At this point it’s no secret that I’m a diehard Apple fan. My family bought the very first Macintosh in the mid 1980′s, and I’ve never been without one since.

I’ve blogged before about accessibility features that Apple has put into their products, from their operating systems to the iPhone. While it’ll forever be a debate if they’ve gone “far enough” with their considerations for those with disabilities, the point I continue to maintain is that they seem to take it seriously enough to continue adding enhancements.

We’re on the cusp of another Mac OS update, with Lion roaring in any day now. I for one can’t wait to get my paws on it, especially at its ridiculously reasonable price of $29.99. They’re touting that it’s littered with over 250 enhancements.

Here’s a rundown of some of the touted new accessibility features:

• Addition of picture-in-picture zoom – to enhance the zooming experience and providing greater overall context of how what you’re focusing on fits in with the overall page/screen.
• Support for 80+ Braille tables across multiple languages
• Greater control over how and how much information comes across via a refreshable Braille device
• Greater precision in the appearance of the pointer when viewed at larger zoom levels
• Greater customization of VoiceOver, enabling it to perform in different manners for different activities
• Screen sharing – enabling users to assist other users directly

You can find out about all the new features of Lion at Apple’s OS X Lion Features.

As always, we’ll have to see these features in action to gauge whether they truly make disabled Mac users’ lives easier. Hopefully by the end of this month, we’ll start finding out.

Further reference:

• Current Mac OS X accessibility features
• Apple’s accessibility statement

Tags: apple, braille, lion, mac os x, refreshable braille, VoiceOver, zoom

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

It’s no great revelation that many people use Internet Explorer to comb the web, while others prefer Firefox or Safari. Some are giving Chrome a go, and a small percentage hop around cyberspace through Opera. Those of us in the web design and development world use all of the above (or at least should!)

I remember, back in my college days when the Internet was first making its foothold, I used the text-only browser Lynx to putter around, mostly because I had problems getting Mosaic to work on my Mac and 2400 modem.

As I began researching web accessibility, I was surprised to read that people still use Lynx.

Sure, there are people restricted by low bandwidth Internet access who would sooner get to where they are going than endure painfully long load times.  But Lynx by its nature has an attribute that makes it particularly appealing to people with certain disabilities — because it strips down a webpage to its most basic, GUI-less state, and can be completely navigable by keyboard. For someone with physical limitations that affect the motor skills necessary to navigate with a mouse, strict keyboard navigation is much easier.

Some other assistive technologies that aid the disabled in their web surfing:

JAWS™ screen reader
JAWS is long-standing software that enables the visually impaired to navigate Windows more easily. It uses text-to-speech technology and also interacts with refreshable Braille displays (to be discussed in a moment). Working over the top of Windows, it begins its speech capabilities upon startup. A user navigates using keyboard commands and shortcuts. This extends to Internet Explorer as well, reading aloud what is displayed through the code of the web page.

Naturally, as we’ll talk about at length in future posts, how accessible a site is determines how well programs like JAWS present its material to blind visitors.

Like a lot of assistive technologies, JAWS is not inexpensive. It runs $900 and up. Another option in roughly the same price range is Windows-Eyes.

VoiceOver
Built right into Apple’s OS X since 10.4, VoiceOver allows users to navigate about their Mac using keyboard commands and voice. It works with Braille displays and boasts being very intuitive for users of Windows-Eyes and JAWS who are switching to Mac. 

Refreshable Braille Displays
Some blind computer users prefer to use speech technology to navigate, while others opt for Braille. Refreshable Braille displays, in layman’s terms, raise dots to form the Braille that enables the visually impaired to read whatever the screen reader is capturing. As an example, Freedom Scientific offers 40-cell and 80-cell displays. Their devices are quite expensive in their own right, roughly $4000 and up. The ALVA Refreshable Braille display is another example.

Screen Magnifiers
Built in to Windows, Mac OS X, and several flavors of Linux is “magnifying glass” type of technology, to enable those who are visually impaired by limited sight to zoom in on whatever they want on their computer screen, including web browsers.

There are certainly other assistive technologies that will crop up in future posts. These are but a sampling. Feel free to pass along others worth mentioning in the meantime. As I continue along with my Web Accessibility 101 series, I hope to better flesh out the user experience that various disabilities create. 

Web accessibility — specifically, how designers and developers build out their sites — make such assistive technology’s jobs easy or very difficult.

Tags: accessibility, assistive technology, braille, jaws, screen magnifiers, screen readers