Facebook, despite its ubiquity, has naver been very accessible. The pages are densely cluttered with an overload of information. Since the company is not doing much about it, there is now a Facebook Accessibility project going on at the volunteer developer group, Project Possibility. But I digress. Facebook has developed a free app, Facebook for...
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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 explanation...
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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 Portrait...
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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 was...
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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 iPhone. ...
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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 a...
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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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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. Wobbrock (iSchool) Exploring...
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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 select Zoom....
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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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Spotted on The Mac-cessibility Site, Anazon’s Kindle team is working on some accessibility improvements. The main focus seems to be on voice feedback during navigation. The lack of an audio interface meant that the Kindle text-to-speech feature, Talk to Me, would not be accessible to blind users without the help of a sighted person....
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Being an avid news junkie and a fan of the New York Times, it was inevitable that I find the NYTimes iPhone app. I found the app a while ago and have been drafting a review.  From an accessibility point of view the app had little going for it. Since it was slow to...
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There is hope! A few days ago, an email popped into my inbox about a new iPhone App. BigNames has been developed with accessibility in mnd. This is a first. BigNames is a contact app for the iPhone.  “BigNames displays your iPhone contacts extra-large and easy to read. Perfect for when you’re on the move...
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Apple previewed the upcoming summer release of the next iteration of its iPhone platform today. A small portion of these features have been documented on the web at the iPhone OS 3.0 Preview.How will iPhone OS 3.0 affect iPhone accessibility? To be honest, it is way too soon to say. Apple’s show today highlighted...
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