Blind engineering student ‘reads’ color-scaled weather maps using Cornell software that converts color into sound

Seems like a really good idea. Makes me won­der if you could use a sim­u­lar con­cept on size-scaled graphs and charts.

Accessible Online Slide Presentation Tool

Or per­haps bet­ter stated by the author of the tool, A Sim­ple Standards-Based Seman­tic Slide Show Sys­tem or S⁵. In Eric’s own words:

With one file, you can run a com­plete slide show and have a printer-friendly ver­sion as well. The markup used for the slides is very sim­ple, highly seman­tic, and com­pletely acces­si­ble… It’s totally sim­ple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

You really should at least check out the demo to under­stand how cool this is.

Housecleaning and New Blogger

Curb Cut Learn­ing would like to wel­come the new Coor­di­na­tor of Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion at the Insti­tute for Com­mu­nity Inclu­sion, Alvaro Tobar. Alvaro comes to us from Boston Uni­ver­sity and has some great dis­tance edu­ca­tion experience.

Along with the redesign, I also changed how com­ments are accepted on the site. We have been using the excel­lent MT-Blacklist Plu­gin which does a great job, but we have now added Type­Key authen­ti­ca­tion as well. You can still com­ment with­out sign­ing up for Type­Key, but your com­ment will then be mod­er­ated (sorry). Side­note– if any­one knows how to block all com­ments from the user­name ‘bob’ I would appre­ci­ate it– there is a guy who uses all kinds of dif­fer­ent ip addresses and domains that some­times gets through MT-Blacklist.

Bowser toolbars redux

• Web Devel­oper Extension
• Acces­si­bil­ity Exten­sions for Mozilla
• Fangs: The Fire­fox Screen Reader Emu­la­tor Extension
• Shark­ware, JAWS Screen Reader Adap­ta­tion for Mozilla Firefox

All of these are for Fire­fox, of course. Go nuts with these and let us all know what works and what doesn’t.

Looking good, feeling good

Many thanks to Christo­pher Phillips for giv­ing Curb Cut a nice new look and feel. It looks great and I’ve never liked gill-sans more. Curb Cut’s new years res­o­lu­tion is to post even more than it did last year. It would also like to shed a few inches around the waist-line. Or maybe that is me. Any­way, wel­come back for another year of Curb Cut and enjoy the new design.

PDFs Redux

arti­cle from ear­lier this year on acces­si­ble pdf.

adobe just announced acro­bat 7.0 with “advanced acces­si­bil­ity fea­tures”– see bot­tom of page 2 here. inter­est­ing stuff on canada’s acces­si­bil­ity requirements.