who are blind can actually access the computer and web sites but also that this access is not magical and does not work perfectly.

All that said, it is annoying, frustrating, and sometimes downright anger-inducing to be on the wrong side of anything that blocks you from trying to do what you want. In this case I’ll give the contact and awareness routines some time to work themselves out with a taciturn acceptance that the social web is sometimes not as social as we think. I’d like to join the party too.

As anyone who starts using Office 2007 likely knows, one of the more dramatic changes is the elimination of traditional menus and toolbars. These have been replaced with what Office calls the Ribbon. The short explanation of this new user interface is that more commands are displayed at a time without having to hunt through various submenus, dialogs and toolbars.

While the Office team has done work to try and support Office 2003 hotkeys through a method that let’s you type those keys and have them still work, commands themselves have been completely rearranged. For example if I remember that in Office 2003 the hotkey sequence to bring up the Paragraph Format dialog was alt+o,p, I can still press this sequence. However if I only remember that a particular feature I use was located on a certain menu, then it is a bit of an exploration expedition to find the new location.

The Office Online pages have some very handy documents to assist with this challenge. For each Office 2007 application that had an Office 2003 equivalent, there is an article explaining the new UI. Better yet each article has a link to an Excel workbook that lists each menu and toolbar from the Office 2003 version of the program and explains where to find the equivalent command in Office 2007. My Paragraph Format command for example can now be found on the ribbon under Home | Paragraph | Dialog Box Launcher.

Here are links to the articles and the Excel workbooks for the three Office programs I use the most, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Word Article

Word Command Summary

Excel Article

Excel Command Summary

PowerPoint Article

PowerPoint Command Summary

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, at least one U.S. court has said that our currency needs to be made more accessible. Since that time things have heated up a bit.

The treasury department has appealed the court decision largely on what the treasury department sees as the cost of making currency accessible.

But in their petition to the appeals court, government lawyers argued that varying the size of denominations could cause significant burdens on the vending machine industry and cost the Bureau of Engraving and Printing an initial investment of $178 million and $37 million to $50 million in new printing plates.

The American Council of the Blind (ACB) who filed the original legal action has vowed to continue the fight.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has sided with the government in the appeal of the court ruling on accessible currency. The NFB’s position is outlined in an editorial that ran in the New York Times.

NPR ran a story featuring both sides of the debate.

Finally there’s now an online petition directed to the U.S. congress in support of accessible currency. As of this writing the petition has close to 1800 signatures, mine included.

NPR’s Weekend Edition featured accessible audio games today.