In the correspondence that followed, my colleague noted that the mobile version of Facebook was “usable” with screen readers but we both agreed that there were a number of things that you could not do on Facebook using the mobile interface or even the iPad/iPod Facebook app.

I wish I had read a December 8th posting from Marco’s Accessibility Blog because he had done all of the work for me, detailing extensively the issues related to the two big social networking sites as well as several more – some of which I’d never heard of before. Marco’s “Social Networking and Accessibility: A rather sad picture” blog does give a pretty comprehensive, sad and up-to-date (he revised the blog several days later with new information) picture of the topic so I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. I like the fact they he did not stop with screen reader AT but also mentioned issues for folks with mobility issues and the requirement to use a mouse/pointing device to access content and perform functions with many of these services.

So, if you are looking here for a good, reliable and accurate review of the major social networking services and their lack of accessibility, head on over to Marco’s and check it out. I will be adding him to my blogroll.

Happy New Year – Let’s hope there are new and good things in store for accessible web design in 2012.

This item also published on Maine CITE News.

The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article about the use of “apps” for children with pervasive developmental disorders like autism. They note:

Anecdotally, teachers, parents and therapists describe the profound difference that apps for Apple and Android products have made in helping autistic children develop skills. IPad programs have provided a means of communicating for some children with autism who cannot speak or have language delays. Other apps help children learn to handle social situations that can be stressful, like crowds at malls. And many programs can help develop fine-motor skills, which promote functions like writing or manipulating small objects.

Several lists of apps are provided and readers are encouraged to add more to the list by making a comment.

Read the entire article: Finding Good Apps for Children With Autism

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Photo credit: Licensed by Creative Commons by Notions Capital

When I had the opportunity to meet with one of the focus groups, most of the other faculty were rather traditional types who had graced the campus for many years and appeared to enjoy their roles as “sage on the stage.” There was quite a bit of skepticism about distance learning and even though I had a positive reputation for teaching in the traditional modality at that university, the majority of faculty didn’t really seem to value what I was doing.

When it came my time to talk, I chattered away about my views and how as an institution we needed to get out there and expand out “presence” on the Internet and World Wide Web, that we needed to build more server capacity and in particular, not invest in the large scale college library expansion program that was in the works. I remember the look of disdain on the faces of my colleague, but I pressed forward. I can remember one asking me if I really believed that there would come a time when traditional students would actually take distance learning classes in lieu of the campus-based, terrestrial offerings that then were the norm.

The gentleman who was leading the focus group appeared to welcome my vision and even though I suspect he was not suppose to shape the discussion, he gave me lots of clear messages that he thought my vision was indeed the correct one.

The library project did go forward, but on a much smaller scale. Fortunately, the director of the library was also a very smart guy and he and his staff had already seen the writing on the walls. In fact, he eventually became the vice president in charge of information technology at the university and shepherded through a rather dramatic number of technology advances in the next decade.

With this backdrop, I read the recent news story about the pending closure of the medical library at Johns Hopkins University. While this is a loss of tradition, it is clearly, as the title mentions, a sign of the times. The author makes this clever observation:

People don’t go to Johns Hopkins for appendectomies. They go there with rare and difficult conditions to seek help from the top medical minds in the world. If I’m at Hopkins as a patient and not to visit old friends and colleagues, I don’t want my team of physicians and residents to be searching through the stacks for possible answers or keys to my treatment. I want them to pull out their iPads and have instant access to the information they need to make me better.

Read the whole article “Sign of the times: Johns Hopkins shutters its medical library.”

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Photo credit: Image licensed through Creative Commons by Brett Jordan

We’ve recently made some accessibility enhancements to Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. Improvements have been made in keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers among other items.

Google Calendar: Google Calendar now has new keyboard shortcuts and better screen reader support for our blind users. Members of the blind community can now use JAWS, VoiceOver and ChromeVox to manage your calendars, create and edit events or simply browse your events.

Google Docs and Google Sites: New keyboard shortcuts and better screen reader support with support for two screen readers: JAWS and ChromeVox.

Read the rest of the report

As reported here, you will recall that Google had gotten into some hot water with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) last spring. NFB had lodged a formal complaint to the Department of Justice on concerns it had regarding the accessibility of these free applications. We’ll be checking them out and spreading the word.

According to their official blog, Google reports that they have worked closely with the American Council of the Blind (ACB) to develop a survey that would give them “a greater understanding of how people choose and learn about the assistive technologies they use.” They go on to note that the survey “will help us design products and tools that interact more effectively with assistive technologies currently available to the blind community, as well as improve our ability to educate users about new features in our own assistive technologies, such as ChromeVox and TalkBack.”

The survey for people in the blind community, reportedly takes about 20 minutes to complete (link to the survey is here) and includes incentives by way of random drawings for gift certificates to Amazon.com.

