Stanza - Accessible E-Book Reader for the iPhone

Scanning through the Personal Tech section of the Times, I bumped into an interesting tidbit, "Tip of the Week - Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book - NYTimes.com". I have an iPod Touch (the iPhone sans phone), so I ws intrigued, though remaining skeptical, by this tip. I just downloaded the app, Stanza, to my iPod and fell in love. On a technical level, it is a perfect application of accessibility for a visually impaired user. The font sizes can be adjusted with a very wide range. You can select font and background colors with a wide selection of choices, not just a simple reverse color scheme option. The screen rotates with the iPod, so you can read it landscape with the larger text. Pages can be turned with a simple flick on the screen. Best of all, it retains your choice of settings. I could not be happier with the accessibility.

Now I have to download the desktop version and hope that there are interesting e-books to read . . .

AFB's Jitterbug Review

Most of the ways people find this blog is through web searches. One of the most popular search terms that bring visitors here is "high contrast cell phones" that directs them to this post. Surprisingly, to me anyway, this is the first entry that Google lists for this search term. However, my post is mostly a gripe about the lack of accessible cell phones. The only phone that seems to fit my criteria (accessible to those with low but functional vision) is the Jitterbug. I do not have one, so I can not review it. However the AFB has a good review, with images, here: An Accessible Phone Comes Calling: A Review of the Jitterbug Cell Phone - AccessWorld® - March 2007. So take a look at let me know what you think.

Alternative Google Color Schemes

Following up on my earlier post about the lack of accessible Vista themes and my current feelings on standard internet color schemes, I posted the following to the accessible Google Group: Alternative Google Color Schemes - accessible | Google Groups

For the visually impaired, Google's (as well as MS and most websites) color scheme is downright bad. Does Google have or could it develop an alternative accessible co or scheme? Not only should it be high contrast, but also light-on-dark. For me, I like yellow-on-black. Firefox and IE allow users to impose color schemes while browsing, but this method changes all text and background to the same two colors. This ruins the full use of each page. For example, in Gmail, the star feature becomes useless.For another, regular text and hyperlinks become indistinguishable. So this solution is only partial. This remains true for other websites and for Windows as well. Both Vista and XP have high-contrast color schemes, but there are both aesthetically unappealing (Visually impaired does not equal aesthetically unaware) and more problematic then helpful. Is this something that Google could/will implement? Is this something a third-party could do well? There are some third party tools (e.g. Firefox's Accessibar), but none are subtle enough to retain the full nature of each web page. Is anyone up for the challenge? Thanks! PS Can someone create a nice Vista/XP theme with accessible and aesthetic colors and font sizes

I will relay any useful responses.

The Touch Sight camera

Touch Sight Camera Allows The Blind To Take And Touch Photos | Device Daily

The Touch Sight, a concept camera from Samsung, is a great stride forward for visually impaired photographers with little of no vision. Instead of an LCD screen, it has a Braiille display that can present the image in a 3D format. Since it is only a concept, it is not for sale.

I will email the designer (Chueh Lee: chueh.lee@samsung.com), to offer thanks and encouragement. Maybe you have a moment to do so as well.

Curiosity & The Blind Photographe

I just stumbled across this essay, a blind flaneur » Curiosity & The Blind Photographer, on "accessibility in terms of culture and cultural production." A worthwhile read with some magnificent photos. What do you think? What is the link between accessibility and curiosity? Is access no longer a one-way street?

Amartya Sen paved new roads in economic thought when he changed the idea of poverty being absolute to being relative. To translate, Sen simply pointed out that what would have being accounted wealthy a thousand years ago would be accounted poverty today. Sen pushed a participatory (i.e. relative) concept of poverty. Someone is poor if they cannot fully participate in the economy (too poor for a phone, transport or sufficient nutrition for health, e.g.).

I can see clearly a parallel here to accessibility being defined as the ability to participate in society (or culture). Food for thought...

Image Zoom : Firefox Add-on

To continue the theme of useful Firefox extensions, I also find myself using Image Zoom all the time. This extension adds another option to the context menu (the one that pops up when you use the right click button). With it installed, you have the option to increase the size of the image (i.e. zoom in) right there in the web page. You don't have to copy and paste it into another program or open it in its own page, you can just zoom in right there. Very useful!

In particular, I find it useful when shopping (either in Amazon or eBay) and the accompanying image is just too small to make out. Now I right-click on the image and zoom in. I have also found it useful on those DIY project pages when the illustrations are just too tiny to help.

Some images do not have good resolution, so, when you zoom in, the image 'pixelates' and becomes blurry. But that is not Image Zoom's fault. Give it a try. You will like it.

Accessible Windows Vista Themes

As I noted in the last post, I have just moved to a Windows Vista machine. I have spent the last few days looking for a decent theme with large fonts and good light-on-dark contrast. There are none!

