Hey, Intuit! What you got against “high contrast”

Well, we were moving right along with my 2007 taxes, ready to download the state form, and ran into a TurboTax gotcha.

I set my PCs in High Contrast theme with a dark background, cuts down the brightness for when I can see the screen. “High contrast” is one of the standard changes made by the very helpful Windows Accessibility Wizard and is probably used by 10000s of low vision ppeople, as well as many sighted looking for a more restful background. Apparently, TurboTax download for state forms was not tested in this configuration as a nasty error message came up at the start of the transition to state form mode, usually a piece of cake compared to the federal form.

The recommended change to a “classic” or non-contrast theme did not solve the problem, namely a failure of a Continue button to appear. Nor is the intuit recommendation, to “well, just make a slight change in your system” trivial, as it’s easy to screw up Display properties and also can be very hard to change back to High Contrast staring into a painfully bright screen. Sorry, intuit, that’s not fair And it didn’t work, anyway. Now, there is a free state CD on its way to me, responding to an 800 number, but not likely to get here before April 15. We did finish my taxes by moving to another household computer, and would have appreciated knowing of this pitfall to install there first. Thanks, again, intuit, for the advanced warning.

So, this is a pretty egregious screw-up by a major vendor, probably due to some combination of poor specification, lax qA, unfamiliarity with accessibility settings, and not many visually impaired testers in the intuit world.

Of course, I wasn’t trying to do my taxes alone, but rather to avail myself of some in-house teenagers with fast fingers to enter the data I compiled and explained to them. Indeed, I use tax preparation as a way to impart some financial lessons, explaining terminology, re-inforcing “income vs. expenses”, and, unfortunately, occasionally demonstrating confusion from lapses in record-keeping. This extra glitch didn’t help our family morale at all, nearing 90% done, and ready to move on to more fun activities.

I’d be interested in hearing from other visually impaired people:

• Anybody else run into this intuit QA mess?
• Anybody have any recommendations for an accessible tax program for next year?
• Are there other software packages that have a bias against “high contrast” like this one, obscuring a single crucial button or operation?
• Oh, wow, wouldn’t a flat tax be nice?

Reference: google search ‘turbotax “high contrast” state form”

TurboTax Buttons Don’t Show in Firefox Browser - TurboTax Customer care …
TurboTax - Income Taxes, Tax Preparation and Tax s

Turbotax at intuit.com

Hear me stumble — web accessibility observations

This posting lists several good and bad examples of web accessibility and usability situations in an instructive sense, including recorded sessions of this intrepid logger guiding her web page readers.

Background Postings and Standards

• WAI-aria proposals for accessible-rich web next generation technologies;
• webaxe accessibility blog for typical accessibility engineering principles;
• SXSW Interactive Media conference presentation’s> on accessibility issues and enterprise approaches
• Previous posting: “are Missing, Muddle Use cases the cause of much web inaccessibility

recurring Problems that are easily fixed

1. Problem: useless links click Here — huh, for what?
   

   
   The unfortunate user must expend extra energy to read surrounding context to find what the click is for. This mistake usually indicates poor communication skills and lack of testing using a screen reader. variations include: Learn More, read more, and the especially illuminating here. similarly, a document may be identified then followed by its type a line like PDF or HTML or size 5 MB. >
   

   
   Recommendation: Page content writers should read out loud the list of links by screen reader or by eye scanning and assure clarity where each link leads. And there is no excuse for not using a screen reader with the nvda, free, open source, easily installed screen reader .

2. Problem: blog postings blocked by links — when good blogs go bad.
   

   
   conventional web layouts contain site navigation, rolls of links to related content, meta data about site and author, news, etc. screen readers follow a left upper corner, top, left, order that forces reading or bypassing links to reach actual page content, which sighted readers look for in the middle of a page. a repeat visitor rarely has interest in these links. blog and other content management systems usually provide a choice of page layout Reading a links-first blog format takes up screen reader time, even with a jump to heading. More disastrously, an RSS client often receives all the links on a text version of a posting, taking a minute or more to read before content, making some blogs effectively unbearable in RSS format.
   

   
   Recommendation: Design pages and choose layouts to favor quick access to recurring content, placing honorific stuff right and below what your main page matter.

   
   

   
   Examples: two of my favorite tech blogs, Good example: Jon Udell blog and Bad example: Phil windley’s technometria.

3. Problem: Learning the structure of a page — it’s the headings, stupid!
   

   
   we all know to sprinkle headings through our documents to break into and describe sections, even applying this to bills and forms. for a screen reader user, headings provide the primary way of moving among sections, often preceded by an exploratory “heading tour” to identify the page sections ahead. without sections, the screen reader’s finer detail units are links, lists, and paragraphs, but this rapidly degenerates into interminable tabs and keystrokes like taking steps into a cave without knowing where the path will lead. conversely, a well-sectioned document also broken into pages can be very rapidly browsed with a screen reader, perhaps even faster than a scrolling sighted reader. can cover graphics and font styles. Chunks of text can be skipped for more detailed reading later. Nothing substitutes for having a sense of the page’s structure in outline form.
   

   
   Recommendation: Make sure all page sections are well described by HTML H1, H2, H3,… headings with informative descriptions. Now, is that so hard?
   

   
   Example’s href=”http://sxsw.com”> Good example: sxsw.com program organized by days and topic’s> and Good Example: browsing wai-aria documentation

4. Problem: switchingfrom browser to an external app — .txt imprisoned in .doc or .pdf
   

   
   Browsers are now integrated with external applications like Microsoft word or adobe PDF. but that meanss a screen reader user must first launch that app, and, of course, MS OFFICE is not free! reading the document involves a different set of keystrokes and conventions with PDF often losing any previous document structure. Ironically, frequently, the document being read is little more than text any way! This vision Loser simply saves DOC or PDF and then strips the document down to TXT for reading in Notepad or on an external reader like APH Bookport or Levelstar Icon. With gratitude, another path is google search “View as HTML” and HTML save As in mobile gmail. This argument also applies to mail attachment — imprisoning text memos in a WORD format attachment requires a lot of extra work by a visually impaired recipient, and “click on attachment” is often a security risk.
   

   
   Recommendation: Web authors should save a version of a document as HTML and Make that a primary link, offering a PDF for portability (that’s the P in PDF). HTML is the document format that literate web writers should be using, e.g. to exploit hyperlinks, and not at all the private domain of web designers and New Media or IT departments. Strictly speaking any PDF should be produced in accessible format for extensive reading.

More complicated web accessibility Problems

1. Problem: Locked out of the chat room — social Media Overkill.
   

   
   recently, one of my favorite podcasters started live chat sessions with call-in. I wanted to ask a question and join in so showed up at the web page at the appointed time, having pre-registered and browsed the site the day before. Uh, oh, I couldn’t find an entry point, didn’t even know what I was looking for. worse yet, an audio had started playing - was that the current session? No, it was prerecorded, drowning out my screen reader with no way of silencing the cacophony. Eeventually I waded through a ton of links to other shows, popular podcasters, special offers and found a PLAY button. Now, all this with a screen reader contending with an audio discussion, and then the text chat was completely inaccessible to the screen reader. well, that podcaster lost a fan’s admiration for choosing BlogTalkRadion as a meeting place uncomfortable for me. The key problem was that the main purpose — to bring people together — was obscured by the now socially acceptable business practice of trying to draw attention to other podcasts and \shows - current, popular, categories, rated, which we term “social media over-kill”.
   The irony is that the blind and visually impaired communities have superior chat facilities, as exemplified by accessible world.org, built on Talking communities supporting happily chatting friends of Bookshare book club meetings.

