Alla Gringaus

Unlocking the power of iPad for the blind

Cheree Heppe, blind reader sent Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, her review of the iPad. Read Full Version on Read How You Want blog.

“The iPad should not be thought of as a tool solely for low vision people. I’m a no-vision user and can work the iPad well, for being a new user and having no experience with configuring the Voiceover settings.

To use the iPad well, a blind user should have a strong spatial sense. I mean that the touch method for the screen depends on knowing where the icons reside in space in relation to other icons on a flat glass plain.

I speculated that if a blind user wanted to use a certain app a lot, such as the typing virtual keypad feature, a tracing could be made of the positions of the icons and someone could cut out an overlay of light plastic, like a glorified check writing guide or a stencil. That way, a blind user could tactilely locate the positions quicker. Imagine a sheath of light plastic overlay cut-outs the shape of the screen for different standard uses, such as typing or web surfing, carried in a sleeve or pocket inside the front cover of the iPad case. This idea is based on knowing virtually nothing about how the icons refresh or whether they change position, etc.

What a gadget! Accessible right out of the box. If Apple can insist on accessibility across the entire platform as standard foundational basics for any app developer, blind consumers will have a lot of amazing possibilities with this device and won’t have to be shunted off to the separate-but-equal, but not quite accessible, side of things.

Apple has caused a totally unexpected paradigm shift with this iPad, at least in my thinking.­­­”

Selective Freedom Online

Hillary: Internet is a public space for excellence – it should be protected. It is vitally important that every nation represented here and every nation in the world namely Internet Freedom. This is an urgent task. It is most urgent for those around the world whose words are now censored, who are in prison because they’ve written online, who are blocked fro accessing entire categories of Internet content, or, who are being trapped by governments seeking to keep them from connecting to one another… Governments will have to face the Dictators Dilemma – the dictators will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying for keeping them standing by resorting to greater oppression and to escalating the opportunity cost of missing out of the ideas that have been blocked and the people who have been disappeared… We will preserve the Internet as open as secure for all.

I’ve done a bit of a transcript for my friend who has hearing disability and won’t be able to understand what’s in the clip above. Most of the online videos don’t have corresponding video transcripts, unfortunately. Same goes to visually disabled who can’t ‘see’ the picture. In our case, it’s kinda hypocritical for the organization who declares Freedom of Press to keep important content and main headlines within the images (again: visually impaired can not read the text within the images). Ironically, even the site’s mission is included within the image: “People deserve to know” (apparently not the disabled).

“For many people around the world, access to quality information is far from easy. Everyone needs reliable, impartial information to judge their situation. If you don’t know what’s happening around you, how can you make the right decision?”

Moving the Web onto Mobile Devices

Mar 14, 3:30, ACC, Salon J
Take a look at how the complexity of design has increased exponentially with the web moving onto today’s mobile devices. There are so many more considerations when thinking about a design or a campaign that go beyond the basic, “who is my target audience….how do I reach them?” Now it’s also, “what devices do they use…what browsers…..do I use Flash in my designs….what about HTML5?” Hear from a panel of industry experts about how they are dealing with these questions and what winning strategies they have found to be most successful for them.

For my SXSWi schedule for March 11-15 click here. The overlaps reflect my options.

Flash is crawled and indexed

Adobe is done working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the “… SWF file format a first-class citizen in searchable web content….”

What a feeling! Even better indexing of SWF content

Practically anything that the user sees on the screen including SWF can now be indexed by Google?… Even the RSS feeds populated into Flash, or practically any kind of external content tied up with SWF file are all indexible. Exciting news, but wait: indexible doesn’t guarantee indexed, just like in regular HTML – “…Flash remains a problematic medium at best for publishing content online. The lack of unique URLs, page titles, link anchor texts and content hierarchy are only some of the common issues and factors that make Flash content far more difficult to classify and work with for search engine optimziers. Compare this with HTML content and it’s obvious that the two cannot compete on a level playing ground. This is especially worrying since it’s pretty clear that Flash websites (and Flash components in general) will continue to face problems with efficient crawling, indexing and ranking – just take a look at the treatment that Flash gets through Google’s new Instant Preview…” - Peter A. Prestipino, the Editor-In-Chief of Website Magazine.

Speaking of effects and even that HTML 5 is a while from being ready, watch the HTML5 Chrome Experiment – turn the sound on, insert the address of your hometown, sit back and watch http://thewildernessdowntown.com/

Obama signs Accessibility bill for disabled

For example, anything CNN repurposes from TV to distribute online will need to have captions. Also, it pulls in accessibility of mobile devices, TV set-top boxes, electronic program guides and electronic messaging services. the online accessibility has been ignored for a long time, and not taken seriously. What happened today is a very good reason for some level of dedicated focus, it’s heating up – the development community better watch out.