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.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the announcement from Google that they had markedly improved the accessibility of various free apps they deliver to the public. In a article from the E-Access Bulletin of October, Brian Gaff, an accessibility columnist says “not so fast!”

Google Gaps:

Our regular correspondent Brian Gaff, who is on the committee of the Kingston upon Thames Association for the Blind, writes in to grumble about accessibility issues relating to Google services.

“Judging by the comments in the Google group ‘accessible’ it seems that Google have painted themselves into a corner with their new online apps like Google Plus and Google Docs,” Gaff says. “Half of them won’t work with most basic screenreaders and so they add ChromeVox to their Chrome browser. Hardly what blind folk would want, to have to alter access technology just to use Google’s stuff.

“The failing here surely is that the folk writing the code are not aware enough of what works and what does not for blind access. It’s sad that in this age we are still saying that the writers of code are not educated in making sites that just work out of the box, so to speak.

“Surely in this age when people want more users to generate more revenue, it ought to be a no-brainer to get as many folk as possible to be able to use web sites, software and online systems, but it seems it’s not. We are invisible I suspect.

“I block Google’s ads now as they persist in trying to sell me Venetian blinds… grin.”

Copyright 2011 Headstar Ltd http://www.headstar.com .

From CBS News-60 Minutes:

(CBS News) Ten-year-old Nuno Timoteo, an autistic child who does not speak, was thought to have the intelligence and attention span of a two-year-old until teachers put an iPad in his hands and learned he loved opera and classical music. Joshua Hood, 27, also non-verbal and autistic, was thought to understand much of his world, but his lack of speech frustrated him and all around him until he began communicating freely with a touch-screen tablet computer.

Nuno, Joshua and others whose autism prevents normal speech have made these breakthroughs with the help of tablet computers and special applications that allow them to communicate, some for the first time. Lesley Stahl reports on this new tool for understanding autism for a “60 Minutes” segment to be broadcast on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

More of this story from 60 Minutes…

A preview of the episode…

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.

For more information about this story and to read it in its entirety, please visit the AST website.

Two prominent disability rights groups have filed suit against prominent media companies for failing to provide closed captioning on internet videos.

In June, the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) charged Netflix in Federal court with violating the ADA based on the limited number of captioned shows available through the company’s “Watch Instantly” option. See the release announcing the lawsuit, and the actual complaint [PDF].

At the state level, the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD) has made a similar charge against news giant CNN. GLAD’s lawsuit alleges that CNN.com is violating California’s anti-discrimination statutes, the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Disabled Persons Act, by preventing access to much of its news content. Both lawsuits come after months of active petitioning by NAD, GLAD and many others concerned with equal access to internet media.

Netflix and CNN acknowledge that the technology is readily available to add captioning, but question whether current legislation does in fact require them to provide it. The ADA and the Unruh Act became law well before anyone knew the how prevalent web media would become, and, as such, have no specific wording that legislates captioning of streamed movies and news. The Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act which became law last year will change this very soon. An FCC advisory committee has been hard at work since January developing specific recommendations for video programming accessibility. The committee has clearly made internet captioning its top priority, assigning the first and earliest report deadline to the work group examining the issue.

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Photo credit: Image licensed through Creative Commons by Daniel Oines

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

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.

The process to get involved does require installing a free Beta-Tester plugin to your WP install, activating it, and then downloading and installing the latest beta version of the WP core. I decided against installing this myself on this jebswebs blog as I was not sure if it would mess things up. They give you fair warning that once installed, it may be impossible to go back to a stable version – I’m fairly threat sensitive.

I encourage readers to check it out and consider testing and providing input. Here is the link to the Make WordPress Accessible blog.

First, the on-line captioning system that I described in my March 10^th blog – Universal Subtitles – is just one of a number of on-line services. Here are some more:

• CaptionTube
• dotSUB
• OverStream
• Subtitle-horse
• Easy YouTube caption creator (from accessify.com)

There is also this great resource that provides lots of information about captioning video that is supported by the National Association of the Deaf.

Another point of information

I have long heard, and often preached that one of the advantages of captioning your videos was to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What I had heard was that the search engines were able to spider through your caption file, index the content and add it to their inventory. Well that is not exactly correct. The big boys and girls – Google and Bing – do not index caption files. But the good news is that I have discovered a new service called 22frames.com that intends to do just that. Here’s how they describe themselves:

By continually indexing videos from these multiple hosts, this site offers an increasingly comprehensive catalog covering many different topics. Indexing is mostly automated using APIs and specialized web crawlers. User submissions of videos and channels also play an important role.

22frames is still in early development and there is no indication how many videos they have already indexed. Their technology sounds interesting and hopefully will be mainstream someday.

In closing, one of my upcoming blogs will discuss the inaccessibility of Flash video like YouTube for screen reader users. I’m working on that now.

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Photo credit: Image licensed by Creative Commons by matsuyuki