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

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

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

Admittedly, I have been and always will be an Apple devotee. With that disclaimer aside, during one of my many ventures through the Web looking for interesting web accessibility topics, I came across extensive coverage of the topic of accessibility on Apple’s website.

To cover the highlights briefly, Apple claims the iPhone has these accessibility features:

For the Visually Impaired:

• Physical buttons for commands such as sleep, ringer and home
• Zoom ability for viewing content
• Font size increasing for Mail
• Alert and ringtone customization based on audio, visual or vibration

For the Hearing Impaired:

• Support for open and closed captioning, as well as subtitles
• Using Safari, ability to use web-based instant messaging services such as Meebo
• SMS texting
• Headset options including hearing-aid induction ear loop
• Visual Voicemail feature
• TTY support (with a separate iPhone TTY Adapter)

They similarly point out some of these features — like the tactile buttons, voice dialing, and assignable ringtones — as being accessible to those with physical disabilities as well.

Furthermore, AT&T has a Text Accessibility Plan for iPhone, which offers unlimited messaging and data usage and pay-per-use voice and Visual Voicemail.

There are conflicting views, not surprisingly, on how successful Apple’s accessibility efforts with the iPhone are. Some laud Apple and AT&T for considering those with disabilities and providing growing options. Others feel that these features aren’t enough.

For example, Touchscreens, from the inability to feel buttons to supplying multiple levels of menuing, provide significant problems for those unable to see. See TechNewsWorld article “Is Technology Accessibility the New Green?.”

Again, like website accessibility, it is not always practical and feasible to make something for absolute everybody? The challenge is continuing to push the technology envelope in making cool and useful new innovations, while doing as much as possible to enable those with disabilities to enjoy the experience as well.

Does the iPhone have further to go? The answer seems to be yes, but I would say that Apple at least appears to take the subject of accessibility seriously, and all signs point to them doing better with future releases.

A sampling of differing viewpoints in the blogging world:

• Forget the iPhone: accessibility trumps trendiness from Computing Unplugged Magazine
• iPhone Accessibility: But Not For Me from ShellyBlog
• AT&T Intros iPhone Text Accessibility Plan; Phone Still Not Accessible to Blind Customers from Disability Nation

Tags: accessibility statement, apple, iphone, safari, sms, tactile buttons, text telephone, touchscreens, TTY, zoom