Do you are understand that web accessibility is really not hard?
I mean, the web and computers are inherently 'visual' mediums.
Incorrect. The web is an information medium. As far as the computer goes, the display and keyboard are really kind of arbitrary, the compelling action takes place between those two!
I mean, I feel for the handicapped, and appreciate making things as accessible as possible, but, isn't it going a bit far on things that just are naturally aimed for normal people?
So, do you think it is a good practice for the Federal government to build (or pay for) things that create obstacles to citizens with disabilities? Or for the Feds to build/pay for applications that provide an obstacle to their current (and future) employees with disabilities?
I'm thinking geez... what a crock. NONE of the people needing training were handicapped... yet the rules still applied...
Some random observations:
Accomdations are still easier to provide in-person than remotely.
Odds are that with remote training, there would have been more participants, and likely some with disabilites.
The remote conferencing systems are way behind the ball on 508, and will never get their act together if they are not pressured by potential Federal customers to do so.
Why should it necessarily be that more efficient == less expensive, especially in the short term? Fossil fuels means taking advance of a resource that has taken literally millions of years to accumulate.
I think renewable implies efficient, at least enough for you to let the grandparent comment slide.
I'm convinced that you cannot have a good knowledge of the history of the textual transmission of the Bible and be a Protestant.
There are many liberal progressive protestants, whole demnominations really. I'm convinced that you cannot have a good knowledge of the history of the textual transmission of the Bible and be a fundamentalist.
The speech output option of Rockbox lets you navigate menus and track names and such, but is does not let you hear the title of the track while the song is playing. That aspect is pretty slick!
I wish I could remember the name of this device, but it was essentially a MP3 player with no screen; just directional buttons and voice-based navigation. It was manufactured for blind users, and it worked wonderfully. It could even read text files and accept CF cards for expansion!
I have never heard of any MP3 player that works from voice commands, so I would like to hear more about that! Or do you mean synthesized speech based navigation? If so, you may have been thinking of RockBox. Which is FOSS that runs on a variety of hardware.
I think that a cell phone with just buttons on it and braille lettering would suffice, provided that the voice navigation is really good. An added advantage is that having no screen can make for very thin and attractive devices, if aesthetics is something of a priority for them.
I think this could also be a good opportunity to market to tech-phobic grandma types that want a cell phone that is only a phone. ("Why does a phone need a screen anyway?")
The only cell phone I have encountered without a screen (Owasys 22C) was not as thin as I thought it could/should be. This was a couple of years ago though. Aesthetics can be more than visual. I know a couple of blind folks that were sold on Macs because they took the time to hold a Mini in their hands.
I realize you are just trying to be funny, but iPod, iTunes, and Apple TV all support captioning, and have for some time. Jobs even metioned it during his last keynote. Here is a page about it: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/itunes/hearing.html
Microsoft Office is completely inaccessible on the Mac with VoiceOver.
This is true. Other developers heavily vested in Carbon, not the least of which is Adobe, also have huge problems with VoiceOver compatibility.
most fully blind people do use JAWS or WindowEyes because they have to... $1000 isn't a big deal.
Mostly true. If a blind person needs to use MS Office or other Windows-only applications, there is no choice, and a grand is not expensive if that is all it takes to get a job. But just as most people use MS Office Windows because they think they have to, most fully blind people use JAWS or WindowEyes without consideration of the alternatives.
then you can scan and read books, mail, magazines, etc
OCR software that is fully functional for a blind individual costs another $1000! Unfortunately, this is another absent product category under OS X and Gnome.
Hopefully they [Gnome vs. KDE] are similar.
I do not quite grok the reasons for the differences, I think they are architectural, but there are at least three decent screen readers for Gnome, but none for KDE.
Microsoft does do a good job with accessibility, especially Office, but there is no good to be had in overstating their effort.
You'll find a number of accessibility programs
As TaxMan explained in his reply to your post, those are more like utilities than robust features that can be relied upon every day.
And honestly, are you seriously trying to tell me that buying a Mac is ever cheaper than a roughly equivalent Windows PC? Macs are great computers, don't get me wrong. But they're also *premium* devices, and cost more than PCs.
You are trolling. It has been demonstrated repeatedly on/. (and everywhere else on the 'net) that Macs are more than price competative in the mainstream.
