I’m downright appalled at how much I’ve neglected this blog in the past month. The fact of the matter is that work demands, among other things, contributed to theaccessibility.com taking a hiatus.

Nevertheless, that still doesn’t make me feel good about disrupting what was becoming a good blogging rhythm. And we all know that frequency of quality posting is key to any successful blog.

This is a short blog post to get back into the swing of things.

Last week, Apple released iPhone OS 3.1. There are some nice features in the release, but one in particular adds a nice little accessibility win.

The upgrade makes it easier to activate the accessibility features on your iPhone. By clicking the Home button three times, you can toggle on VoiceOver, Toggle White on Black, and Ask.

While arguably a minor enhancement, anything that makes accessibility features easier to get to is admirable. As I’ve said before, Apple seems to genuinely take accessibility seriously, as they continue to evolve their products such as the iPhone, Snow Leopard and now the mobile OS. Are they perfect? Of course not. But at least there is continual progress.

Tags: apple, iphone, mobile

I’ve admitted numerous times that I’m an Apple devotee. So maybe I’m biased when I laud their efforts in the accessibility realm. However – and perhaps it’s in part because they have always done a good job “getting it” when it comes to creating software and hardware that are both well-designed and easy to use – they seem to at the very least take accessibility seriously and continue adding or bolstering accessibility features in their products with each release.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard is slated for a September 2009 release. As with most of their products, they have an accessibility features page for Snow Leopard and the OS X platform in general.

Among the heralded Snow Leopard accessibility enhancements:

• More robustness to the built-in VoiceOver capabilities, particularly for web browsing
• Major enhancements to their trackpad – which will represent the active window, enabling users to hear what item they hover over, as well as to discern and navigate through multiple items on the screen through finger movements
• Support for over 40 plug-in Braille displays
• The rotor capability – an enhanced capability of the trackpad to enable users to use a “dial” motion for cycling through text word or character at a time, and also to navigate a web page by common items, such as headers, links and imagery
• Technology that to a degree overcomes sites’ accessibility shortcomings by assigning “auto web spots” denoting important elements of the site. One can, for example, assign certain areas of a regularly-frequented site so that, in the future, VoiceOver can skip right to those elements first.
• VoiceOver Commanders – a new enhancement to the VoiceOver admin utility that allows for greater automated actions and keyboard shortcuts

Many of these features, on the surface, promise to offer greater ease of use, particularly for the visually-disabled — from all-around usage of your Mac to web surfing specifically. How effective they are, of course, remains to be seen when Snow Leopard arrives. Also, with just about all the enhancements directed towards the visually-disabled, how will Snow Leopard work for those with other disabilities, such as limitations of motor skills and hearing problems?

Tags: apple, braille, mac os x, snow leopard, VoiceOver

I’ve had the opportunity recently to do some basic accessibility testing on some sites, and thought I’d share just a few of the tools I use to make certain aspects easier. There are many out there, with varying degrees of usefulness. This list barely scratches the surface.

Firefox Accessibility Extension 1.4.5.0
This toolbar gives you a handful of features that aid in accessibility testing. You can run a report that notes accessibility failures. You can easily identify important elements of a page such as title, headings, frames, and links. It gives you image options such as viewing alt tags in context, or viewing the page without images altogether.

There are also built-in validation offerings, as well as color contrast findings and keyboard navigational aids. It directs you to options such as the Cynthia Says Web Content Accessibility Report and WebAIM WAVE

Web Developer 1.1.6 add-on for Firefox
Another Firefox extension that enables you to check out aspects of accessibility is Web Developer for Firefox. You can easily disable elements such as CSS and images, as well as run automated tests such as Validate CSS, Validate HTML, and Validate Section 508, which utilizes Cynthia Says.

Juicy Studio Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser
There are numerous tools out there for testing color contrast, but I find myself in the habit of using the one at Juicy Studio. In determining if text on backgrounds (colors or imagery) meets the minimum WCAG 2.0 requirement of 4.5:1 (3:1 for larger text), all you have to do is enter the foreground and background colors and you’ll see how you’re doing.

GrayBit.com
This is an interesting tool that renders a site in grayscale. By pulling color out of the equation, it enables you to get a raw sense of visual contrast.

Of course, none of these really do everything for you. Looking right in the code of a page, or carefully navigating through with your own senses offer invaluable insights as to how well a site has been set up.

Tags: accessibility tools, color contrast, firefox

In a fascinating nexus of accessibility and social media right here in the state of Wisconsin, a researcher posted a message on Twitter using a brain-computer interface system — basically by thought.

Adam Wilson, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison researching biomedical engineering, posted the message “using EEG to send tweet” by using technology in which the letters of the alphabet flashed individually on a screen, and the computer was able to gauge brain activity, selecting the desired letter when brain responds to it flashing.

Such technology has a long road to go before being mainstream, but its successful test on an Internet application opens up tremendous potential in enabling those whose bodies are inoperable to communicate and interact online.

Read more and watch a video here:

• Researcher use brain interface to post to Twitter (WTN News)

Tags: als, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, brain-computer interface system, eeg, twitter, university of wisconsin-madison, uw

It’s one thing to summarize screen reader technology in a few sentences. It’s entirely more meaningful to watch one in action.

Victor Tsaran, an accessibility engineer at Yahoo, talks about and demonstrates how a blind user navigates their computer via a screen reader. It’s a revealing look into an experience of which most of us fully-sighted people have no frame of reference.

Of course, it should be noted that there is no captioning or text version of this video, for those with hearing disabilities.

Tags: assistive technology, screen readers, visually impaired