   
   Recommendation: when choosing a hosting service, check out its accessibility policy, not just how free it might be, if you want to retain your whole audience and its respect. service providers, please write and follow an accessibility policy and stress its use to service users. service providers, content management system designers, and designer assistants all have a great social responsibility - and opportunity - to be inclusive and to educate service users.

2. Problem: Muddled, missing, mixed use cases — accessibility and mobility needs are met together.
   

   
   consider if you know exactly the book you want to buy at amazon or another big web seller. a trip into amazon takes you through myriad departments of other types of products, offers Recommendations, specials, bundles, and even a chance to become a reseller yourself. but all I wanted to do was get that one book into my cart! Well, luckily, limited screen space on phones and PDA’s is leading to overhauls of web sites to alternatives that offer simple and straight paths to the most common goals for impatient, on-the-go users. contrast clutter full scale amazon.com with accessible, mobile amazon.com . Now, not all of Amazon is on the accessible alternative, and they don’t tell you what’s missing, e.g. changing an email address in profile.
   

   
   Recommendation: web designers can take the opportunity to produce an accessible version of a site along with a mobile-friendly or mobile-optimized version. and don’t forget to tell screen reader users with a non-intrusive link at the top of the page to the alternative. and, save the specials and Recommendations until after the sale.

3. Problem: forms take forever to fill out and an error can be costly, causing form-o-phobia.
   

   
   It’s not just me, the usability literature notes something like 5 times longer for visually impaired form-fillers than sighted users. problems include: identifying required versus optional and what actually goes in a field; non-standard formats for dates, social security numbers, phone numbers; unpredictability of length of forms; time-outs and site failures; and difficulty finding the notification of errors or requirements for verifications. Then there are all those registration “opportunities”, without explanation of benefits of registering, without acknowledgment of the pain to be incurred. No thanks, no forms please.
   Is there a better way? Maybe, as suggested by Jon Udell’s article on batch form-filling for civilians suggesting the use of text strings completed by simple editing and input to an API or query processor. geez, this is so brilliant!

   Recommendation: web designers should take every care to label all fields clearly and acknowledge the time and pain of a visually impaired user. If possible, watch one of us use your form until you cannot stand the pain any longer. and recognize the difference in skill levels and experience and tenacity of a broad audience. forms are where you capture or lose a client. and, don’t even think of putting a graphic only CAPTCHA at the end at risk of eternal damnation. On the other side, visually impaired users need to practice form-filling and accept it as a necessary evil that could ruin your day. We all need to look for better ways, like Jon Udell’s text line suggestion.

Personal Observations and Grand Claims

With a year’s experience using a screen reader, I am still a novice and use articles like this to apportion responsibility for failures
to accomplish web tasks. With a 4-decade career in computing paralleling the lifetime of the Internet, I am acutely aware of many sources of failures: selection, training, and skill level with software, like browsers and screen readers; network and workstation architectures that dictate performance; application requirements analysis and design, as in web 2.0 interactions; educational backgrounds and career motivations of web designers; human proclivity toward ascribing beauty to color and graphics I can no longer appreciate; the levels of personal, team, and enterprise processes that influence application usability; the immense costs of maintenance and upgrade of websites; and now, the structure of the assistive technology industry, the many human factors of accessibility, and the social resistance to disability issues. Mainly I am trying to take responsibility for building my skills to remain productive in society, and especially to pass along technology lessons to other Vision Losers.

Rarely am I completely stymied but far too often the energy required is the limiting factor. I use the “minimum of 5 times ” rule to estimate effort required for a task, based on memory of past trials. Often, just the thought of the work involved deters me from trying a web site, like registering and then facing a CAPTCHA, maybe putting off to a future idle day. Flippantly, I wish all young web designers would test their web sites during a bout with the flu, so they might appreciate the effects of reduced energy on every click and key stroke.

A second observation is how much the web is overly populated with extremely complex web sites, exacerbated by the trend to social media linking. Every link bypassed in a blog or information page is a decrement in energy available for reading, navigating, information seeking, and transactions. Web designers often seem to cram too many functions onto pages and fail to identify the primary use cases and prioritize for screen reader users. I am delighted at the trend toward mobile friendly pages as very helpful in countering complexity and offering redesign opportunities.

In recent discussions with web accessibility practitioners I sometimes found myself thinking as the beggarly, or maybe miserly,old lady who could not shell out $1000 for an industry standard screen reader like Jaws or Window Eyes and got stuck with a third world open source software tool. There is some truth in the monetary argument as I fail to fall into the social services classes: veteran, worker, job seeker, student, or poverty level. But I have also made a technical choice in screen reader, nvda, based on confidence in its developers, satisfaction with its early capabilities, ease of use and installation, and belief in the efficacy of the open source model of development. I also am concerned at a shaky industry chain of developers, screen reader vendors, and rehab organizations that will soon be coming under more international pressure as a free screen reader takes hold in other countries, perhaps with easy adaptability for local languages and web conventions. I cheer for the Australian Torvalds of assistive technology.

Finally, I find myself moving away from the PC and browser with increasing use of the Levelstar Icon PDA. News comes from the NFB Newsline to Bookshare to the Icon’s Newstand without a visit to a slow website. Blogs and feeds bring more news from CNN, USAToday, CNET, and many political and professional organizations — again obviating a browser session in favor of RSS. And the Icon’s little browser often suffices for comfortably reading search results, pages, and blogs not embroiled in Javascript/AJAX interfaces.

Ok, hear me stumble! Listen to recorded sessions.

Here are two recorded sessions of screen reader uses at Amazon and Fidelity. The Amazon demo follows me through the process of getting a pre-selected book into the cart, using the newer accessible and the classic websites. The Fidelity example shows an exploration of a website that has its whole enterprise mapped into menus.

Consolidating links for Vision Losers in Prescott Arizona

Unlike the other essays in this blog, the current post is a link to a resource page about a local community. I have often been frustrated at finding information about events and services, occasionally learning valuable tidbits first from my walking companion, Jack and his dog pack.

My hope is that other Vision Loser’s in the Prescott area will find useful items and that community members will contribute to this resource.

The Vision Loser’s Guide to Prescott Arizona lists local social services, RSS feeds, and pointers to state and national organizations.

Is there a Killer App for Accessibility?

Is there a “killer app” for accessibility?

This post speculates about alternative changed futures for accessibility, such as cost-busting open source developments; self-voicing interactions; over riding inaccessibility by proxy web servers; a screenless, voiced, menu-driven PDA; and higher level software design practices.

First, I digress to tell you about a cool utility that invoked the serendipity behind this posting. Blind Cool Tech has a podcast, Jan. 1 2008, on a “You tube to iPod converter”. I haven’t used Youtube.com much since the videos appear to my partial sight as white blobs with some hand waving going on. Last week, I began to rethink my intellectual aversion to mindless drivel I feared populated Youtube and affronted my blindness sensibilities. The NYTimes had a piece on “Big Think”, a Youtube for eggheads that promised a variety of magazine-style videos of the ilk that interested me, namely politics and economics, reminiscent of the university-based video series at research

Wow, this little piece of software Youtube to iPod converter really delivers and opened up a new way for me to get useful web information. The use case is: copy the URL for a video that interests you, the link you would click to invoke the viewer; paste the link into the accessible converter; choose a file name and location; choose the format type mp3; click “download and convert”; wait a while; listen to the mp3 or your PC or send it on to a digital player, in my case my Bookport from aph.org. With a bit of imagination and patience, you can mentally fill in the video and also have a version to replay or bookmark. Moral of this digression: once again podcasts from the blind community open new worlds for us new vision losers needing accessible software to stay in the mainstream. Thank you, blind cool tech podcaster Brandon Heinrich! Check out my page of Youtube converted videos on eyesight-related topics.

