ECO2
This eye-gaze system brings the latest in alternative input. For people who cannot use their limbs, nor speak (perhaps someone with ALS — Lou Gehrig’s Disease – or a person who has had a stroke), Prentke-Romich’s ECO2 is a great innovation. To calibrate ECO2, I followed a bouncing ball on screen while it recorded my eye movements – this takes all of 30 seconds. The program, a combination of words, phrases and pictures, can be operated using just the eyes, allowing someone to express their thoughts (and their gratitude for this program.) ($7,795)

Proloquo2go
An iPhone/iTouch app for people who have trouble communicating, Assistive Ware’s Proloquo2go is genius. Founder Samuel Sennot designed the app earlier this year, and it has received rave reviews, particularly among the autism community. Users press icons to express phrases, comments, or questions – and it is cooler and less bulky than a traditional speech-generating device. ($189 plus the cost of an iPhone or iTouch)

BrailleNote Apex
If you’re not blind, you might not grasp the importance of having an all-in-one personal digital assistant strapped to your waist 24 hours a day. Simple tasks, like fishing for a pen or paper to write down a person’s telephone number, can be difficult when you can’t see what’s around you. The BrailleNote Apex is the thinnest (less than an inch) and lightest (less than two pounds) notetaker on the market, and is the latest model to come out of HumanWare’s lab. This PDA takes notes, reads books, plays downloaded music, streams Internet radio, has a web browser, Braille (or QWERTY) keyboard, and makes snow cones. Just kidding on that last one. ($6,195)

Oratio for the BlackBerry is the first-ever screen reader for the visually impaired using this smart phone. Oratio uses text-to-speech technology to convert the visual information displayed on the BlackBerry screen into audio output. Finally, visually impaired persons who don’t have an iPhone can have an accessible experience.

Oratio will first be released in North America in English, supporting the BlackBerry Curve 8520 smartphone from AT&T, available through online purchasing from www.oratio4bb.com for $449 US for a single license. Support for additional BlackBerry smartphone models and languages will be available in subsequent versions of Oratio.

Read the full article at http://abledbody.com/.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco ordered the National Conference of Bar Examiners on Friday to accommodate Stephanie Enyart, who was born sighted but suffers from macular degeneration and retinal dystrophy and was declared legally blind at 15.

Enyart, 32, graduated last spring from UCLA Law School, where she took tests on a laptop with software that magnified the text and read the words into earbuds. But she has not taken the bar exam because the national examiners, who administer the two multiple-choice portions of the California test, have refused to allow the same arrangements.

Federal disability law "does not require testing organizations to provide disabled examinees with their preferred accommodations," the examiners' lawyer, Gregory Tenhoff, said in court papers. He also said putting the test questions on a computer disk would expose them to hackers and thieves.

The examiners said Enyart would have to accept the usual accommodations for blind and visually impaired applicants: a pencil-and-paper test with questions displayed on an enlarged screen, a human reader and twice the usual three-day testing period.

Enyart, now a law clerk at Disability Rights Advocates in Berkeley, said in her suit that she needed the computer setup to have a fair chance of passing the exam. Breyer agreed Friday and said the bar could provide its own computer for increased security.

"A disability should not prevent an individual from pursuing their dream, if that's what it is, of practicing law," the judge said.

The exam begins Feb. 23. The examiners could ask a federal appeals court to block Breyer's order. Their office declined comment after the hearing.

Disaboom.com has gathered together some products that will assist special needs kids in learning a variety of skills that will transfer to the classroom. Several of these are equally beneficial for normal-ability kids, so siblings can benefit as well. A variety of subjects are covered, including social skills.

Read the article at http://www.disaboom.com/.

The Alliance for Technology Access is a national network of non-profit community based technology resource centers whose mission is to increase the use of technology by children and adults with disabilities and functional limitations. In addition to information and referrals, members of the network can also provide training, with many locations offering guided technology exploration, product demonstrations, computer labs and workshops. The network consists of assistive technology resource centers, individual and organizational associates, and technology vendors and developers. Currently there are 42 community based technology resource centers listed on the ATA Website.

For those who do not live near a resource center, ATA has also published an award winning guide to computer technology. The guide, Computer Resources for People with Disabilities is available online.

Validation equals accessibility - Good markup is the foundation of a usable, accessible and robust website. Testing that the HTML (and CSS) that you write passes a validation test can be very useful, and in general validity is something to strive for. But this is not the same as accessibility, validators do not check that alt attributes are relevant, or that link text is useful. They do not test page interactions to ensure that they are usable by all. They do not ensure that text is readable. All of these issues are more important than validation, and given a choice between accessibility and validation, accessibility should win every time.

