Access on Main Street

Hooking up a usable world, one mainstream product at a time.

You can’t spell “complain” without “LA”

Posted by Jim Tobias 29 June 2010

Using an Apple iPhone app, L.A. citizens can now take a picture of a broken sidewalk or other municipal flaw and send it directly to the city government for instant relief.  How about reporting blocked curbcuts or illegal use of handicapped parking spaces?

L.A. city government: Residents have a finger on problems with iPhone app - latimes.com

More invisible touch, yeah

Posted by Jim Tobias 1 May 2010

Apple has patented a technique to hide sensors beneath the skin of a product.  They will be completely invisible and undiscernible any other way as well (in direct contravention of 1194.23(k)(1) of Section 508, which is now under review).  But embedded LEDs may announce their presence via patterns of micro-holes drilled by frickin’ lasers.

We love seamless input devices, we really do.  We’re sleek as seals ourselves.  But unless there is some redundant alternative or accessibility technique, blind and low vision users are going to be excluded.

ArsTechnica: Apple combines touch, laser etching for “disappearing” input

Deja vu all over again

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 6 April 2010

Coding kvetch: A perusal of the Apple Developer notes for designing websites to be compatible with the iPad shows that one of the guidelines discourages exclusive use of mouse-specific event handlers such as mouseover and mouseout. Instead, they encourage use of Safari-specific DOM Touch events. Would it be possible for us to all get along on a universal scale by using hardware- and browser-independent event handlers such as onfocus and onblur?

Apple Developer: Preparing Your Web Content for iPad

Send in the clowns…don’t bother, we won’t see ‘em

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 20 October 2009

To the list of disabilities that technology use emulates–like ADD–we can now add “inattentional blindness,” which causes cell phone users to miss blatant changes in their visual field, such as the appearance of a brightly-dressed clown on a unicycle. In lieu of requiring that all cell phone use occur inattent, maybe some more concerted compliance with architectural regs about reducing environmental hazards for blind folks could lower accident rates among walking talkers as well.

CNET: Talk on your cell, risk missing the unicycling clown

Great XPectations

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 2 October 2009

So why is our attention piqued by Windows 7 XP Mode, which will let “small and medium-sized businesses running Windows 7 Professional or higher leverage their existing investments in Windows XP applications”? Well, some assistive technology products never came out in a Vista version, and many others will take awhile to release Win7-native versions. If XP Mode is a way for businesses to upgrade to Win7 without interrupting accessibility, it will prevent a lot of migraines.

TechNewsWorld: Microsoft Puts Final Polish on XP Mode

A waste of money

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 15 September 2009

Here’s the dark side of accessibility features in mainstream products: Insurance companies may refuse to pay for, say, a communication aid if it’s implemented as part of a standard computer or cell phone, or may insist that all features unrelated to the communication function be deactivated. Unfortunately, this isn’t news to anyone who’s ever provided direct service to clients, but this is the first time we’ve seen the issues laid out this clearly in the mainstream press.

New York Times: Insurers Fight Speech-Impairment Remedy

Pill pager prompts Pop to pop

Posted by Jim Tobias 20 February 2009

We’ve seen many medicine reminders, high and low tech.  Now we’ve got one that does text messaging!  This compact, attractive prototype pill dispenser can receive SMS (wireless text) messages that remind the user to take a pill.  The message and timing are pre-programmed in the network (we’ve set ours to 4:20); the dispenser stores the time that the user opens it up so a pharmacist can check it later.

Ubergizmo: Pill Dispenser

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