By sheer luck, the first You Tube search I chose was the term “screen reader” and it turned up a provocative demo and discussion:

University of Washington Research: Screen Reader in a Browser by Professor Richard Ladner and graduate student Jeffrey P Bigham in the Web Insight project at cs.washingting .edu

Briefly, this experimental work addresses the problems of costly screen readers and the need for on-the-fly retrieval of web information by blind users away from their familiar screen readers. The proposed solution is a browser adaptation adding a script that redirects web pages to a so-called proxy server that converts the structure of the page, known as its document object, to text and descriptions that are returned to the browser as speech. This is pretty much what a desktop screen reader does, only now the reader and speech functions are remote. Of course, there are a gazillion problems and limits to this architecture but it appears to work sufficiently reliably and rapidly to achieve the social goals of its name, “Web Anywhere”. This research project, funded by the National Science Foundation, has also used the above architecture to modify web pages to add ALT tags from link texts, OCR of the image, and social networking tagging of images. Not only is the technology very clever, but also the work is based on observations of how blind users use the web and on a growing appreciation of the complexity and often atrocious design of web pages and use of AJAX technology that frustrate visually impaired web users, no matter the power of their screen readers or magnifiers or their skills.

As a former employee of funding agency NSF, a reviewer of dozens of proposals, a Principal Investigator in my sighted days on Computer Security education using animation, let me tell you this U. Washington project is a great investment of taxpayer funds. The work is innovative, well portrayed for outreach at at webinsight.cs.washington.edu, addressing monumentally important global and social issues, and helping to bring about a better educated and motivated generation of developers and technology advocates on accessibility issues.
Now, is this proxy-based architecture the killer app for web accessibility? Possibly, with widespread support of IT departments and developers, but the project sets it goals more modestly as “Web Everywhere” for transient web uses and possibly more broadly to address the cost of current screen reader solutions. Maybe the proxy-based approach can be expanded to other uses in demonstrations and experiments on a range of accessibility problems.

In one sense, a no-cost screen reader provides a way of breaking up the current market hierarchy, which one might unfortunately describe as a cartel of disability vendors and service providers. Yes, the premier screen readers sell for $1000 which seems justifiable by the relatively small market, the few million U.S. and international English-speaking PC users who are blind and on the rehab grid. Some, like Blind Confidential blogger, blink, and industry insider suggest the assistive technology industry is doing fine financially, able to afford more R&D and QA, and attractive to foreign investors. Like any segment of the computer industry, buyers become comfortable with the licensing, personalities, training, upgrade policies, and help lines so therefore resist change. In the case of the $1k products, buyers are more likely not individuals but rather rehabilitation and disability organizations with a mandate to provide user support through a chain of trained technical, health, and pedagogical professionals. A screen reader like the free, open source nvda will shake up the industry segment as more users find it suitable for their needs, as I have written about in“Look ma, no screens! NVDA is my reader” posting . With broader acceptance of open source as a reliable and effective mode of software enterprise, as nvda co-develops with other flexible open source office and browser products, as energetic developers fan out to other accessibility projects, well, nvda might well be the killer app of cost and evolution.

However, in a more radical sense, I argue that the screen reader model itself is badly flawed and that also technical accessibility alone is inadequate to resolve the needs of blind web users.

The value of a universal screen reader is that it can do something useful for most applications by dredging out fundamental information flowing through the operating system about an application’s controls and its users’ actions. But another model of software is so-called “self voicing” where the application maintains a focus system that tracks the user’s actions and provides its own reactions through a “speech channel”, providing at least equivalent information to an external screen reader. Such a model can do even better by providing flexible information about the context of a user event and preferences. A button might respond upon focus with “Delete”, or “Delete the marked podcasts in the table”, or repeat the relevant section of the user manual, or elaborate a description of the use case, such as “first, mark the podcasts to delete, and here’s how to mark, then press this button, and confirm the deletions, after which the podcast files will be off your disk unless you download them by another name”. Self-voicing as speech technology is implemented by many applications that allow choice of voice, setting speed, and even variation of voices matched to uses, e.g. the original message in an email reply. More significantly, self-voicing puts the responsibility for usability of the application directly on a developer to provide consistent, coherent, and useful explanations of each possible user interaction. Further, this information is useful both to the end user and to testing professionals who can check that the operation is doing what it says, only what it should, and in the proper context of the application’s use cases. Ditto, a tech writer working with a developer can make an application far more usable and maintainable in the long run. So, we claim, that a kind of killer app development practice would be the shift of responsibility away from screen readers onto self-voicing applications, including operating systems, where development processes will be improved. We base our claims on personal experience developing a self-voicing podcatcher, @Podder, for partially sighted users using a speech channel of copying text to the clipboard to be read by external text-to-speech applications. Another self-voicing application is Kurzweil 1000 for scanning and document management, and employing the nicest spell checker around.

We have argued in “Are missing, muddled use cases the cause of web inaccessibility?” posting that the main culprit in web usability is not technical accessibility but the way use cases are represented, tangled, and obscured by links as well as graphics and widgets on web pages. A use case describes a sequence of actions performed to meet a spcific goal, such as “register on a website” or “archive email messages”. Use cases not only lay out actions but also provide the rationale, the consequences, constraints, and error recovery procedures for interactions. Our claim is that software developers, both desktop and web application developers, force all users, sighted or blind, to infer the use cases from the page contents and layouts, often embellished with links, such as blog rolls, to enhance social interaction and increase search engine rankings. Reports such as those from the Web Insight project and the Neilsen Norman report “Beyond ALT text” describe in gory detail the frustrations and failures of visually impaired users struggling with their screen readers and magnifiers and braile displays to overcome the practice of poor use case representation as they try to keep up with sighted users in gaining information from and performing consumerism within the constellation of current web sites. While I certainly believe that web accessibility activists are important to removing barriers and biases, the larger improvement will come when websites are designed and clearly presented to achieve their use cases, for the benefit of all those who gain from better website usage. This is already occurring with re-engineering for mobile devices where failure to activate a use case or have available the appropriate use case is especially apparent, and, seemingly, not really that hard to achieve.

Finally, what about the marvelous mobile devices such as the fully voiced, menu-driven LevelStar Icon and APH Braille Plus Mobile Manager? After 8 months of Icon addiction, I firmly believe that, cost aside, this form of computer is far superior to conventionalL Internet usage for the activities it supports, mainly email, RSS management, browsing, and access to Bookshare.org resources. for example, I can consume the news I want in about an hour from NYTimes, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Arizona Republic, CNN, InsiderHigherEd, CNET, and a host of blogs. And that’s BEFORE getting up in the morning. No more waiting for web pages to load on a news website, browsing through categories on information that don’t interest me, and bypassing advertisements. Additionally, I am surprised at how often I use the Icon’s “Mighty Mo” embedded browser by wireless rather than open up the laptap to bring up Firefox and fend off all my update anxious packages and firewall warnings. Yes, life with the Icon is “living big”. the Icon is mainly part of the trend toward phones and wireless devices, but just happens to be developed by people who know what visually impaired users need and want.

