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From Glenda Watson Hyatt’s Do It Myself Blog, here are 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable. How many times do you skim an online article or blog post, looking for interesting or relevant links? Individuals with sight impairments using screen readers (software that reads aloud text on the computer monitor) can have...
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Spotted on Slashdot, Stem Cell Treatment To Cure the Most Common Cause of Blindness. Specifically, this treatment, if it passes the trials, should be a cure for AMD, age related macualr degeneration. As I have a form or juvenile macular degeneration, I have high hoped for some broader applicability. The Times Online reports that...
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As spotted on MacWord’s iPhone Central, Ars Technica is reporting that iPhone OS 3.0 to feature voice control and feedback. Various voice-related features, under the codename “Jibbler,” have been discovered in the version of SpringBoard set to ship with the next update to Apple’s mobile operating system. …. Not much information is known at...
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Google’s iPhone app brings most of Google’s many applications under one roof. It refers most features to that application’s mobile web site. Google Talk is one of these applications. Since my wife and I are one of those couples that instant message each from one room to the other, I wanted to test this...
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All Access Blogging has some great Tips for Your Blog. All Access Blogging focuses on making the blogosphere accessible, a goal close to my heart as well. Tips include: Fix Your Feed Icon What’s In Your Blog’s Title Bar? Text and Background Colors On Your Blog Can Help or Hurt Your Readers Blog Quizzes:...
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To keep track of all the blogs I like to follow, I use Google Reader. It has a nice clean interface and works in any browser from anywhere. So, I naturally wanted to check this out for the iPhone. Like most of Google’s online applications, access to Google Reader is through its mobile web...
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Apple has worked hard to make progress towards giving blind people access to the iPod system. The big move for Apple is the 4th generation iPod nano, which offers spoken menus and large font with high contrast screen and backlight. Unfortunately for me, this came out just before my last iPod upgrade. Apple paired...
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Carl Zeiss’ video headset, the Cinemizer Plus, has received the go-ahead from Apple for release as an iPhone accessory. This could be the most expensive accessible accessory for the iPhone yet (or ever). According to the web site, the Cinemizer Plus’ “image is optically tuned to appear as virtual 45-inch (diagonal) screen, as viewed...
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The iPhone’s built-in Calendar App is one of the more important features for a smart phone. Unfortunately, this program is very inaccessible. There are four accessibility features I look for in iPhone apps; zoom, landscape mode, adjustable color scheme, and adjustable font sizes. Calendar has none of these. As you can see in the...
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Today on Slashdot, Why the CAPTCHA Approach Is Doomed. Though CAPTCHA’s alleged doom is due to its technical limitations rather than its accessibility problems, the sooner its demise, the better. TechnoBabble Pro writes “The CAPTCHA idea sounds simple: prevent bots from massively abusing a website (e.g. to get many email or social network accounts,...
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Thanks to lodroridgzin, I ran acroos a web-based screen reader, WebAnywhere. WebAnywhere is a non-visual interface to the web that requires no new software to be downloaded or installed. It works right in the browser, which means you can access it from any computer, even locked-down public computer terminals. WebAnywhere enables you to interact...
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The Reading Rights coalition is organizing a protest today against the restrictions on the new Kindle’s text-to-speech feature. At noon in NYC, you can watch the event online. Please support us by joining our informational picket in front of the Authors Guild’s headquarters at 31 East 32nd Street in downtown Manhattan on April 7,...
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Following my earlier review of free Twitter apps on the iPhone, Accessing Twitter from the iPhone, a reader suggested I check out his favorite Twitter app, Tweetie. Tweetie is a feature-rich Twitter app that has added a couple of valuable accessibility features in its latest release, making Tweetie worth the $2.99 price tag. If...
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The first step to making a computer more accessible is to make everything on the screen bigger. This involves tricks like lowering the rsolution, zooming and using large fonts. These adjustments definitely increase readability and overall usability. There is a cost. Screen real estate becomes more valuable. Even larger monitors experience this problem. I...
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One of the most frustrating apps on the iPhone, from a readability point of view, is the App Store itself. Like it iTunes counterpart, the store uses unnecessarily tiny font.There is no workaround. You can’t zoom. You can’t go landscape. There is no font setting. You can’t even go to the mobile web site...
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