In any case, our friends overseas at the E-Access Bulletin reported recently on legislation here in the US that calls for requiring product manufacturers and suppliers of consumer technology to make their products accessible to blind consumers.  According to E-Access Bulletin:

Introduced by Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Illinois, the Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind Act 2010 is based around creating accessible alternatives to what it calls “increasingly complex user interfaces” found in consumer electronics.

Many of these devices, from televisions and dishwashers to office equipment such as photocopiers and fax machines, are operated by touch-screen technology or other visual displays that are not accessible to blind people, the bill says. “This growing threat to the independence and productivity of blind people is unnecessary because electronic devices can easily be constructed with user interfaces that are not exclusively visual”, it says.

What is even more interesting is the possibility that this legislation could also impact web accessibility. Again from the report in E-Access Bulletin:

Peter Abrahams, accessibility and usability practice leader at IT research organization Bloor Research, told E-Access Bulletin that as well as being a significant step for accessible manufacturing of consumer electronics, the bill could, in theory, also be used to enforce website accessibility. “I can imagine you could say that [a website] is the interface to a product or service, and therefore it has to be accessible and be covered by the same bill. My view is that in the future it could be used to push [the web accessibility] agenda as well.”

However, it may take some time for manufacturers and website owners to be affected by the technology bill, even if it is passed, warned Abrahams. The bill needs to pass both houses of the Congress by a majority vote, before being examined and signed by President Obama. This process, combined with setting up the office of non-visual access compliance and carrying out the study and report as set out in the bill, means it could be several years before the proposed legislation comes into effect.

Stay tuned.

Read the whole article on E-Access Bulletin Live.

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Image from Creative Commons/Wikipedia Commons

Seems I have been saying that a lot lately.

The latest is related to how to use WordPress. I had been making all of my posts “stick” to the home page by checking off “Stick this post to the front page” under the “Visibility” section in the Publish action box. I think I did this because when I first started using WordPress, the order of the posts were not correct (older posts were showing first).

In any case, it turns out the “sticky” button was causing more problems in that it was showing all of my posts on the home page despite the fact that I had the settings telling WordPress to only show the last five posts. Removing the “sticky” switch on all of my posts fixed this.

So the new thing I learned today…”Sticky buttons and sticky posts, make a mess!”

In their article, Report: Malicious PDF files comprised 80% of all exploits for 2009, ZDNet reports:

A newly released report shows that based on more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009, the use of malicious PDF files exploiting flaws in Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat not only outpaced the use of Flash exploits, but also, grew to 80% of all exploits the company encountered throughout the year.

The other blog, Adobe plugs more gaping holes in PDF Reader, ZDNet reports that Adobe has released a new patch for the Adobe Reader yesterday.

This morning, both of my Windows XP machines lit up with an announcement that there was a new version of Flash Player available and urged me to install. I did despite the fact that I manually updated them all last week when the first stories appeared that the patch was released.

Perhaps the scariest conclusion noted in the ZDNet article about report from ScanSafe was that:

Therefore, the increasing use of malicious PDFs can also be interpreted as the direct result of the millions of users using outdated and exploitable Adobe products (emphasis mine), with the only preference a malicious attacker could have in this case remaining the incentive based on the 99% penetration of Adobe Flash on Internet-enabled PCs.

I guess the adage, “you have no one to blame but yourself” comes to mind, but clearly, people have come to expect that the people who make the stuff that they run on their computers ensure that their stuff is safe.

So the message here folks is: when you get a notice that there is a new version of your software available, drop everything and install it.

My mind works that way. Give me a few words, and a song title or lyrics pop into my brain and usually out my mouth.

“Magic Mouse, build me a hundred….I want it, I want it, I want it…”

I know…I am showing my age.

In any case, the Apple Magic Mouse caught my attention and I did indeed secretly want to get my hands on one. It’s shape, color and “trackpad” features intrigued me. So, when I was in fact in need of another mouse – this for my new MacBookPro (MBP), my AppleFanBoi friend suggested I get on.

Seventy dollars later, it was ordered and within a week the box arrived.

I must confess that I have also been intrigued by Apple’s packaging department. They don’t do anything without panache. It took me a week to figure out what that flat black thing wrapped in plastic was in the MCP box. Who would have guessed they would supply you with a silk-like “dust cloth” to keep your screen clean. Don’t get me started with Apples use of all of that unique thin plastic wrap.