Maybe, somewhere out there is a wondrous software package that will dramatically boos the productivity and comfort of visually impaired computer users. With some assurance, we can recognize an upcoming generation of open source oriented developers seasoned by traditional assistive technology and adept at both project organization and current software tools. Funders and support organizations can look ahead to utilization of their innovations and improvements. But maybe the core problem is much harder, as we claim, a disconnect in “computational thinking” between software designers who have found their way through models and user-oriented analysis and those web designers stuck at the token and speechless GUI level of browsers and web pages. Empirical researchers on accessibility are starting to witness and understand the fragility of users caught between artifacts designed for sighted users and clumsy, superhuman emulating tools such as screen readers and magnifiers while the proper responsibility for accessibility falls on developers who have yet to appreciate the power of readily available speech channels along side graphical user interfaces.

What do others think? Is their a “killer app” for accessibility? Comment on this blog at http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com, “As Your World Changes” blog or email to slger123@gmail.com.

2007Summary and on to 2008

This posting provides a summary of “As Your World Changes” major subjects and web links in 2007 and a preview of topics in the works for 2008.

Recommended Software experience reports

• an open source screen reader nvda previous post, “Look ma, no screens!”
• FileDir replacement for Windows Explorer from Jamal Mazrui
• TextAloud, reader and mp3 converter from nextup.com. Previous post TextAloud, a simple, low cost reader
• Handy peripherals Previouse Post on “Mouse Hacks” and Being Your own system integrator
• Sample synthetic voices in TextAloud reading earlier posts

Next topics: “What is emacspeak?”; “Any benefits from Microsoft Word DAISY output?”; “Conquering gmail”; “Google your past from your desktop”, “Will speech recognition save my wrists and thumbs?”

People, Organizations and Services

• nvaccess.org, nonprofit developers of assistive technology
• mdsupport.org, information and community for macular degenerates from Previous Post: Resources, Support, and Reality Check for Macular Degenerates
• Bookshare.org, “Technology for Society” with affiliated Friends of Bookshare.org book clubs and chat room discussed in previous post “what’s a vision loser to do? Bookshare!
• Great series of software resources and reviews ACB Radio.org Main Menu , AFB Access World, Accessible World.org , <a and Blind Cool Tech.com ,Accessible Software
• apodder.org, distributor of @Podder, an “easy viewing” podcast collector and Library of podcasts on eyesight-related topics using the Podzinger.com audio search service

Topics in progress: Great vision assistance technologists: Bookport, Literacy, Icon; “Why should I join a blindness organization?” ??”; “Grrrr, becoming a community activist!”

Philosophy and Analysis

• Book Reviews of Vision Losers: “Twilight, a memoir by Henry Grunwald and “Conversations with author Susan Krieger
• Previous Post “Aren’t we Vision Losers Lucky?” on podcasts and modern technology
• Previous post “A Guiding Philosophy for Vision Losers” Safety, Energy, Relationships, Appreciation, and Financial
• My take on accessibility and usability - big design challenges:
  • “Are Missing, muddled use cases the culprit?” posting,
  • “Seeing through Google Book Search” posting,
  • “Help, I’m being updated to death!” posting,
  • “e-voting = Extreme Voting, a Moon Shot for Democracy”

Topics in progress: “My brain on sound - re-wired for speech?”; “Continuing progress in accessibility and usability”; “Computational Thinking — living with more levels of abstraction”; “GTD, getting things done, non-visually”; “What disability teaches you, and others around you”

Virtual Stocking Stuffers for Vision Losers

To overcome my life-long tendency to emulate Scrooge at this time of the year, I am happy to share some pointers to gadgets, gear, and comfort items I have come to appreciate especially in my first full year of diminished vision.

Now, is this theme about stockings that are virtual or are the stuffers of a virtual kind? Both, really, these are things one might want to buy for oneself or for a Vision Loser family member or acquaintance. One thing I have learned is that cost is more than money. The overhead of making a purchase, tracking receipts and accounts, setting up a working version of something, and integrating it into my routine takes a precious commodity — physical and mental energy. Any gift that reduces energy load and doesn’t require disproportionately more energy to acquire and maintain is especially helpful to Vision Losers.

First, the “free” stuff, meaning worth a trial and consideration for investing learning time. I have written about the nvAccess, an open source screen reader nvda project based in Australia. This remains my mainstay for reading text and navigating screens, getting better all the time. This organization is also a great place for an end-of-year donation as are other vision-assisting organizations like mdSupport.org, information and community for macular degenerates.

Based on interviews and recommendations within the blind community, as heard on ACB Radio Main Menu, Accessible World, <a and Blind Cool Tech, I am starting to use vision-avoiding software FileDir and TextPal from Jamall Mazrui, a Microsoft-oriented developer. Downloadable FileDir sets up easily with a gazillion shortcuts and menu entries that expand and provide an alternative model for Windows Explorer, notably tagging files and directions as opposed to extending selections, talking responses to actions, and conversion to text of PDF, DOC, and other less speaking applications. Accessible Software has other utilities to try.

What every Vision Loser learning to type with reduced vision needs is a really good spelling checker that reads mis-spelled words, suggestions, and context. Kurzweil 1000 has by far the best checker but that’s $1000 software, which also supports easy document scanning. Since I use the absolute minimalist Windows Notepad for most typing, exactly because it doesn’t have extra tricky functionality, I am asking my Santa for a stand-alone spelling checker just like K1000 - please, please, please. A neat feature of Google, as related on the Google blog, topic “accessibility” is its ability to correct proper nouns you might hear but cannot spell, giving the most popular spelling on the web.

In the low-cost gift category are the Microsoft mouse models with magnifiers, especially the larger one with extra buttons for assigning functions, as discussed in our early post on “Mouse Hacks”. Don’t forge to strip this gift of its hard plastic cover which can stymie just about any human let alone someone who can’t see where to poke a sharp instrument. Avoid a trip to the emergency war.

For the beginner Vision Loser and a great all-around bargain is TextAloud for nextup.com to read saved documents or text copied to a clipboard, also converting to mp3 files for digital player listening. With a few checks in your browser menus, you can have a TextAloud toolbar to read pages with an added bonus of of zoom buttons. And don’t forget the premium voices that over-ride the robot-like Microsoft Sam, Mary, and Mike. In fact, if your gift recipient likes to listen to long-playing materials or is picky about voices, you can assemble a small choir of Neospeech, Reals peak, Nuance, Cepstral and other voices at about $30 each. Except for Cepstral, which had license problems, these voices work nicely with nvda screen reader and the documents it reads out.

A surprisingly useful piece of equipment is an external keyboard. Plug in its USB receiver, recline before the warm fireplace, and practice your screen reading skills, like “speed browsing”. Once you have unglued your eyes from a screen, your versatility of skills can promote more degrees of comfort than you might imagine. These full-sized keyboards are available for <$100 from most consumer stores, but it helps to add in a lap board and maybe a wrist rest as faster fingers and a different posture can put a lot of load on thumbs and wrists. Safety-first says my guiding philosophy (previous post) and no need to invite the secondary disability of repetitive strain injuries.

The world of so-called Independent Living Aids has some amazing stuff. I use more than I had expected a little sensor and voiced reader that tells me the color of clothes, so I less often pack mis-matched blue and black for a trip. It’s cute, saying “blue” in kind of a tentative voice, requiring a good window of natural sunlight, and, unfortunately, failing to tell me when I leave home with a sweater on wrong side out. My next consumer goals are lables for just about everything and a system for finding the stuff I mis-place.

