open and accessible
Done by the same folks who are behind Speegle, the talking search engine, Speakwire is a free online tool that reads aloud a rss feed. From their press release:
Most people associate computer speech with visually impaired users. I think that is missing the point and we set out to demonstrate just how universal speech is. It’s the nearest eqivalent to a common currency and can be exchanged and undersood as easily. Speech is mightier than the pen.
(via Robin Good)
Hello everyone, after a long hiatus Curb Cut is back in action. Even though I work in a different field now (religious education for youth with disabilities), I haven’t been able to stay away from this stuff and am anxious to get a few posts out there.
Also, I have changed the rss feed to point to a feedburner feed for curbcut. If you are subscribed to any of the old feeds, I think I have set it so it will automatically redirect to the new feed, please let me know if you have any problems with it.
Despite the pooh-poohing of the format, I am still backing the idea of a universal accessible web policy for developers. But lets take a step back and take care of the format issue first. I chose to publish this in a Word Doc, because everybody I know uses word to edit and write content (including those with screen readers). It also has some features for tracking changes, which we have already used on this document within my office.
So lets hear some constructive ideas on what format we should all be working in, as I am going to try and drag more people into this. I looked into Wikis a little bit, but it didn’t seem like a great fit for this project. Using and XML or HTML document seems like it might exclude people who don’t work with those formats.
Go.
Recently I’ve come accross a problem. Managers are often unable to convey what the accessibility requirments are for a product to their developers, outside of “it needs to be accessible.” I’ve been working on a document that serves as both our accessibility policy and as guidelines for us and the developers and contractors who work on our sites. Now I would like to release the first version of this document to anybody who would like to read it, and encourge anybody to make suggestions and changes [that are clearly marked] and send it back to me and I will look at intergrating the changes.
So Download the document and then email me back the document at ici.webmaster@gmail.com with your revisions. No guarantees that your change will make it in everytime, but if we all are working together, I think we can ceate a pretty useful document.
Seems like a really good idea. Makes me wonder if you could use a simular concept on size-scaled graphs and charts.
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.
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.
All of these are for Firefox, of course. Go nuts with these and let us all know what works and what doesn’t.
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.
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.
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Christopher Phillips on openness, accessibility and stuff.
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