The Windows high contrast themes, besides being hideous, do not have large text. To check these out, you can either right-click on the desktop and select 'Personalize' and then to 'Windows Colors and Appearance' or go to the 'Ease of Access Center' Control Panel and then to 'Set Up High Contrast'. Either way, you are stuck with an ugly interface with the small font. The 'Ease of Access Center' has an option for changing something called DPI to make the font easier to read, but that only goes so far.

I checked out the trial version of WindowBlinds, but I could not easily find any accessible themes. After a frustrating few minutes with the software, I sent an email to the company who sells it, asking them if WindowBlinds offeres any accessible themes.

In the end, I spent a good chunk of time adjusting all the color and font settings in the 'Windows Colors and Appearance' panel. After a few mistakes and having to start from scratch a few times, I succeeded in creating and saving a minimally acceptable theme. It is not professional in the least. My next job is to figure out how to export and share it with you. For now, email me if you would like a copy.

Do you know of any useful themes? Do you know someone who can create one? Let me know!

Access Firefox: Because the Internet is for everyone.

Having just moved to a new computer, I have been installing software and making the system more accessible. In trying to find all the little ways to make Firefox more accessible, I ran across this website, AccessFirefox.org. They do a remarkable job of collecting all the Firefox themes ans extensions that help make Firefox a superior browser for ease of use. My favorite so far is Accessibar, which adds a toolbar to the top of the screen that allows you to control the text size and the colors of each website. The large icon themes are also quite useful.

The one item that is missing right now is No Squint. With the latest version of Firefox, No Squint allows you to control the full zoom and text zoom of each website. What is particularly useful is that it remember the particular setting for each site. I find that different websites require different adjustments, depending on the amount of text vs. images and how many columns the site has. Accisbar allows you to adjust font sizes, but is not site specific and has no 'memory'. I will recommend that AccessFirefox add No Squint to their list.

Do you know of any Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts that make Firefox and the web more accessible? Please let me know!

My Point Exactly

This is what I have being saying for a while now:

“A lot of technology was originally developed for people with severe disabilities,” Mr. Sinclair said. “But these solutions are proving valuable to a much broader range of people.”

Th Times is running a piece, At a Certain Age, Simplicity Sells in High-Tech Gadgets , in today's paper. It is worth the read, though it is light on examples. The article mentions the new Jitterbug, some new GPS units and some desktop concessions.

When are these companies going to realize that a few easy design tweaks can make their products more appealing (and accessible) to a wider audience? More high-contrast visual interfaces, more auditory and tactile cues, more text-to-speech. None of this would be expensive, bue all of it would make products better.

Zooming in the new IE

At first, I did not like the new Internet Explorer (IE). It buried the accessibility options I like most (text size and ignore colors specified on webpages). There is one new redeeming feature, the new zoom.

Zoom does what it says. Just like zooming in and out with your camera, zoom lets you magnify websites at any level of magnification you desire. I usually keep it between 125% and 200%, but it depends on the website. Very useful. Unlike text size, zoom works on all web pages. The only downside is that many pages will extend eve further off the right side of the screen. The solution for that has been to get a wide-screen monitor.

Zoom's official home is under the Pages menu right about my other favorite, text size.The excellent news is that there are two easier ways to access it. First, the bottom right corner of the IE window has a "change zoom level" drop down menu. Even better are the keyboard controls; Ctrl-+ to zoom in and Ctrl-- to zoom out.

Time to zoom away.

Blog Accessibilty

The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) has instructions on 'How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Blind Readers'. I have wondered how accessible this blog is. I can access it quite easily since I have tweaked IE to make almost any page readable. Bur I do not know how others see it. I looked through the AFB's tips and have followed those that I could understand, but I didn't write the template for this blog and I don't know enough html to adjust the template according to the tips. Hopefully,, I have done a reasonable job, but it would be nice to know how to check simply and easily how accessible one's blog is. Any ideas?

On the Side: Inaccessible accessibility

A couple of months ago, the Times' David Pogue wrote an article, Spending Time to Save Time, about why we do not take enough advantage of available computer technology that could make our lives easier, more productive or both. The lessons Pogue discusses apply directly to adoption of any level of 'assistive technology' whether it is a fancy screen reader or a simple Internet Explorer trick to make the text larger. I have spent countless hours finding these little ways to make using my computer easier and it has been an investment too high for most people. I would like to extend Mr. Pogue's call on software makers to make accessibility feature more accessible.

Accessibility Switch

The technology guy for the NY Times posted some thought about an issue that had not crossed my mind, "But What About the Color Blind?". I think that browsers should come with some default accessibility option. I do not mean the complicated range of options available now, but a simple on/off switch. This switch would automatically reformat all websites in some easy to read, high contrast and nice looking style, something that uniformly addresses the widest range of accessibility issues. For more advanced users, they could leave all the tweaks available now. For those who prefer simplicity, this accessibility switch could make a huge difference in the quality of internet life. Such a feature on publicly available machines, at kiosks or in computer labs for example, would allow anyone to make the web accessible with the touch of a single button. I suspect that the technology exists already. There is something called a style sheet that controls the look and feel of a web site. All it would take is a web designer could develop a style sheet with the characteristics listed above and the browser designers incorporated a single button that strained all web content through that style sheet.