If your Vision Loser has reached the certifiable level of print disability, congratulations, memberships in Bookshare.org is available at $75 + a trip to eye doctor for the certification. 35,000 books, many recent best sellers and a host of disability-related texts, await someone who needs to expand or replace physical book collections. A voiced reader is needed, on PC or hand-held. Bookshare will be expanding rapidly as a provider under U.S. Department of Education grant funds of textbooks to print-disabled students across the U.S. within limits of student eligibility and publisher constraints. Moreover, a constellation of book clubs is now starting up at Friends of Bookshare chat room. Bookshare propagates the National Federation of the Blind Newsline to deliver newspapers right to your doorstep.

Switching over to hand-held reading appliances, new this year is the Victor Reader Stream from Humanware. I prefer the Bookport from American Publishing House for the Blind which is unfortunately out of stock until components are available for the next major release. The Stream, like the Bookport, is about the size of a pack of cards, with content loaded onto its storage card from a PC, then reading text with a synthetic voice. Digital Talking Books from Bookshare. podcasts, other mp3 files and all kinds of memos can be copied to the Stream and annotated using its voice recorder. Of course, just like the teens get for gifts, there’re all kinds of accessory ear bud’s, mini-speakers, even incorporated into pillows (hint, hint!).

Way up the ladder of costs is the remarkable Icon PDA from Levelstar at $1400 + optional promised $400 docking station. Integrated with Bookshare, working well with a home wireless network, and containing fully functional email, browser, and RSS/podcast clients, the Icon is with this Vision Loser hours a day. In fact, my newspapers are delivered without getting out of bed, along with a first pass at email, podcasts, and many mailing lists. I suppose my TV still works, if I could find the remote, but the Icon provides most of the news I used to get from papers and magazines and TV. In fact, my favorite radio and TV shows , Lehrer news hour and WAMU Diane Rehm, are available in podcast format. And the speed of reading using the Icon is amazing, with no page flipping, and, of course, no need to recycle piles of paper. I would not put the Icon into the hands of someone yet to become comfortable with synthesized voices, but there’s no need for learning a screen reader with an Icon, because there is no screen, only voiced menus. And Le`velstar provides an exceptional set of podcast tutorials, including upgrade changes.

And I, this geeky Vision Loser, offer a free podcatcher, @Podder from apodder.org. While other podcatchers, like on the Icon, provide convenient download and, listen, and throw away podcasts, @Podder supports collections of podcasts on hobbies, news, whatever someone might think worth collecting to listen to later, for reference or repeat enjoyment. In fact, this blog is sprinkled with web pages of podcasts from a growing library of over 2000 podcasts on eyesight-related topics. For the more advanced listener, here are OPML files if you want to track accessibility progress or listen into the lively blind community podcasts and blogs eyesigh related blogs and podcast. Use Podzinger audio search to find podcasts of specif eyesight topics.

But, for all the good cheer my geeky devices bring me, my immediate geographical community is disappointing. There is only one bus, making mainly the mall route hourly. A community center was built within walking distance of my home but without even a sidewalk, requiring a stretch of walking next to traffic in a bike lane. The only mobility trainer in the county is booked for months, so I cannot get the training I need for more comfortable and safe traveling. The local newspaper is a loss for website browsing, not available on Newsline, limiting my awareness of local events. Ok, the U.S. has such wealth, but skewed priorities against disability, a bitter lesson for the newly disabled. At least, next year I will be back on a level playing field for health insurance with Medicare. If only one of the vacant over-priced houses in my neighborhood could be converted to social services, then independent Vision Losers, with many more Baby Boomers soon to have failing eyesight, could make the transition more gracefuly, safely,, and productively. A lump of coal to those who cannot see the value of taxes as investments in the younger, the older, and the differently abled. And a heap more coal to the many who don’t realize this basic truth: “Designing for the disabled produces better products for all” because the disabled expose the design flaws and suggest solutions the “fully abled” would not think of.

Please visit @Podder collected podcasts on eyesight topics for a broad sampling of the news, reviews, personal revelations, and activist actions of trickle-down helpfulness from the blind community.

Web Inaccessibility — Are Missing, Muddle Use Cases the Culprit?

Web Inaccessibility — Are Missing, Muddle Use Cases the Culprit?

As I have been learning to traverse websites using the nvda screen reader (previous post) I try to formulate the principles of design and implementation that make this task more or less productive, as well as pleasurable. At the same time, I have been tutoring myself in the accessibility literature, mostly in the form of blogs and podcasts. This post recounts some of my frustrations, diagnoses possible remedies, and a sweeping conjecture about the root cause of much web inaccessibility and difficult usability.

As I improve my proficiency with the nvda screen reader and learn to navigate web sites by voice and keyboard, I am constantly amazed at how hard it can be to get where you want to go and avoid heading down the many, well, blind alleys. I am an Internet veteran: first email around 1976, worked with protocol pioneer Jon Postel, saw Mosaic in late 1992, had my first web page in 1993, set up my first domain name and website in 1995, and several websites since, plus writing search analysis software, Java applets used around the world for security training, and a podcatcher for partially sighted people like me. However, all too often, I find myself fumbling, stumbling, and cursing my way around websites, wondering why using a browser with a screen reader is so difficult, error prone, and exhausting. Is it the tools I am using? or my admitted status as self-trained beginner in the low vision world? ignorant of accessibility tricks and techniques? or maybe I expect the task to be easier than possible, for me or others?

To document my environment: Windows XP on tablet PCs, Mozilla Firefox browser used for over 3 years, TextAloud toolbar for reading and zooming on pages, nvda screen reader used for 2 months as discussed in previous post, responsive natural synthetic voices, pretty good bandwidth on home wireless and cable. My main browser interactions: h for heading to page sections; k to links; control F for quick find page search; tab among page items; up and down arrows through lines; page up up, down, home, and end to page boundaries; INS + down to read consecutively down a page; INS + BLANK to pass through typing into form fields; control K to start a search; control L to open a new site.

Here are a few situations, complaints, diagnoses, and remedies.

Booking a flight on USAir, fondly known in Arizona as America West. I cannot find the boxes to query for flight schedules then make a choice and book the flight. So I reluctantly call the 800 number, beg my way out of the $10 booking penalty, and hope for a good fare. The problem in software design terms is that USAIR has scrambled its use cases together on the first page, providing last minute specials, detours to frequent flier data, wonderful offers of cruises and vacations, and practically everything the airline does. On a good sight day, I can locate the depart/arrive boxes to start, but screenless. Like many commercial booking websites, I give a rating of “hopeless jumble of links” although the sites may still conform to the letter of accessibility rules.

Amazon has also seemed like another jumble of links: recommendations, my account, searches for all kinds of items, invitations to become a seller. But, thankfully, there is a link to a more accessible streamlined page I can actually use most of the time. It is ironic that the needs for mobile users to see small screens coincides with the needs of visually impaired users to traverse streamlined web pages. This allows me to get most of a pre-defined purchase completed, going into exploration and recommendation mode when I choose rather than as obstacles on the route to a purchase. I still need sighted help to get the coupon numbers copied onto the purchase page, but transaction appear less daunting now on Amazon. Actually, on return recently, the website appears to be undergoing a makeover from accessibility experts - kudos to them!