For a home or school user (or really anyone who does not have to run Windows) who happens to be blind, going Mac can save the person a thousand bucks!
remember when Apple said that everything from the Blue & White G3 onward were always going to be able to run Mac OS X.
I never understood that to mean forever, just OS X 10.0. (But who would have guessed the numbering scheme back then?) What actually surprised, and disappointed, me with 10.5 was the MHz rating as the deciding factor between supported or not, it just feels arbitrary. I was surprised, and delighted, when 10.4 supported G3 Macs with native firewire. IMHO, Apple should have optimized 10.5 until they could support all G4's. Then 10.6 could require G5 or Intel, and 10.7 would require Intel.
I have a G4 for my young kids running OS 10.4. I was hoping to use parental controls from 10.5, but giving up Classic is a non-starter. There is still quite a bit of software on the store shelves that is not Carbonized, it really sucks. For all the software they have, I still like Launcher better than the Dock.
Ditching PowerPC is an interesting choice though - it basically means that third-party developers won't be able to use any of the new features in 10.6 without abandoning a big chunk of their potential market.
This is sad development if true, but I think many PowerPC home users stayed with 10.4. Giving up Classic was too high a cost for the modest improvements of 10.5.
My three very favorite things about my Ti and Al PowerBooks: (1) The backlit keyboard, (2) ability to swap batteries while it is asleep (does the MBP do this?), (3) the relatively low weight. So unless you can account for that, you are IMHO comparing Apples and oranges. But if you look at the current iBook:
MacBook 13.3-inch glossy widescreen TFT display (1280 by 800)
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm ($100 upgrade)
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
$1,399, plus you get that sweet MagSafe power cord, Gigabit Ethernet (instead of 100), Mini-DVI (instead of VGA), FireWire, 802.11n (instead of g), and BlueTooth. All at just 5 lbs including the ruggedized construction.
Please pick a smaller display for the Dell and run the numbers again and let us know how it goes. And if the Dell has features I do not give it credit for, please correct me about that too!
I am not in the habit of responding to ACs, but you ask so nicely!
The technique of implementing a parallel text-only site is one that is explicitly allowed by 508 and WCAG 1.0 and still favored by some experts, advocates, and end-users. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of failures with implementations, the idea has long fallen out of favor and does not appear at all in WCAG 2.0 as a consequence.
For a web comic, I would recommend longdesc with the dialog. The Java site might be even more straightforward with things like: alt="screen shot of rendered code as described in the next paragraph". The thought exercise I like to recommend is to ask yourself: How would you read the page to an informed colleague over the phone?
Authors new to accessibility tend to get hung up on how hard it is to provide text equivalents when really all that is needed most of the time is text alternatives which "at least provide descriptive identification of the non-text content". This change in language from WCAG 1.0 to 2.0 is quite deliberate. If you make the paradigm shift from thinking of the web as a visual medium to that of an information medium, you will be on the right track.
Those of us who work in the field of disability regard this issue as a matter of Civil Rights. Once you understand that about us, it may help you understand why we are dogmatic about it.
The analogies people make to the build environment (e.g., ramps) are apt. If a designer does not incorporate the best practices that constitute electronic curb-cuts, there is nothing the best assistive technology (even at the helm of the most skilled end-user) can do to surmount the barrier.
Fortunately, things have matured enough that I no longer have to convince programmers to do the right thing, as the law and economics are on the correct side (this time). If you want to sell to the Federal government you need to make your stuff accessible.
LOL. No, but my high school was small, ~120 in a class. Barely enough to have cliques. Too poor to field a football team, so the jocks had friends who were non-jocks, and most had other interests besides sports. Without planning to, circumstances conspired to provoke a bunch of non-geeks to try something a little strange, and I was a good enough DM. A few key trend setter types gave it whirl, had fun, and ended up running campaigns on their own. This was in the early 80s, and the first round of accusation about links to Satanism, so there was the danger appeal. I also introduce the school to punk, despite being a complete poser, but I had at least heard of the Ramones.
The geeks I had learned from were friends for much a longer time, but I only got to see them once a week. Yes, they were at the next stage of gaming, and that was much better than being part of the "in crowd" -- but that was a whole different crew that didn't interact with my peers from school.
Here is an obit on a server that is likely to resist the/. effect.
