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

As I covered in Web Accessibility 101: Assistive Technologies, the text browser Lynx is particularly useful for stripping down a web site to its raw, GUI-less nature.

Why is this useful? Well, someone with a motor skill disability that prevents them from effectively using a mouse can navigate a website in Lynx solely by keyboard. Also, blind web surfers using certain refreshable Braille displays can use Lynx as their browser. There are others – disabled or not – who may have connection or hardware limitations that make graphical web browsing slow or just impractical.

Lynx strips out all graphical elements as well as JavaScript, leaving just the raw text, links and alt tags. As such, depending on the complexity or manner by which a site was constructed, a user surfing the web this way may be able to get around, or may be hopelessly barred from getting where they are trying to go.

I recently checked out my site in Lynx and was pleased to see that, overall, one can get around effectively via the arrow keys. I can’t take too much credit for that, given I’m using WordPress as the guts of this blog, but it’s at least another area of accessibility where I can set my mind at ease.

If you’re a Mac user like me, you can download Lynx right from Apple’s website. Once you install it, you can fire up Terminal, type in “lynx” and surf the web.

Otherwise, check out the Lynx site for more information.

Tags: apple, assistive technology, braille, internet software consortium, lynx, terminal

Next week, the Paciello Group — an organization that works with all manner of entities from governmental to commercial to ensure their technologies are accessible for all people — will be presenting a webinar on Flash and accessibility on Tuesday, March 31st.

There is also one on Wednesday, April 1 about PDF forms and conforming to WCAG 2.0 standards.

Both will take place at 11 a.m. Central time.

Adobe has more details in an entry on their accessibility blog entitled “Accessibility webinars on Flash and PDF.”

Related Links:

• The Paciello Group and Adobe Present WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Webinars for Flash and PDF
• Adobe’s Accessibility blog

Tags: Acrobat, adobe, flash, paciello group, PDF, WCAG

This past week, Apple released Safari 4.0 beta. With touted speed enhancements that put it ahead of the competition, the beta reportedly has even pushed Safari’s market share over the 10% hump.

As touched on in “The iPhone and Accessibility“, Apple openly demonstrates a commitment to accessibility in its products. How much they succeed will always be open for debate, but it’s certain that they treat the subject seriously.

Even though alphabetizing has more to do with it than anything else, front and center on their 150 Features page for Safari 4 is Accessibility.

New to Safari 4, according to Apple, is support of Accessible Rich Internet Applications, or ARIA. On the heels of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 becoming a Recommendation this past December, just last week WAI-ARIA was published as a Last Call Working Draft. WAI-ARIA takes web accessibility considerations to the next level, helping establish guidelines for dynamic content using more advanced technologies like Ajax and JavaScript. ARIA opens the door for utilizing such coding to interact with assistive technologies.

Also improved with Safari’s new beta are greater Zoom features — combining keyboard commands, Multi-Touch, and a Zoom button that can easily be added to the toolbar. The user can zoom in and out while text and imagery scale accordingly and keep the layout intact.

These, paired with Apple’s already-integrated VoiceOver screen reading feature, keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to create or download custom stylesheets for desired viewing states, make Safari 4.0 — while certainly not a perfect accessibility experience just yet — appear to be progressing respectably.

Tags: accessible rich internet applications, apple, aria, multi-touch, os x, safari, safari 4 beta, VoiceOver, W3C, wai-aria, web browsers, zoom