Hurrah!! it is so exhilarating to see a simple page show up, just like the early days of the web, before images, adsense, navigation bars, dynamic content, etc. So, here is a remedy when doing battle with a complex commercial site: Look for a “basic HTML”, “mobile friendly”, “mobile optimized” link and throw back to the early days of the web. Thanks to Allison Sheridan for urging me in this direction on her vision-friendly NoscillaCast podcast.

How about search sites? Well, google is pretty good at separating its search results with headings with intervening links to google alternatives, including the extremely valuable “view as HTML” that avoids a cycle of save, import, export as text, and listen rather than open the usually unneeded Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF. On the other hand, the tagged and search-based gmail is a tangled overlay of use cases. For example, archiving messages by a filter requiring several steps down to a filter label, over to a select all link click, combo pull down to Archive list item, and return to Inbox. In single step mode,, one can check the box for conversations the find the archive button. Or there are keyboard shortcuts that my mind simply boggles at learning. At least reading gmail is enabled by a pop3 account on my Icon or, soon to be, fully voiced Mozilla Thunderbird. Google offers a separate search that weights accessibility into its search results, but I have not used it sufficiently to comment.

Blog readability varies a lot, but at least there is a common structure: entries with associated reply and comment fields; archives; blogrolls of links; and assorted meta data and added pages. The clincher is choice of template to place navigation bars relative to blog entries — right and below being best for screen readers and spoken RSS clients. While not easy, the wordpress dashboard is usable through a combination of good structure and parsimonious informative link labels.

Government Web Sites often, while conform ant with the so-called 508 mandate, follow a recognizable organizational or legislative hierarchy, sometimes with a touch of hilarity. I’m familiar with the NSF Fastlane proposal management system, which has changed little in the past 5 years except for an accretion of bureaucratic guano. It took me 17 tabs to get to the login box on one page, covering links about travel, registration, policies here, manuals there when the sole purpose most users would be on this page was to enter username then password. Later I found myself scrolling over a large block of text to the worksheet, a rendition of workload requirements that nobody in their right mind would read except for a hapless blind person who got stuck there. My complaints to a government representative were duly noted and agreed with but it will take a very fresh perspective to turn a bureaucratic haystack into a really usable website, well beyond the purview of accessibility standards that may simply divert attention to the wrong details.

I was highly impressed recently on the medicare.gov website when a link came up for screen readers. Following that path, I soon ran into the hilariously dumb “Click here” link text that should be a red flag for any accessibility analysis clickhere for what? And there was a sequence of “click here” on a page expressly designed for screen readers! Geez, where are the accessibility police?

Well, that’s enough complains, what does the literature of accessibility tell us? First, there are the common sense guidelines, see links below, that mention the sensible ordering, link text, graphic ALT tags, use of headings to reveal page structure. Any trip into the standards literature shows how complex the language and tradeoffs are, when compiled by a group of experts trying to reach a consensus — not an easy read for anybody, and a good excuse for routine web designers to avoid thinking about accessibility. The standout book for me is “Constructing Accessible Websites” which tours the landscape of HTML and CSS as well as the legal issues, e.g. can that routine web designer be held accountable for violating ADA laws?

Blogs such as “A List Apart”, WebAxe, WebAim, etc. often delve into highly technical issues of web accessibility at a feature and technology level. The tradeoffs of writing a web page one way or another are often poorly understood and tricky to articulate so the expense of apaplying a particular rule can be hard to justify. Indeed, my technical background combined with my accessibility needs leads me to commiserate with people who must deal with accessibility, especially late in website design or even later in mintenance, violating the software process rule that cost escalates with delay in addressing a solid requirement.

I have been confusing two terms here, “accessibility” and “usability”, with the latter my main concern. Accessibility is more technical in stipulating that the system stack of hardware, operating system, applications, and screen display provide sufficient and correct information about the screen data state and events to screen readers to interpret and pass onto uers. This architecture is historical and, I believe, wrong to its core now that we have a “speech channel” that could throw the responsibility for interpretation and amplification of data provided to bypass or supplement the screen reader ,, but that’s a future posting. Usability refers to the bottom line of whether users can complete the tasks at hand. Inaccessible features here and there may be barriers to usability but issues of separation of content and presentation, well-planned navigation, and display of the right stuff at the right time most determine usability.

For this Vision Loser, there is an internal batter reading of energy consumed by tasks, enabling me t to predict impossible tasks and schedule smaller chunks of work that can be completed. We have noted in our post on “Extreme Voting” that voting tasks fall in the range of Olympic events which must be completed under severe time constraints with no prior training or practice, complicated further by long ballots. To sighted people open to a comparable challenge: use a talking ATM to withdraw $100 in less than 1 minute.

A few conclusions are:

• The book “Constructing Web Accessibility” validates my navigation complaints as common and often cured by “link to content”, “jump to sidebar”, modest sized navigation bars, supers mart screen readers able to recognize chunks of HTML as non-content to bypass, and and avoiding the pernicious dumb “click here” or “learn more” link. These are sign posts of attention of web site designers toward accessibility and techniques to improve my browsing practice.
• Indeed, I am not fully empowered by my chosen screen reader to jump comfortably to all parts of a pages I will wait for the next version, partially developed under a Mozilla grant, to determine whether this youthful product is remiss and watch carefully for the productivity improvements noted above. Meantime, I can live with excess links as long as I know where I am situated on a page, e.g. by a “heading tour”.
• I just can’t help but reverse engineer each transactional website into its use cases and mentally Write an introduction I wish were available as a spoken site overview.
• The trend toward mobile pages offers a practical remedy for working on many websites, with hope for momentum to alter web design.

So, what is the big deal with “use cases”? The sweeping conclusion.

The concept is quite simple: a system’s design starts, in part, from a suite of named paths through the system’s eventual operations interleaved with those of users and other systems. Each use case has a precondition for its proper execution, a post condition stating the changes and outputs, and considerations of errors and options. In practice, a use case analysis can take several weeks and result in multiple pages of structured text and graphics, sometimes produced by CASE computer-assisted software engineering tools. This kind of stuff is taught presently in software engineering and object-oriented design analysis courses.

My complaint is that these use cases, whether explicit or not, are then mapped into a few web pages with forms, combo boxes, and text labels. The situation is close to what we called in the 1970s “spaghetti code” where control flow was woven through small sections of code because the state of programming languages did not sufficiently support modularity or the world view of object orientation. HTML is the assembly language that is unfortunately available to thousands of web designers not educated in the more advanced methodology and tool base that systematized programming to some extent.

The sighted person has an intuitive grasp of what each form needs and the physical agility to complete it and to detect and correct mistakes. The visually impaired person must somehow parse how the use cases, find the appropriate forms, meet the unidentified preconditions, find error message and fault locations, avoid cancel buttons, and complete the task before a time-out, wireless failure, or automatic PC update invalidates minutes, or hours, of tedious work.

Note again how nicely the “mobile revolution” can cooperate with accessibility. A site developer must identify the most important use cases to place on a mobile-friendly page, strip off ads and special offers, put the function forms prominent, and not clutter the page with navigation. That busy traveler needing to order a gadget without recommendation use cases, frequent purchaser signups, and the latest added options’ — and so does the visually impaired user. Separate and save the recommendations, special offer shopping, and account management until the transaction is completed or for idle browsing moments.