Let Users Control Font Size (Alertbox Aug. 2002)

Jakob Nielsen, a 'crusader' for web usability, wrote a plea,Let Users Control Font Size (Alertbox Aug. 2002), a few years ago. In this article, Nielsen articulates an idea that I have been percolating for a long time. From his column,

Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site's visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size.

I think that we need to expand upon this idea. Not only should every browser should come with a 'large print' style sheet and an easy-to-find button to load it, but every computer should have an easy-to-find icon on the desktop that will reset the Appearance setting to a larger font, higher contrast (but still visually appalling) setting. Computers at kiosks and in school computer labs and even ATM machines should be reuired to have these 'large print' icons.

Boston.com / Designing websites with senior citizens in mind

The Boston Globe ran an article, Designing websites with senior citizens in mind, about a month ago. These design principles will help all of us, not just seniors or the visually impaired. Hopefully, the continuing demongraphic shift towards an older population will hasten the arrival of more thoughtful web page design.

The Terrible Typist

I am a terrible typist. Despite the years of training and years of typing, I still need to watch the keyboard when I type. For some of us terrible typists, watching the keyboard doesn't always help. Letter labels on each key fade with use. (My keyboard has almost completely lost E, A and S.) For many aesthetically-designed keyboards, these are already too small to read. There is a s solution. There are several, in fact. First, you could dish out some serious money and buy a new, large-print keyboard. These can be expensive and are usually designed without even a slight nod to aesthetics. A less radical solution is to use large print keyboard stickers (sometimes called labels or overlays). These stickers, which are hard to find in stores, but are readily available online, often come in several high-contrast styles, white on black, black on white and black on yellow. [I am still looking for my preference, which is yellow on black.] These stickers are also quite affordable, running between ten and fifteen dollars. A Seattle based non-profit agency, Community Services for the Blind and Partially Sighted, has an online store, SightConnection, which has Large Print Keyboard Stickers for sale for $12.50.

Boston Globe "Adapting PCs to an aging population"

Hiawatha Bray had a great column, Adapting PCs to an aging population, last Monday that captures the spirit behind this blog. I hope that the ideas that I post here will be helpful for everyone who has trouble using the compute. As Mr. Bray says;

Take a good look at the words on your computer screen. They may be smaller and harder to read than they were a year ago -- and if not, they someday will be.

Firefox vs. Internet Explorer: Accessibility

Firefox is a recently released alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox is open source, meaning that Firefox and its underlying computer code are publicly available for free. It has a reputation for better security (less viruses, etc.) and better adherence to WWW standards (websites display more nicely).

In terms of ease of access, I find that both Firefox and IE have different problems, meaning that when one displays a page incorrectly, the other will probably display it correctly. So I go between the two programs depending on which sites I am looking at.

Sites like CNN and Netflix do not appear properly in IE for me, so I use Firefox for them. However, I like to keep several windows open at once. IE remembers my text size preferences when opening new windows. Firefox does not, so I have to increase the font size each time I open a new tab or a new window.

To sum up, I recommend using them both, switching between them when sites do not appear properly in one.

My iPod Wishlist

I use an iPod MP3 player to listen to audiobooks. It has some great features and looks great too. I have some ideas about how to make it easier to use for those of us who find its screen hard to see. I sent the following message to Apple via its iPod feedback page

As a legally blind iPod user, I have a three suggestions for making the iPod better. The first is to add a bookmarking feature. The second is to add a Current AudioBook selection on the main menu. The third is to add audio cues. To be upfront, my main use for my iPod is to listen to Audible.com content. The bookmarking feature would be fairly standard. I am sure you have other requests for this, so I will not waste any more words on it. Adding a Current Audiobook would allow users to easily switch between music and their current book, without having to drill down and search thorough the list of audiobooks each time they switch between music and books. Audio cues would be the most important accessibility feature. I cannot read the iPod screen without my low vision aids, so maneuvering around the iPod is not so easy. If the iPod spoke out loud the current screen information when pressing the Menu button, my life would be much easier. Another nice cue would be for the iPod to list the current time and time remaining when the menu button is pressed while listening to the audiobook.

I will let you know if I get any response. What do you think of my suggestions? UPDATE (12 February 2005): No word from Apple, but I would like to add another idea. An undo feature that undoes the last accidental button press would be great!

Slashdot: RFID-Equipped Robots Used as Guide Dogs

There is an article from Slashdot discussing a new project developing RFID-Equipped Robots Used as Guide Dogs. One possible implementation might be "RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store". If I needed a guide dog, I think I would prefer the furry kind, but this is certainly interesting!