Accessibility
Edison and Disability Employment
Thursday, October 15th, 2009October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The Library of Congress has a display of items from its collection regarding the contributions of persons with a wide range of disabilities. This exhibit has been displayed annually since October 2006.
Did you know that Thomas A. Edison held the record for obtaining the most U.S. patents in his time? He is [...]
Equal and not separate Reading Rights
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009The Reading Rights Coalition is a collaborative effort by 30 nationally recognized organizations that represent those who cannot read print. The coalition members believe access to the written word is the cornerstone of education and democracy and that new technologies must serve individuals with disabilities, not impede them. Ths group protests the threatened removal of [...]
Facebook Commits to Accessibility
Monday, April 13th, 2009Facebook is working with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to make the social networking service more accessible to users who are blind or visually impaired. Carl Augusto, AFB President, explains:
About two years ago, AFB approached Facebook in order to combat the accessibility problems of blind members who were having trouble using the [...]
Braille Literacy Scholarship
Friday, March 6th, 2009HumanWare is launching the 2009 Braille Literacy Scholarship Program which supports the premise that braille literacy is fundamental to a blind child’s success. Choosing the right tools is key to their success. The Mountbatten Learning System Award includes a MB Learning System, Mimic Display, keyboard and MBcomm PC to MB communication software. Entries should be [...]
Kindle 2 Controls
Friday, February 20th, 2009Kindle 2 “cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind.” This quote is embedded in the Kindle 2 controversy about copyright infringement. See the press release from National Federation of the Blind responding to the Authors [...]
Listen to Blog articles
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Odiogo which converts blogs into podcasts has been added to the Talking Books Blog. Click the Listen Now button located on the top left of each article in the blog to activate the text content voice. The Listen Now button will open a player which will read in a near-human quality voice the currently displayed article. While it’s quick to [...]
Wireless Reading Device
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009Amazon will soon make available the latest generation of Kindle, a wireless reading device. What makes Kindle 2 of interest to persons with visual and reading disabilities is the Read-to-Me feature. With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle claims to be able to read every book, blog, magazine, newspaper, and personal documents out loud. Other features include male and female voices which can be sped [...]
Screen-access Training Tool
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009JAWS is a computer based tool developed for people whose vision loss prevents them from seeing screen content. It reads aloud what’s on the PC screen. JAWS Tandem is a recent screen-reading software enhancement whose big feature is training. It allows 2 users in different locations to simultaneously listen to the same computerized voice on an Internet site. The target user [...]