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: Make Them Work For...
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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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Lst week, the Gadgetwise Blogat the NY Times offered this Tip of the Week: Desktop Magnifying Glass. Tired of squinting at tiny type the screen all day? In Windows Vista, you can bump up the font size — right-click on the desktop, select Personalize and click on “Adjust font size.” Once the “DPI Scaling” window...
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Google Maps is a great thing. There is no question about it. But it is not perfect. Surprisingly, it suffers from the same gripe I have with map books and atlases. I can not read the print. It is simply too small, no matter how much you zoom in. This is true both...
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Twitter calls itself a a microbloogging service. What the heck is a microblog? Basically, it is a mix of blogging, text messaging and emailing. The New York Times’ David Pogue offere his take on Twitter in Twitter? It’s What You Make It. Pogue is right. Twitter is in the eye of the beholder,...
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Next in my series of iPhone app accessibility reviews is Easy E-Mail Free 1.1. As the company, Rock iPhone, puts it on their web site: Want to make email writing on iPhone much easier? Easy Email is what you’re looking for! Easy Email uses the wider landscape mode keyboard which is much easier for typing....
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The brouhaha over the new Kindle’s text-to-speech function possibly violating copyright has really caught fire. The issue hit the papers as well as the blogosphere. The Wall Street Journal carried the sotry with New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir. Several fellow accessibility blogs have picked up the issue. The Talking Books Librarian...
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Spotted on Slashdot, Author’s Guild Says Kindle’s Text-To-Speech Software Illegal. “The Author’s Guild claims that the new Kindle’s text-to-speech software is illegal, stating that “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” Forget...
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Last week, Google announced that its Book Search would be available for iPhone and other mobile device users. I like to read, so I thought I would see how it works and how accessible it is. I looked at another e-book reader, Stanza, in an earlier post, so I will look at the differences. As...
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The NY Times, along with every other news source, is reporting on the new version of Amazon’s e-book reader, the Kindle.Buried among all the other changes is one important accessibility feature: text-to-speech. According to the Times: Giving Voice to the Kindle: The Kindle 2 also has text-to-speech built in. “Any book, blog, magazine or personal...
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A while back, I thought I had a great idea. I still think its is a great idea, but I was beaten to it. One of the major reasons I rarely use magnification software is that I find the process disorienting. You lose either the whole screen or an important piece of it to...
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Google Earth is a profoundly visual program. It is fun to watch the program zoom in and out, moving around the planet with breathtaking visual effect. It is useful to learn about the geography, both topographic and human, of particular locations. In the end, Google Earth is fundamentally visual, so why would it be...
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This is yet another idea for making WordPress more accessible. A simple way for a visually impaired user to make a web page easier to access, either directly or through a screen reader, is to simplify the web site. The easiest way to remove clutter is often to find the printer-friendly version. These print this...
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I am on the hunt for accessible iPhone apps. By accessible, I mean those easier to use for those of us with limited vision. Unfortunately, for now, profoundly blind users are out of luck when it comes to the iPhone. Still, you might think that the tiny screen on the iPhone is just too...
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There is no need to take the web as it comes. Fonts too small to read, color schemes that make you squint, bright white backgrounds that scream for you sunglasses, images too small to make out. These issues can be solved. You can take control. Changing colors, fonts and image size is no longer...
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