So, after what seemed like an inordinate amount of time to get the MBP’s Bluetooth to discover the mouse – or vice versa – the device came alive.

Sadly, my first discovery was that the Magic Mouse is designed for people who have hands the size of a … mouse. It is tiny, and flat. It immediately reminded me of the hockey puck that came with the original iMacs back in the mid 90’s. I had thought that Apple had learned its lesson by now. The Magic Mouse does NOT fit my paw.

The second big disappointment is: unless you are using your Magic Mouse on a mouse pad, the device does not slide very easily, and because the bottom is made of metal – unlike the el Cheapo plastic ones I have all over the house – it makes a considerable amount of noise when it “scrapes” along on the top of my desk.

The positives should also be mentioned: the touchpad-like scrolling function is flawless, very accurate and easy on the hand. Unlike a standard scroll wheel, there is no tension in the motion and you can control the cursor with much more accuracy than with a wheel, especially a wheel with a gear in it that gives the mouse that “ratchet” feel.

Second positive: the zoom feature. While holding the Control button, the scroll function activates the screen zoom. I don’t use it much, but it is nice to have.

But the small size of the Magic Mouse may be the deal breaker for me. We’ll play with it for a while longer and see.

The Magic Mouse does not support all of the great features that are found in the MBP trackpad and that was a big mistake on Apple’s part. It seems to me they could have added the three- and four-finger actions; maybe we’ll see those in the next version.

So, if you have seventy good ones burning a hole in your pocket and own a late model Apple computer, you’ll probably want one of these. If not, I’ll sell you mine – cheap.

If you have a client or boss to needs convincing as to why you need to build accessibility into your web design, have them take a look at this video.

DO IT on YouTube

I have disliked Flash for a long time, primarily due to its problems with assistive technologies; it often does not play well with screen readers, especially if it has not been developed correctly. In my mind, many Flash developers are graphic artists, illustrators or animators, and don’t really understand web design.

Add to this the fact that more people are now accessing web content via a non-traditional user agent (i.e., not a traditional browser) and you see why I agree with Bradley that Flash may be past its prime.

It’s ironic that Adobe developed Acrobat to find a way to share documents at a time just prior to the “invention” of HTML. Flash, build on the same business principles, was developed for the same reason. And once again, a new standard (HTML 5) may usurp their position. And, I should point out that the new standard will be accessible to screen readers.

But just as those who predicted the demise of Adobe Acrobat 15 years ago were wrong, I suspect it is not quite time for Adobe to throw in the towel and hire the undertaker. Look for Flash to be around for some time to come. But at least for some of us, there will be other options.

This will be interesting to watch.

I have been using the WAVE tool for years to do quick and dirty reviews of web pages for others and always use it to check my own work once it has been published to the web. The advantage of this new extension is that I will now be able to check the accessibility of my pages before publishing them live on the web.

The WAVE Dreamweaver extension (still in Beta) is free and works with Dreamweaver CS3+.

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Under the “in the works” category is none other than Microsoft’s Office 2010 purported to be release sometime in June of this year. Already out in Beta, one of the features garnering my attention is the inclusion of a new “document Accessibility Checker.”

Direct from Microsoft’s Office Engineering blog they state:

To solve this problem in Office 2010 we created a document Accessibility Checker (like a spell checker, but for accessibility issues) as a core feature of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

We started by examining the most common accessibility problems in Office documents and bucketing them in terms of their severity – we ended up with three categories:

• Issues where content is unreadable. For example, a picture missing alternative text (alt text provides a text based representation of an image) is unreadable to a person who is blind.
• Issues where content is difficult to read. In general, these issues are less severe than unreadable content – for example, if an author has created a data table and used complex formatting to alter its presentation (i.e. using blank rows or columns, or merged and split cells), then a person with a disability might have difficulty understanding content in the table.
• Issues that may or may not make content difficult to read. In our explorations, there were a set of issues that potentially cause users with disabilities difficulty for which we don’t have a high confidence, automatic way to determine whether the issue is really a problem. For example, knowing whether or not the reading order of objects on a slide or cells in a layout table is optimal for a particular reader falls into this bucket.

