Archive for March, 2009

The Victoria and Albert Museum offers via Photographs Described for Blind and Partially Sighted Visitors. Currently this online collections has four historical images with descriptions for perusal. This section of the website looks at four very different historic photographs from the V&A’s collection. Each photograph is reproduced in colour and is accompanied by an...
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San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA just completed an exhibit of blind and visually-impaired artists in Creative Vision: An Exhibition on Vision and Perception. At the College’s Delta Center for the Arts, Creative Vision: is ran from February 26 to March 27, 2009. Note from the Gallery Director, Jan Marlese: I first became...
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In today’s Pogue’s Posts Blog, Pogue repeats a question from one of his readers; “Why Are PDFs Still in Portrait Orientation?” It is a question tha t I have been asking for a while not, but one for which I offer a better solution: reflow is better than landscape. Why Are PDFs Still in...
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Fred’s Head blog just posted about Sight-Free Dialing with the iPhone. This caught my attention and brought me to the iHear Dialer app from KayZee Solutions. This is a great new accessibility app for the iPhone. iHear Dialer allows you to dial phone numbers without looking at the keypad. As you move your hand...
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Speeding up a recording used to make it sound like Alvin & the Chipmunks. Growing up, I had a cassette player for the blind that had a variable speed playback control. Being a kid, I used it mainly for entertainment value. Fun...
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Recently I wrote about the first accessible iPhone app. BigNames, a large print, high contrast contacts directory app, is due for a review upon its upcoming update release, when it will be available for the Touch. I asked the developer, Jason Moore,  to share a little about himself and developing accessible apps fro the...
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The Krugman Song on Youtube.
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Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum ran a photography course for some of its visually impaired patrons. The museum has put together the results in a nice website: Photographs by Blind and Partially Sighted Visitors. This is a collection of photographs taken by blind and partially sighted visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum during...
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WritePad is a handwriting recognition engine for the iPhone from Phatware. WritePad is the free basic app that powers Phatware’s more functional suite of apps, WritePad Affairs, WritePad Events and WritePad Notes. WritePad Supports iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 or later WritePad is a new custom editor for iPhone that utilizes handwriting recognition input...
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The scoop we use for our morning coffee is coffee colored. This makes it hard for me to see how much coffee is in the scoop. Instinctively, I tilt the scoop so that the nearest light falls across it rather than directly on it. The cross light brings out the texture of the grounds,...
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As seen on Mac-ccessibility, there are some engineers at University of Washington’s AIM research group working a neat project to make mobile devices with touch screens, like the iPhone, more accessible to blind users. Slide Rule: Making Touch Screens Accessible to Blind Users Shaun K. Kane (iSchool), Jeffrey P. Bigham (CSE), and Jacob O....
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As I mentioned earlier, I had some Sportsplex Photos in the News. For the assignment, I submitted four more photos that did not make the cut. I liked this first shot a olt. It is a bit too artsy and dark, I think, for the paper. I had my light on a stand to...
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I downloaded the beta version of the next iteration of Google’s Chrome browser. The big accessibility improvement is the switch from text zoom to full page zoom. From the Zoom – Google Chrome Help page. If you’re using Google Chrome Beta, try out the new full-page zoom functionality. Go to the Page menu and...
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The Gadgetwise Blog @ NYTimes has a useful suggestion for DSLR owners on how to Take Better Photos With a Fast Prime Lens.  Prime lenses, which are lenses that do not zoom, can take better photos as they have fewer mechanical parts. Zooming in requires that you get closer to your subject and zooming...
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A fun way to liven up your computer screen is to add a favorite photo as the desktop background. The problem is the your family portrait or pet collage make the icons difficult to make out and the text hard to read. Moving to a solid color background, such as black, makes for a...
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