Thinking Accessible » assistive technologies

Make it readable

Rocío — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:10:05 +0000

Have you ever been on a site that the text was simply unreadable. You know what I’m talking about! The colour of the text and the colour of the background just makes it hard to read, or either the font is just too small or the width of the line is too long. Well now you can customize those pesky texts into something you can actually read.

“Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.”

This application made by Arc90 is quite easy to use. Just pick your settings and bookmark it on your favourite browser and use it at your leisure. Get it at Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment.

Read about it at: Readability | Arc90 Lab

Another Firefox add-on

Rocío — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:55:09 +0000

Don’t you just love Firefox add-ons. I do! Especially because they make my life easier.

As a developer it is important to have a feel for what the user is getting out of your site. I found a good way to use a screen reader on any operating system (OS) without paying a dime. I am using Fire Vox. It utilizes the integrated screen reader application of any OS (Windows, MAC and Linux) and functions on your Firefox as an add-on. I tested it on a Windows XP and it worked pretty well. I got some choppiness in the sound but this is probably due to my old hardware. The only downfall for me is that I cannot easily turn it off. I would have liked to have this feature in the Fire Voxes options, but instead I have to go to the add-ons extensions list and completely disable it. Oh well, I’ll live

Examples of assistive technologies

Rocío — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:49:32 +0000

So I saw this story on the news by Chris Brown and was happy to learn that assistive technologies are being researched actively in Canadian Universities. The University of Victoria has a unit named CanAssist, they develop technologies and provide services for people with disabilities. Naturally this is relevant in terms of web accessibility because a lot of these devices interact with computers. I encourage you to read their technology showcase as it describes the uses of these technologies by people with different types of disabilities. For example, instead of using a mouse for navigation, it is possible to use one’s mouth. And as the news piece revealed, the team of researchers have created a device that detects the movement of the pupils and allows the cursor to move accordingly. Pretty ingenious!

It is obvious that these researchers and developers are not waiting for websites to get their act together in terms of web accessibility, but it just proves that this demographic has the possibility to access the world wide web. We can all make it a little bit easier for researchers to make these products more effective by implementing WCAG.

Watch the video entitled “Communication Research” at the CBC. Unfortunately, this video has no caption and thus not accessible.

So what is web accessibility?

Rocío — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:28:49 +0000

Web accessibility is part of web standards. It focuses on making any online content accessible to people with disabilities. These people use a variety of assistive technologies to navigate through the Internet. For example, people with visual impairments often use a screen reader to read outloud the text on the page. People with reduced motor skills use adapted keyboards or mouses that help them click on links amongst other things. All these technologies are pretty pointless if the code is not correctly implemented.