Purely by luck I have been gaming since Chainmail was first published. Senior year in high school I was the only kid for miles and miles around with the books. I had to travel to next city to play once a week if that. But that was the year that the first bad press hit the mainstream. I actually became quite popular and, for the first and only time in my life, was with the "in crowd" for the rest of the year! Quite bizarre really, and had I been a year older or younger, that never would have happened!
Yes, I have heard of Wikipedia. It is how I came by the common name for that gem. Probably I should have pulled the full quote to make that a little more clear:
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity... except when it comes to the Bush White House.
Vought (perhaps unwittingly) turned Hanlon's razor into Grey's Law. The former is pretty well known, not so much the latter, and seemed especially on topic. It is less a variant than a derivation meant to refute the other. Of course, it follows the form of Clark's Third Law.
I work in government. In the beginning I was quite routinely distressed by the bureaucracy. A variant of Hanlon's (one mis-attributed to Napoleon) gave me real sense of perspective when I first heard it. More recently, Grey's Law has me doubting my compliancy.
If anyone has etymology for Grey's Law, I would much appreciate it being shared. Wikipedia and Google give up only trivialities.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you are understand that web accessibility is really not hard?
Incorrect. The web is an information medium. As far as the computer goes, the display and keyboard are really kind of arbitrary, the compelling action takes place between those two!
So, do you think it is a good practice for the Federal government to build (or pay for) things that create obstacles to citizens with disabilities? Or for the Feds to build/pay for applications that provide an obstacle to their current (and future) employees with disabilities?
Some random observations:
Why should it necessarily be that more efficient == less expensive, especially in the short term? Fossil fuels means taking advance of a resource that has taken literally millions of years to accumulate.
I think renewable implies efficient, at least enough for you to let the grandparent comment slide.
There are many liberal progressive protestants, whole demnominations really. I'm convinced that you cannot have a good knowledge of the history of the textual transmission of the Bible and be a fundamentalist.
I misread the heading as the Unexpected patience of Steve Jobs. I read the heading a second time, since I knew that couldn't be right!
Should there not be an achivement for NOT frivously modding?
LOL! I really had to think about it for a minute to figure out how you could make such an outrageous claim.
The speech output option of Rockbox lets you navigate menus and track names and such, but is does not let you hear the title of the track while the song is playing. That aspect is pretty slick!
Definite troll. He is just jealous, or can't afford the iPhone.
Anyone find anything that is captioned? Looks like YouTube changed their ToS so the Feds are not endorsing idenification.
I have never heard of any MP3 player that works from voice commands, so I would like to hear more about that! Or do you mean synthesized speech based navigation? If so, you may have been thinking of RockBox. Which is FOSS that runs on a variety of hardware.
I think this could also be a good opportunity to market to tech-phobic grandma types that want a cell phone that is only a phone. ("Why does a phone need a screen anyway?") The only cell phone I have encountered without a screen (Owasys 22C) was not as thin as I thought it could/should be. This was a couple of years ago though. Aesthetics can be more than visual. I know a couple of blind folks that were sold on Macs because they took the time to hold a Mini in their hands.
FWIW the advertising (wall boards) here in the Washington DC metro is crazy heavy.
I realize you are just trying to be funny, but iPod, iTunes, and Apple TV all support captioning, and have for some time. Jobs even metioned it during his last keynote. Here is a page about it: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/itunes/hearing.html
This is true. Other developers heavily vested in Carbon, not the least of which is Adobe, also have huge problems with VoiceOver compatibility.
Mostly true. If a blind person needs to use MS Office or other Windows-only applications, there is no choice, and a grand is not expensive if that is all it takes to get a job. But just as most people use MS Office Windows because they think they have to, most fully blind people use JAWS or WindowEyes without consideration of the alternatives.
OCR software that is fully functional for a blind individual costs another $1000! Unfortunately, this is another absent product category under OS X and Gnome.
I do not quite grok the reasons for the differences, I think they are architectural, but there are at least three decent screen readers for Gnome, but none for KDE.
The fact that you include this factor in your developement process has got to put you in the top 1% of all programmers. Kudos and thanks!
Microsoft does do a good job with accessibility, especially Office, but there is no good to be had in overstating their effort.
As TaxMan explained in his reply to your post, those are more like utilities than robust features that can be relied upon every day.
You are trolling. It has been demonstrated repeatedly on /. (and everywhere else on the 'net) that Macs are more than price competative in the mainstream.
