Last week a colleague from my days at Microsoft wrote an excellent analysis of the current functionality using ChatGPT and a basic question in HTML. I had been dabbling with questions from time to time around accessibility and ChatGPT myself but hadn’t written anything formal up. Now I have. This evening with a bit of time, I decided to see what the AI technology knew about reading web pages with several leading screen readers. The…
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Several months ago, I started a podcast with a nephew of mine. In a quest to feed what I lovingly call the monster because the podcast always needs content, I was researching some NFL statistics and it was a poignant reminder of what a challenge it is to find consistently usable tables on the web. These NFL tables on individual player statistics for my basic criteria are reasonable. Column and row headers are marked.…
Leave a CommentIn my web use, I’ve noticed a growing trend to add instructions to more experiences on the web. This week it was more than 250 words on reading a table on a financial web site and another couple hundred words on a calendar control for an airline company. Most often, this is coming in the form of an ARIA-Label or other hidden text, aimed at explaining how to use the experience with a screen reader…
Leave a CommentKeeping up with all the changes in even the Microsoft products I personally use on a regular basis can be a challenge. I say that because I just read about a new function Excel has added to add images to a spreadsheet in a formula and it seems quite handy so far. Full details on the function are in this blog posting. Screen readers will read the alt text on the image when you navigate…
Leave a CommentOver the years I’ve assisted multiple people with Outlook and one feature that I commonly use stands above the rest as far as being a time saver that most people seem to have not discovered. Quick Steps allow you to take multiple actions on an email message with just a couple mouse clicks or a single key press. Office has a comprehensive support article on this feature. As an example, most know about filters to…
Leave a CommentSeveral years ago I wrote about how I used Excel to track a fantasy football draft. Everything in that post is still relevant but I wanted to provide a short update. Most importantly, the spreadsheet I use is now available and updated for 2022. See the instructions sheet in the document for how to use it during a fantasy football draft. The original post talked about my league having 16 players that each fantasy owner…
Leave a CommentMy wife and I did some hiking in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado this week. Here are two short recordings of a couple mountain streams from our hikes. I always enjoy the sounds of rivers and streams in the mountains and the different sounds they make. The first was a fairly slow running stream. The second was a bit faster. I was a bit surprised at the lack of sound in the parts of the…
Leave a CommentA version of this post, with some of the same content, was published last year. A bit of reorganization and some new commentary has been added. I’ve opted to use some of the same content because I do have to ask what has changed in the last year? If anything, I’d say 31 wasn’t a great year for The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or at the very least, the future is looking less optimistic.…
Leave a CommentWarning: The audio linked to inn this post has multiple explosive sounds and they do start at the beginning and some can be loud. Over the holiday weekend I was at a family cottage at Tuttle Lake in Wisconsin. Each 4th of July weekend, there is a sizable private fireworks display put on by some cottage owners at the lake. This year, I captured some of the audio and find the sounds of fireworks over…
Leave a CommentOne of the handy but not so obvious features of a Microsoft 365 subscription in my opinion, is the ability to transcribe 300 minutes of audio a month using the online version of Word. I’ve been using this on and off for many months but have started making regular use of it for some personal projects of late. I also noticed a note when uploading audio recently, that the 300 minute restriction appears to be…
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