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Apple have just announced that the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G S will include the VoiceOver screen reader, among other accessibility enhancements. Although I'm still uncertain as to the efficiency of a touch screen interface for the blind, this is fantastic news. For the first time, an every day mobile phone/PDA will include a screen reader as part of the core product at no extra cost. Apple's inclusion of VoiceOver into Mac OS X was revolutionary news, and they've now done it again with the iPhone. I'm sometimes rather cynical towards Apple, but I am continually impressed by their commitment to incorporating out-of-the-box accessibility into their products.
It's worth noting that the iPhone is not the first touch screen phone to include accessibility for the blind. A suite of self-voicing applications called Eyes-Free is available for Android which enables blind users to use many functions of the phone. While this is great to see, it's disappointing that this is what I call isolating (or isolationalist) accessibility; i.e. blind users must use a different set of applications to everyone else to access the phone and are thus isolated from the experience of other users. This appears to be a (in my opinion disappointing) trend for some sections of Google, as demonstrated in the separate, so-called "ARIA enhanced" and "accessible" versions of some of their services, wherein they often present a different interface for blind users instead of integrating accessibility right into the existing interface. I think that isolating accessibility certainly has its place - it can sometimes make for a more friendly and easier learnt interface and is the only practical option in some extremely visual scenarios - but in general, I believe it is extremely limiting and inflexible. Admittedly, a touch screen interface is inherently visual and thus presents a new set of challenges. Not only does the user interface need to be spoken or brailled, but the method of input needs significant adaptation to be used by a blind person. This is probably why the Android Eyes-Free developers chose the path they did. However, Apple have taken a better, more generic approach similar to that of most modern operating systems, allowing blind users to use the same applications as everyone else. The new iPhone incorporates accessibility into the core of the operating system and VoiceOver modifies the input method as well as reading the user interface, which allows any application to be accessible with VoiceOver, including all of the in-built applications.
Experience will determine whether Apple's implementation is optimal for blind users. Regardless, they've truly raised the bar for mobile accessibility.
Disclaimer: I have not had any personal experience with either VoiceOver on the iPhone 3G S or Android Eyes-Free. These thoughts are solely based on the information I have gleaned from various internet sources.
For a while now, I've been thinking about writing a tool to quickly perform all sorts of little miscellaneous tasks that I'm too lazy to do manually. They aren't big enough to each justify their own application, but nor are they at all related. These tasks include:- Setting my computer's audio output volume to preset levels with a single keyboard shortcut
- Killing off an application which is using too much CPU time and causing my computer to freeze or lag intolerably, thereby making killing it manually extremely difficult or tedious
- Checking and reporting missed VoIP calls via my router
I came up with a great name for this application: Jantrid Laziness Proliferator. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to actually write it...
A post on the JSonar blog pointed me at this thread on the Cakewalk forum comparing Sonar and Pro Tools. I find it surprising that Sonar's poor audio scrubbing functionality (versus Pro Tools's reportedly excellent scrubbing) is not mentioned at all! I keep hearing that many good sound engineers still prefer to "use their ears" a great deal and I'd figure they would therefore use scrubbing a lot, but the opinion from Cakewalk seems to be that scrubbing isn't used by most users and thus isn't a priority. The forum thread does discuss Pro Tools's strength in sound engineering and post production and its relative lack of popularity with composers, which I guess might explain this. If Sonar's primary market is composers and the like, there might certainly be less of a demand for features such as scrubbing. This is a damned shame for me (and I suspect many other blind users), as decent scrubbing (i.e. better accuracy and the ability to play faster than 1x) would make my life a hell of a lot easier, not to mention more fun!
Jen: "Watch the door... it's ajar."
Jamie: (casually, without pause) "No it's not! It's a door!"
... I thought it was kinda clever, personally, but perhaps I've been awake too long...
So we're in the process of finalising the purchase of our house, which is all very exciting. However, the administrivia is quite the opposite, as illustrated in the following series of events:
- A few weeks ago: Our mortgage broker sent our First Home Owners grant documents to St George, our bank. Our mortgage broker then called to confirm that they had been received.
- A couple of weeks ago: I called NRMA (our insurance company) to ask them to raise the building insurance amount to the amount specified by the bank. (My original figure was obviously an underestimate.) They told me that this was all done, no worries.