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Photo credit: Licensed by Creative Commons by Robert Scoble

<rant>

I hope I am not the only one who is getting a headache from the Joomla! folks. Part of the problem is being caused by “business promoters” of all things Joomla. I mean, I appreciate that there are folks who are making a living by making the effort to take the open source CMS Joomla and create an easier to use, prettier to look at, and able to do more things product. But they are starting to make my head spin.

To give an example…today, I received an e-newsletter from a company (who will remain nameless) who sells value-added Joomla products (templates, mods, etc.). Nice folks.

The first article in the newsletter warns us that the end of version 1.5 is coming soon (in April 2012 BTW, eight months from now). They go on to talk about how Joomla 1.8 is right around the corner and that you should be preparing for this event. What!? Joomla 1.6 came out six months ago and Joomla 1.7 just came out two weeks ago! What’s the big hurry?

A couple of articles later the same newsletter has another story about the release of Joomla ver 1.6.6. What? This same company told me just two weeks ago that there would be no further development of Joomla 1.6 and that users of ver 1.6.5 (the then latest version) had to immediately switch to ver 1.7 or all of their websites would turn to pumpkins!!!

You can read about all the fun that caused me elsewhere in this blog.

I guess someone changed their minds and development on ver 1.6 is continuing.

The Joomla home planet gets into this fracas with this comment – clear as mud:

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6.6. This is a security release and is intended only for those users who are unable to use version 1.7.0. Most users should update to 1.7.0 unless there are specific reasons why they cannot use 1.7.0 at this time. Update instructions for updating from 1.6.5 to 1.6.6 are available here.

The Production Leadership Team’s goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community. Learn more about Joomla! developement at the Developer Site.

Version 1.6 will reach end of life on 19 August 2011. All users of version 1.6 should update to version 1.7.0 before that time. The update process to version 1.7 is very simple, and complete instructions are available here.

The thing for everyone to remember is, converting from 1.5x to anything is not an easy process. Many mods which you have learned to rely on are either not going to be upgraded or have a new equivalent built into the core, and more importantly, many of your v 1.5x theme files will not work with ver 1.6, 1.7 and presumably 1.8. If you purchased a theme or spent a lot of time developing one to your liking, it is likely that you will have to start all over again, or at the very least, spend some development time moving things around and getting them to work. Sure, the core and the database may covert easily, but getting your website looking good and running, well, that’s gonna take you some time.

</rant>

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Image licensed by Creative Commons by thetorpedodog

To be continued….

Getting version 1.7 to work correctly, and setting up the new template, will take time. So, in the meantime, I have my jebsblog/wordpress site serving as the primary landing spot for jebswebs.com.

My apologies that not all of the information from the main site is located here. If you have questions about jebswebs services, please use the contact page, send me an e-mail, or call me (207-622-7937) to get in touch.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

In recent years, the Joomla community has eased my neuroses with some nice update modules that made the process more tolerable. BTW, the best CMS upgrade process is with WordPress which is almost completely painless, click a button and wait for it to do its thing. But upgrades of Joomla historically have been a lot more complicated and my past experiences were never very pleasant.

Some of you may know that Joomla came out with a new version (1.6) about six months ago. I have been contently using version 1.5 on my jebswebs core site and for several clients. I had figured to wait at least six months to make sure all of the bugs and kinks were worked out before attempting to make the upgrade. So, this morning when I read a security announcement that 1.6 had some issues, would not be supported after August 19th of this year, and the recommendation was to upgrade to 1.7 immediately, I got a little nervous and figured today would have to be the day.

Girded with a several cups of coffee and the latest migration directions in hand, I set about the task, following the directions with religious zeal. Make backups: done, check tech requirements: check, install jUpgrade – a new module that would automatically upgrade the install from 1.5 to 1.6 painlessly: done. I even made backups of backups.

The process seemed to go smoothly. The new installation appeared within a new folder and opened and worked appropriately. The MySQL tables apparently all converted nicely, my content was all there. But the first signs of trouble were the fact that jUpdate had not installed Joomla 1.6, it installed Joomla 1.7. But that can’t be a problem, right?

I moved the site to the live side of the public HTML folder and made sure my images and other folders were all working. I moved the 1.5 installation into a folder /myoldsite and let it rip!

Then the fun began.

The first thing I tried to do was switch off to my old template so the new site would look like the old site. But I soon learned that my old template would not work with Joomla ver 1.7 (or version 1.6 for that matter). I next headed over to my friends at JoomlaShack where I purchased the original template.  I selected a new template (Enterprise) and made my purchase. When I then checked the JoomlaShack support site, I discovered that others were having problems with the Enterprise template working with Joomla 1.7. Ugh.

So, until this new template gets updated, I am stuck in the water having to use the default Joomla template for jebswebs.com. Sorry folks, I know it looks ugly. I hope to get it fixed soon. Stay tuned.

For those Joomla 1.5 users considering their options, sit tight for the time being. Joomla will be supporting 1.5 LTS (Long term support) for at least another nine months. Joomla has also announced that ver 1.8 (LTS) will be released in January. Hopefully by then all of the bugs will be gone.