Looking back at our examples: a flight schedule lookup should not be cluttered by cruise offers; a log-on to enter a review system should not be over-run with travel instructions; a workload policy is worth no more than a link off a worksheet page, at worst at the bottom; navigation bars aren’t relevant to most use cases; and a mail archive is a lot different than an email lookup. Accessibility writings warn of the difficulties presented by mixing presentation with structured content, e.g. omitting headings. An insidious practice seems to be the desire to make all use cases available on a single page. This is a weird form of optimization I wish someone could explain to me. Is this optimization a root cause of broken rules of accessibility, poor structure, an insurmountable challenge to screen readers, and a constant pain to visually impaired users?

Not surprisingly, a search on terms “use cases and assistive technology” or “use cases web page accessibility” shows some interest in this topic in the w3c and usability communities. My epiphany for my own learning and continued improvement in web skills is that it helps to construct a mental map of the use cases and how they are implemented in the navigation and interaction items of a website, whether on a single page or across a site. My wish is that web page designers would present an overview of their web site in use case terms. In the longer term, it would be great to have multiple presentations, such as the trend toward mobile-friendly pages, where the use cases are sufficiently separated into separate pages that the mental load of intuiting and remembering the use cases becomes less critical to successful use of their sites.

Recently, I ran across JumpChart, a web page design tool that supports what usability people call a wire frame. This tool is exactly the place to interject both accessibility concerns and mechanisms for supporting accessibility.

Wow, is there a lot of substance to this topic. I hope soon to find counter-example websites to the troubles I attribute to missing and muddled use cases, as well as highly accessible pages in the technical and usability sense. Finally, my own mea culpa for all the stupid stuff I have dropped onto websites and made usability harder — I am working to correct my bad style. I haven’t addressed the Target lawsuit or capcha or other biases and so much more is known about hacks and techniques for accessibility. See our podcast library for hours of informative listening.

References:

1. Guidelines for 508 government website mandate
2. Recommendations for accessibility from MIT
3. Amazon entry and reviews of “Constructing Accessible Website” book and “Constructing accessible websites also available from Bookshare
4. accessibility consulting and resources from Jim Thatcher
5. Webaxe accessibility tips and podcast
6. <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_case”?Wikipedia article on “use cases”
7. ` WebAIM blog roundup of blogs on accessibility

8. JumpChart web design service
9. nvda, nonVisual Desktop Access free, open source screen reader
10. apodder.org podcast library on “web accessibility”, collected by @Podder podcatcher

Lessons from “Twilight”, a memoir by Henry Grunwald

This eloquent memoir precedes our current computing pre-occupations, making a case for the advances we consider in our previous posting “aren’t we vision losers lucky?”. The book includes the author’s description of his diagnosis, treatments, and emotional responses along the way. Chapter 2 has a fascinating section on blindness as seen in mythology and literature, identifying our patron Saint Lucy. This book is especially cathartic for a vision loser asking “do I feel or act like that?” or “wow, he expresses my feelings so well. And that makes me feel better to share that feeling.”

Grunwald developed full blown wet macular degeneration after his retirement from Editor-in-chief of Time Magazine and a distinguished career including ambassador to Austria. He wrote his memoir of his vision losing experience in the late 1990s following a well-received article published in the New Yorker in 1996. His short eloquent book is available on Bookshare.org, scanned by this blogger.

In Chapter 10, Grunwald sums up the life-changing effects of gradually losing his eyesight. Hope for a cure never left him, but reality about the permanence of his condition forced him to come to terms with it. Bouts of anger exploded in throwing unreadable magazines across the room. And his family never fully realized the extent of his loss until his journalistic report. He frankly describes the concurrent effects of his aging, and realizing its progress, intermingled with losing vision.

His descriptions of emotional turmoil express my feelings, as well. I often throw a fit of exasperation when sorting out the junk mail, especially when looking for something important like health insurance. Since my condition is caused by lifelong progressive myopic degeneration, I feel somewhat smugly exempt from the age-related label but know in my heart that whitening hair and the slowing gait of a cautious vision loser combine to enhance the impression of aging in others and in myself. Hope, which I have never been given by doctors still brims up in me when I hear of progress in stem cell therapies. I spoke once to my retinal specialist about becoming a subject of a clinical trial, and he chuckled as he informed me that no matching patients as myopic as I could be found for a trial population. Now, it takes a lot to get a grin, let alone a chuckle, from a sober retinal guy, so I gave up on that idea.

Grunwald expresses well what a profound life experience is vision loss, a force for change that brings us to a level of capability and adjustment to age-related factors we might have otherwise just passed through without conscious awareness of the changes or their effects. I personally would not have developed my guiding 5 level philosophy that has helped me sort out not only contemporary but also lifelong feelings. For example, as Grunwald expresses, we develop a keen appreciation of those things we can see. I often feel my greatest loss is not seeing smiles, simple accepted personal experiences which I never appreciated, and especially relish in the rare moments I catch one on a loved one’s face falling in the right spectrum of light. I also find myself more aware of my own smile and offer it to others as a conscious gift not as a reflex, whether they recognize my awareness or not.

Grunwald wasn’t a “computer guy” like us, but he often describes his love-hate relationship with his magnifiers. They are both aids and symbols of loss and regain of power. His electronics use was, in the 1990s, the early days of recorded books and text to speech. I wonder how this highly literate spirit would react to podcasts, ATT Natural voices, and reading technologies we enjoy now, more than a decade after the vision loss transition he describes. A man of letters and printed text would surely appreciate the experiences with digital and spoken materials, even at a cost of intervening synthetic manipulation and complexity.

I bought :Twilight” well before I was into any noticeable level of print disability, was not “out” to many colleagues, just experimenting with MDSupport.or community. Listening now to a book I can not read but know I need helped me gather both courage and humor from a wise older spirit.

Happily, there is a book interview with Diane Rehm on her WAMU radio show, an inspirational personality encouraging “intelligent and civil conversation”. This interview stimulated an open letter from the National Federation of the Blind raising issues about Grunwald’s openness about his visual difficulties and how that attracts negative images of blindness in the press. The letter writer considered him as a suffering soul who would benefit from more integration with blindness organizations like NFB, taking advantage of its valuable Newsline service, then on phone and now available on Bookshare. Actually the book, more so than n the interview, describes interactions with Lighthouse and New York City -based doctors. Listening again to the interview, I sense in Grunwald’s European-accented voice, more world weariness of a life-long journalist, uncomfortable about discussing personal feelings, and not fully conveying the sense of adventure, learning, and self-mockery apparent in the full book.

Belated thanks, Mr. Grunwald.

REFERENCES

• 
  Amazon Book description and several reviews
  

• Available for members at Bookshare Library

• 
  Interview with Henry Grunwald on WAMU Diane Rehm Show
  may require Real Player to listen. Archives on November 16, 1999. Diane Rehm show is now a podcast with great news and author interviews.

• 
  Open Letter to Henry Grunwald from NFB

• 
  Obituary for Henry Grunwald
  

Related blog entries: “Conversations with author Susan Krieger”, “This Vision Loser’s 5 Guides for Living with Vision Loss”, and “Aren’t we vision losers lucky?”

Look, ma, no screens!! nvda, non-Visual Desktop Access, is my new Reader.

Summary: This Vision Loser makes the transition to screen reader dependence, sets up her new tablet notebook with mostly open source apps, and learns many painful new routines.

As my vision changed over the past year, I started to use Narrator, the minimalist screen reader built into Windows XP speaking in Microsoft Sam. I had seen and heard demos of the standard Freedom Scientific JAWS and GW Micro WindowEyes and also tried the newcomer System Access to Go but could not bring myself to invest the $$ fees and upgrade slippery slope and irreversible learning time. However, something deeper, perhaps my Rebel archetype, said “don’t go with the traditional, but find your own pathway.” After all, I’m not on the “rehab grid”, I pay my own way, I appreciate and understand software, and I have time to experiment.

