Signs of light
A team of Ryukoku University researchers is working on emergency information signs that can glow in the dark in a range of colors, not just traditional blue and green phosphor. Let’s hope they include people with various visual disabilities–including colorblindness and aging-related vision impairment–in any usability testing before deciding on standards for color combinations.
Color my world
Just in time for the holidays: info on how to make sure your expensive electronic gift doesn’t end up as a couple of paperweights. We applaud the use of color-coding to help make sure Plug A goes correctly into Slot B–but that’s not going to be much help to people with colorblindness or some other types of visual disabilities. A little information redundancy could go a long way here.
Get it together: expert tips for surviving your holiday assembly
Ignoble mobile
A recent British study found that 3/4 of people who could access the Internet on their mobile phone aren’t doing so because of slow page loading, navigation difficulties, and the failure of pages to appear properly in a non-computer format. Hmmmmm…are webmasters following the Mobile Web Best Practices Guidelines, which should benefit both disabled and non-disabled users? We bet not.
Usability News: Poor usability implicated in rejection of mobile Internet
New digital media guidelines
The National Center on Accessible Media (NCAM) has come up with a new set of accessibility guidelines to supplement the WAI Web access guidelines and similar documents. While we wish it had gone a bit further in some areas (e.g., providing a discussion of when to use null ALT attributes), it’s a useful document for covering accessibility for newer technologies.
OpenDocument Format, the next round
Microsoft has announced they will be releasing free software to translate Office documents into OpenDocument Format. Will this address the Massachusetts accessibility controversy? Stay tuned.
.Tel domain approved
Like .com and .org, you can now get an Internet address ending in .tel. What’s interesting about this is that it may not only be used by businesses for their website, but by regular folks as an all-purpose way to reach them. That is, yourname.tel may be something that can be dialed, emailed, and chatted, all forms of communication reaching you by Internet addressing magic, all formatted how you need them for your set of abilities and preferences. This is yet another way to address the clumsy way we reach people over relay services. One number, now and forever.
“Open” means open
Not the verb, not the noun (think “golf”). The adjective — as in OpenDocument. It’s a format that allows easy access to its contents because there are no proprietary or mysterious settings in the file. It’s the result of many years of technical development and standards work, and it was just approved by the International Standards Organization. It should improve the performance and reliability of screen readers, screen magnifiers, and other assistive technologies.
ISO Approves OpenDocument Format as an International Standard