- Early last week: Jen sent the insurance documents to St George. She also emailed our solicitor with a request to settle a few days earlier.
- Last Friday: No contact yet from our solicitor, so I called his office to confirm that the request was received and actioned. He's not in the office; apparently, he'll call me back on Monday morning.
- Monday afternoon: No call from our solicitor. I called him late afternoon. I noted that he mustn't be receiving our calls and emails. He noteably neglects to mention the email, but was surprised about the call on Friday. He told me that St George apparently haven't received our insurance documents (see 1), nor our First Home Owners Grant documents (see 3).
- Tuesday: Jen had to drive to visit our mortgage broker to sign new First Home Owners Grant documents.
- Wednesday morning: Jen called NRMA to ask them to fax our updated insurance documents to St George. She discovered that apparently, our record states the old insurance amount instead of the updated amount (see 2). Our solicitor called me to tell me that the received fax was missing some information. Jen subsequently called NRMA and they said that the information was correct in the records but that the fax was somehow incorrectly generated.
All is now finally sorted, but.... aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggg!
The new Bazaar 1.13rc1 release is codenamed paraskavedekatriaphobia. Having no idea what the hell that was, I decided to look it up, and as usual, Wikipedia furnished me with the answer: the fear of Friday the 13th. If I knew the smiley for rolling eyes, I'd be using it here...
Well, you learn something new every day.
Jen and I noticed a fascinating glitch in the laws of probability recently. If we are eating something containing pitted olives - home made pizza, for example - I end up with all of the olives which mistakenly contain pits, while Jen encounters none. We're not just talking one, here. It's usually at least three or four. This has happened a few times now. To prove the point even more, after happily enjoying pizza free of olive pits (while laughing at my somewhat less peaceful pizza experience), Jen gave hungry me a piece of her pizza... and guess what I found when I ate it? Yup... more olive pits. I guess a more logical explanation might be that Jen is consciously or unconsciously doing this...
Actually, this title is rather unsuitable. If I am the lord of olive pits, surely I could convince them to cower and run away or something...
I found this quite amusing and satisfying:
Fed-up bus driver 'drove kids to police'
Until a few days ago, the From, To, Cc, etc. header fields in the Thunderbird message reader pane were inaccessible (or at least extremely painful) for those using screen readers. Using NVDA, I was sometimes able to read them with a lot of messing around, but I often found myself viewing the message source because it was so much easier to search for the header names in the raw message. In the few years that I have been using Thunderbird, this has probably been one of my biggest gripes with its accessibility. However, this has now been fixed thanks to Jason Lim Yuen Hoe, a student from a university in Singapore doing a course focused on developing for Mozilla. When I move to the header fields with tab or shift+tab, both the header name and its content is now announced instead of a whole load of nothing. It might seem trivial, but it makes my life a hell of a lot easier, and once again demonstrates the beauty of open source development. Thanks, Jason!
The folder selection tree in Mozilla Thunderbird can be a bit of a nuisance for keyboard users. You cannot jump to a folder by typing the first few letters of its name. In addition, when you move between folders with the cursor keys, Thunderbird opens the newly selected folder immediately. IF you have several accounts and many folders in some of those accounts like I do, this means that moving between folders which are quite far apart will cause Thunderbird to try to open every folder you visit on the way. This is not only slow, but also probably wasteful of bandwidth.
I've just discovered a way to solve this second problem, which I'm posting in case others didn't know about it. To move between folders without opening every folder in between:
- Move to the folder selection tree.
- Press ctrl+space to deselect the current folder.
- Rather than using the up and down arrows to find the desired folder, use ctrl+up and ctrl+down, respectively. You can of course keep your finger on the control key. Notice that Thunderbird does not open each folder.
- When you reach the desired folder, press ctrl+space to select it. Thunderbird opens the selected folder.
There is also the Nostalgy extension, which, among other keyboard productivity enhancements, allows you to jump to a folder by typing all or part of its name. However, I use Thunderbird 3 nightlies and there have been a few compatibility issues recently. Also, Nostalgy overrides the functionality in the quick search bar and it makes the quick search menu inaccessible, so I don't use it anymore. (I should really report a bug, but I can't quite figure out what's going on.)