Based on these three categories, we came up with a set of issues our checker looks for (described in more detail below) – when presented to the user, they are bucketed into “Errors”, “Warnings”, and “Tips” – these buckets correspond to the above three descriptions.

As you know from reading this blog, the best solution to ensuring all documents on the web are accessible is to ensure that ALL documents – wherever they are – are accessible. This includes all word processor, spreadsheet, presentational and desk-top-publishing documents. PDF documents, often the most controversial of all web documents – in terms of accessibility – are best made from documents that are already accessible. This new tool will be a big step – I hope – in making that happen.

From the description provided by Microsoft, it appears the new document Accessibility Checker will be a “voluntary” wizard that users must choose to activate and use. It is not clear if it can be made to be “involuntary” and require authors to review and fix their documents before saving them. But that’s probably asking too much. Microsoft’s angle on this is:

For organizations that are concerned about compliance for employees, we’ve provided several group policy settings that can be used to customize exactly which accessibility violations are checked. Administrators can also increase the visibility and emphasis of the Prepare for Sharing information when there are errors or warnings. Finally, IT departments can leverage Office 2010’s UI extensibility to enforce a workflow that requires users to run the checker – this will help many corporations reduce the risk of employees creating inaccessible content and increase the amount of accessible information available to people with disabilities.

I’ll be interested in seeing this feature when it comes out. Stay tuned.

That said, the e-reader, and specifically the Kindle by Amazon, has been having a rough time of it. First introduced in November of 2007, the Kindle was a big hit, selling out in the first five hours and on backorder for months after that. The Kindle 2, released two years later was equally well received and the DX version released a couple of months later was also very popular.

Then the fun began. A controversy with The Author’s Guild forced Amazon to hobble the Kindle 2 by shutting off the text-to-speech feature. Disability groups stormed the Manhattan offices of The Author’s Guild to protest and claim discrimination, but the device, it seems, was already inherently inaccessible to people with disabilities.

In May of 2009, Amazon announced a bold move of a offering the Kindles to several large US universities with the goal of taking over the college textbook industry and making paper college textbooks a thing of the past. More fun followed when the inherent inaccessibility of the device became widely known. A number of the  universities that piloted the program with the Kindle backtracked and dropped out when they started to see the accessibility problems. “Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also examined the utility of the Kindle DX as a teaching device and decided that they would not use the Kindle DX until it is accessible to blind individuals” – this according to the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).

The latest news on Kindle is a settlement with the USDOJ announced this week. It states:

Under the agreements reached today, the universities (Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Reed College, and Arizona State University) generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.

This sounds pretty bad for Amazon and the Kindle.

And given Mr. Jobs recent efforts at making Apple products fully accessible, one can only imagine that the rumored “Apple Table device” WILL be fully accessible and perfectly timed to kick butt.

Stay tuned.

The easiest thing to do was to simply change the font-family style element from Georgian/serif to a san-serif. That has made a tremendous difference. Let that be a lesson to you; a simple font change can make your whole site look completely different.

There are still some font elements I don’t like, but I gotta search out the code to find where the CSS for that particular code is hiding. Always fun trying to crack someone else’s code.

Next, I need to work on getting/creating some new graphics for the site. With my new HP Pavilion Elite, crunching graphics is a breeze. So, stay tuned.

It may not be spring (look at the photos I just posted of the New Years Storm of 2010), but it is the New Year and change is in the air.

~j

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Image licensed by Creative Commons

A client of mine asked about this topic and, in doing my homework, I am learning that this is something where there are no easy answers. It seems that there are general issues with most if not all of the standard (free) WordPress (WP) themes and there may even be some issues under the hood. A Google search leads to a couple of folks who are claiming their theme meets the standards.

Our friend and colleague Dennis Lembree, of @AccessibleTwitter fame, is apparently also seeking the Holy Grail and wrote about his quest this past summer on his blog. In the responses to his query, there were several free WP themes suggested. I have just switched to one of those and am testing it out. Until I have reviewed it completely, that’s all I’ll say on the topic.

But this is a good time to again mention something I am fond of repeating. You can build the best content management system in the world – one that is completely accessible out of the box – and one user can ruin the accessibility with one simple action like failing to add ALT text to an image or creating a hyperlink using the words “click here.” You simply cannot rely on the software to ensure accessibility. Vigilance is the key.

As I continue my search, I’ll keep you posted. Feel free to comment.