If it works with a screen reader it is accessible - I think the majority of developers and their clients have got passed the idea that visual impaired people do not use the web, however there is so much focus on screen reader users that it is easy to forget that there are other groups of users that we need to make the web accessible for.

Sites are either accessible or inaccessible - Accessibility is very subjective, even by comparing against guidelines such as WCAG 2.0 it isn’t really possible to grade how accessible a website is. Content that is highly accessible to a visually impaired user with a screen reader may be inadequate for a user who lacks fine motor control.

The point is that there is almost always room for improvement, and that it is worthwhile making small changes that improve the user experience for only a small number of people - every little bit helps.

Content that isn’t 100% accessible shouldn’t be published - There is a growing trend of criticizing any content that isn’t accessible to everyone, and this is counter-productive. The web has thrived and become what it is today because it is easy to publish to, by almost everyone. We might hope for more accessible content on the web but we must not discourage publishers, for example while there is no doubt that captioning of YouTube videos is a great boon to many people I would not like to see the pressure to caption put anyone off uploading a new video. Authoring tools and automation are the key for helping small publishers and non-developers make their content accessible, and we shouldn’t criticize the author if the available tools are inadequate.

Between September and December 2009 a poll was conducted on the Webcredible website asking the question of which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites? This may be a pretty generalized survey, which didn’t focus on specific sites, but the results are interesting nonetheless. This is how they turned out:

• Retail / ecommerce - 133 votes (13%)
• Financial services - 164 votes (16%)
• Local authority / government - 342 votes (34%)
• Travel - 91 votes (9%)
• Utilities - 116 votes (12%)
• News / media companies - 69 votes (7%)
• Other - 91 votes (9%)

Some of the results may not come as a particular surprise to many. The content focused sites of news and media companies do not tend to need to use the complex checkout processes that other sites use, and given the high levels of competition, travel and retail websites need to be pretty easy to use.

It’s true that local authority and government websites often have to offer a vast amount more information and functionality than their counterparts in other industries, which can make it more difficult to provide a great user experience, but there are some other reasons why they may have faired badly in this survey.

It could be a lack of investment in comparison to say online retail and travel companies, and it also could be put down to the fact that when using local authority and government websites, dropping off and using another site is often not an option (something which is common when poor usability is encountered in ecommerce and travel) so users will have to just grin and bear a poor user experience.

TecAccess Launches Free Accessibility Webinar Series

(804) 749-8646
info@tecaccess.net

Rockville, VA - January 25, 2010 -- The momentum of web accessibility laws and guidelines are growing at breathtaking speed. Section 508, Section 508 Refresh, and WCAG 2.0 are but a few standards designed to make the web as accessible and usable to people with disabilities as it can by those without. TecAccess has launched a free, bi-monthly webinar series focusing on making technology accessible in the year ahead.

"Many people are surprised to learn just how much of the world´s population is affected by a disability, and how valuable accessible design is to government, private industry, and educational institutions," says Debra Ruh, CEO and Founder of TecAccess. To understand the impact, LaMondre Pough, a leading accessibility expert, will serve as the keynote speaker in TecAccess webinar series. Pough will explore the latest in web accessibility guidelines and how people with disabilities (the world´s largest and fastest growing minority group) are likely to be your next customer. Pough´s ongoing presentations will also review current and pending changes to Section 508 and ADA, as well as international accessibility trends and regulations, with the goal of understanding their impact on you in 2010. TecAccess webinars are designed to identify and analyze significant issues, risks and opportunities and to develop recommendations to assist you in developing your required accessibility strategy in the year to come.

January 12, 2010

Cal State Northridge is launching this semester a new Master of Science in Assistive Technology Studies and Human Services (ATHS), believed to be the first such degree program in the country.

Offered jointly by the Colleges of Health and Human Development and Engineering and Computer Science and CSUN’s Tseng College of Extended Learning, the new program is aimed at mid-career professionals interested in understanding and working with all aspects of the new technologies-from conceptualization and design to use and instruction. It will include more than 60 Northridge faculty and representatives of the university’s nationally acclaimed Center on Disabilities.

The CSUN master’s program encompasses research and design; law, ethics and policy; counseling education and the dynamics of play. The technological aspects are enhanced by the program’s link to the master’s program in assistive and rehabilitative technology in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Read the full article at http://blogs.csun.edu/.