Last month I went to a local Future Shop, a consumer electronics store, to purchase a copy of Apple's OS X Snow Leopard operating system. The staff of the store were very helpful in locating the item for me and showed me to the checkout counter. At the checkout counter I was somewhat surprised to find that the point-of-sales (POS) device, used to process credit and bank card transactions, used a touch-screen interface.
Yesterday morning Prime Minister Stephen Harper performed a first, by being the first Canadian Prime Minister to have his remarks streamed live through YouTube. Before and after the PM's speech, and up until Sunday at 1:00pm ET, Canadians can login to the Talk Canada YouTUbe page to submit and vote on questions, which the PM will answer in another live stream on Tuesday.
I was happily surprised last week when I contacted the Centre for People with Disabilities at the Toronto Public Library and a staff member at the Library offered to digitize a book that I had requested. I am completely blind, and therefore cannot access information available through print alone.
A while back I started a discussion in the jQuery Accessibility group: Screen-readers and UI modal dialog. I was really happy with the quality of the discussion that my question generated, and thought I'd take a moment to share some of my thoughts and conclusions. I want to be clear that the ideas that I am sharing here were only made possible through the people who were so willing to collaborate with me in this discussion.
With the submission deadline for Drupalcon SF2010 session proposals coming to a close I took a look at the Drupalcon SF2010 site to see if any sessions related to accessibility had been proposed. To my surprise there were four session proposals related to accessibility.
After upgrading the operating system on my MacBook to OS X Snow Leopard I noticed that the Drupal 7 CSS style .element-invisible is no longer being recognized correctly.
Elements styled with .element-invisible should be invisible to all but screen-reader users, and those browsing the web with CSS disabled in their browsers.
I have been using a MacBook with the VoiceOver screen-reader for a little over a year now, and have recently upgraded the operating system to OS X Snow Leopard. Another thing that I have been doing for about a year is complaining that the Mozilla Firefox web browser is not accessible with the VoiceOver screen-reader.
Dragging and dropping or re-ordering objects is a challenge for screen-reader users on pretty much any platform, especially on the web. There are some solutions, like the Fluid Infusion Image Reorderer widget, which uses WAI-ARIA to create an accessible experience for users of assistive technologies that support WAI-ARIA. Drupal implements a complex UI component called "table drag".
Good morning and welcome to my new blog. I haven't been writing since the summer when I was working for Open Concept Consulting. I'm not sure how often this site will be updated, but I will do my best to keep the site current with information about the projects that I am currently working on.