For a home or school user (or really anyone who does not have to run Windows) who happens to be blind, going Mac can save the person a thousand bucks!
I have a G4 for my young kids running OS 10.4. I was hoping to use parental controls from 10.5, but giving up Classic is a non-starter. There is still quite a bit of software on the store shelves that is not Carbonized, it really sucks. For all the software they have, I still like Launcher better than the Dock.
My three very favorite things about my Ti and Al PowerBooks: (1) The backlit keyboard, (2) ability to swap batteries while it is asleep (does the MBP do this?), (3) the relatively low weight. So unless you can account for that, you are IMHO comparing Apples and oranges. But if you look at the current iBook:
$1,399, plus you get that sweet MagSafe power cord, Gigabit Ethernet (instead of 100), Mini-DVI (instead of VGA), FireWire, 802.11n (instead of g), and BlueTooth. All at just 5 lbs including the ruggedized construction.
Please pick a smaller display for the Dell and run the numbers again and let us know how it goes. And if the Dell has features I do not give it credit for, please correct me about that too!
I am not in the habit of responding to ACs, but you ask so nicely!
The technique of implementing a parallel text-only site is one that is explicitly allowed by 508 and WCAG 1.0 and still favored by some experts, advocates, and end-users. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of failures with implementations, the idea has long fallen out of favor and does not appear at all in WCAG 2.0 as a consequence.
For a web comic, I would recommend longdesc with the dialog. The Java site might be even more straightforward with things like: alt="screen shot of rendered code as described in the next paragraph". The thought exercise I like to recommend is to ask yourself: How would you read the page to an informed colleague over the phone?
Authors new to accessibility tend to get hung up on how hard it is to provide text equivalents when really all that is needed most of the time is text alternatives which "at least provide descriptive identification of the non-text content". This change in language from WCAG 1.0 to 2.0 is quite deliberate. If you make the paradigm shift from thinking of the web as a visual medium to that of an information medium, you will be on the right track.
Those of us who work in the field of disability regard this issue as a matter of Civil Rights. Once you understand that about us, it may help you understand why we are dogmatic about it.
The analogies people make to the build environment (e.g., ramps) are apt. If a designer does not incorporate the best practices that constitute electronic curb-cuts, there is nothing the best assistive technology (even at the helm of the most skilled end-user) can do to surmount the barrier.
Fortunately, things have matured enough that I no longer have to convince programmers to do the right thing, as the law and economics are on the correct side (this time). If you want to sell to the Federal government you need to make your stuff accessible.
LOL. No, but my high school was small, ~120 in a class. Barely enough to have cliques. Too poor to field a football team, so the jocks had friends who were non-jocks, and most had other interests besides sports. Without planning to, circumstances conspired to provoke a bunch of non-geeks to try something a little strange, and I was a good enough DM. A few key trend setter types gave it whirl, had fun, and ended up running campaigns on their own. This was in the early 80s, and the first round of accusation about links to Satanism, so there was the danger appeal. I also introduce the school to punk, despite being a complete poser, but I had at least heard of the Ramones.
The geeks I had learned from were friends for much a longer time, but I only got to see them once a week. Yes, they were at the next stage of gaming, and that was much better than being part of the "in crowd" -- but that was a whole different crew that didn't interact with my peers from school.
Mail order was latter for us. We got our fix at the Studio of Bridge and Games.
Here is an obit on a server that is likely to resist the /. effect.
Purely by luck I have been gaming since Chainmail was first published. Senior year in high school I was the only kid for miles and miles around with the books. I had to travel to next city to play once a week if that. But that was the year that the first bad press hit the mainstream. I actually became quite popular and, for the first and only time in my life, was with the "in crowd" for the rest of the year! Quite bizarre really, and had I been a year older or younger, that never would have happened!
Vought (perhaps unwittingly) turned Hanlon's razor into Grey's Law. The former is pretty well known, not so much the latter, and seemed especially on topic. It is less a variant than a derivation meant to refute the other. Of course, it follows the form of Clark's Third Law.
I work in government. In the beginning I was quite routinely distressed by the bureaucracy. A variant of Hanlon's (one mis-attributed to Napoleon) gave me real sense of perspective when I first heard it. More recently, Grey's Law has me doubting my compliancy.
If anyone has etymology for Grey's Law, I would much appreciate it being shared. Wikipedia and Google give up only trivialities.