A short flirtation with the Thunder screen reader supported many of my needs, but was rather, well, quirky. A podcast on ACB Replay and review from Blind Geek Zone introduced the nvda (non visual desktop access) open source, free screen reader from young Michael Current, a blind Australian, and his budding infrastructure nvAccess . A simple install, the quick start on the screen, an easy switch to my own synthetic voices, and a bout of fumbling with the keyboard and I knew this was, for me, “the real thing”.

As luck would have it, my Dell notebook’s screen dissolved and I needed to move my primary connectivity and screen to backup Toshiba tablet now also getting a bit old and precarious. With a new tablet moving into the household, along with the Linux-based Icon PDA and it was time to totally remodel my computing environment and my brains, hands, mouse, and reflex “operating system”.

Any relocation, whether household or computer, is a time of mental and emotional turmoil. What applications should I move, e.g. the text reader discussed earlier, and the voice data files I’ve grown accustomed to? Where are the license keys, the setups’ or links to later versions? Maybe it’s also time to revamp my myriad email accounts now mostly funneled through gmail, which I love-hate? Do I want to commit my new setup to the “stove pipe of evil” — Microsoft office, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express? A month later, I’m trying to distill in this post my painful experiences, with more to come later on gmail and portable apps and recent announcements from Mozilla and IBM.

First, let’s define a “screen reader” as really a “screen listener” which responds to events from the Windows operating system and running applications as the user moves focus around the screen. Usually the OS and applications express themselves with dialog boxes and wait for user requests on menus and buttons. The screen listener picks up information about these events and speaks them through a speech engine and chosen synthetic voice files. This is really complicated because there are so many levels of operating systems and applications software, mechanical and electronic hardware in keyboards and mouse, and users flittering around the screen looking for something with their finger or finger surrogates twitching movements leading to a rapid stream of events to be mediated by the screen listener, vying with other processes for memory resources, preferably without crashing.

Narrator is actually understated in value, as Microsoft software goes. Upon initiation, a dialog warns that you’ll probably want a more robust screen reader for everyday use, but well, here’s Narrator for backup or to get you started. Indeed, one purpose of Narrator is to try to assist Windows installation. If you are unfamiliar with Narrator, go to the Start button and type Run and then Narrator or find and work through the Accessibility Wizard. Narrator will occasionally choke when Windows is in a precarious state, but can usually be counted on to walk through the primary windows on the screen and through the file explorer. Therefore, here’s my

Fundamental rule of survival:

(***) Keep Narrator as a backup and remember how to use it with different types of outage: eyesight, mouse, keyboard, resources. It’s there on the desktop as a shortcut in my 911Emergency folder, on the Windows start menus (added in the users + You + startup directory, and specifically added in the startup directory. Of course, you have to find it first and create a shortcut to copy around. And there’s the Start button + Run + Narrator.

Setting up nvda:

nvda is available from ….with either an installer or a zip extractor version. The installer may be hard to understand voice-wise and may be overkill. nvda has a very important property of being a Portable App that keeps all its files in a single directory that will run from wherever it’s extracted, including a USB memory stick. Portability means that you can walk up to modern Windows systems, plug in the memory stick, start nvda from an autorun or shortcut, and you’re in screen listening mode, albeit maybe not with your accustomed voices.

nvda has a number of Preferences to set up or leave as defaults: speech engine, voice and its speed, how much to read punctuation, and rules of behavior in a browser (called “virtual buffer”).

Each screen reader package has a “modifier” key to be keyed in conjunction with letters and other keys. nvda uses the Insert (INS), which may be found in widely varying places on keyboards: immediately right of space on Toshiba, upper right corner on Motion Computing tablet plastic cover keyboard, and middle right of backspace on my Bluetooth 101 full sized keyboard. One of the hassles, a dread for me, is memorizing the needed keys for the screen reader and my customary applications. It’s boring, never-ending, and I just needed to get over An audio tour on the nvAccess website prodded me to continue trying, even to “RTFM”.

Here’s my memory bank to illustrate a few:

Windows shortcuts: ALT+TAB among windows, ALT+F4 to exist an app, ESC to get out of most dialogs, space or enter to push a button, TAB to move around in a window, right and left to open and close tree views with up and down inside a tree,

Trainer Karen McCall of Karlen Communications in Canada calls this knowledge “literacy” but it is often not learned until needed and then becomes essential. with nvda (or any other screen reader), a user must develop a rhythm of interaction, receiving and interpreting speech feedback, e.g. where a TAB has taken you, within or among applications.

nvda frequent actions in Mozilla Firefox include: “h” to headings, k to links, up down between lines, top to reload, combining with Firefox shortcuts control+F to quick find a phrase, control+k to open a search, control+L to type in a location, control+TAB to move among tabs, control+T to create a new tab. And now the big switcheroo in a screen reader is to notify it you’re in an edit box and don’t want the k and other nvda operations, invoked by Insert+Space, known as “virtual buffer passthrough on or off”, always to be remembered on forms.

Well, to wrap up this post, I highly recommend nvda for partially sighted users. It works unbelievably well, especially considering the price ($0) and ease of setup and portability. It lacks the scripting and maturity of the big $1000 packages but has a corps of open source developers helping out, i.e. nvda has a rapid trajectory of development and improvement. As a developer myself, nvda is inspirational, showing how much one dedicated technical person can accomplish in a remarkably short span of time.

My prejudice toward open source throws some light on my above semi-facetious comment about the “stove pipe of evil”. “Stove pipe” refers to communities that don’t talk to each other very much and only use software within their pipe or area. I’m not implying Microsoft evil empire here but rather that lock-in is a user choice that I do not want for myself. Too often I’ve received email which consists of a paragraph written as a MS WORD which I need to click to launch a big application to read, which assumes I own MS WORD or have its reader working, when a simple text body of a message would be safer (clicking an attachment asks for trouble, like a virus), lighter, and easier to produce. Outlook is OK but too attached to WORD. Internet Explorer has finally provided the tabbed windows available for years in Mozilla Firefox, and is a fine browser, but not attractive to me after Firefox. Where I’m let down now in the open sources space is OpenOffice which is inaccessible with nvda. Mostly, my Rebel says to go follow the path of most freedom and change if it offers the affordability and functionality I need.

More to come on “Portable Apps, a good trend, and ones that work for me”, “Living in the new operating system of Web 2.0 and browsers”, and “untangling and reading gmail”.

Summary: I finally took the big leap away from the screen following the nvda screen reader as I set up a new computing environment better accommodating my changing vision, acting as my own rehab support and tra

REFERENCES:

• nvda home at nvAcess
  includes
  nvda audio tour by developer Michael Curran
  and review by Rick Harmon of
  Blind Geek Zone also found in
  the enormous collection
  
  Blind Cool Tech Podcast 1020

• Karen McCall’s Keyboard Literacy tests are great refreshers or learning guides. Note: many articles in PDF and RTF are easily converted with “View as HTML” by searching in Google, “Karen McCall keyboard literacy”.

• Access World reviews of screen readers. Search for Jaws, WindowEyes, System Access, VoiceOver, etc.

• Blind Confidential Blog provices in-depth discussion and comparison of screen readers by an Assistive Technology industry veteran.

• 48
  Podcasts on “Screen readers” from the @Podder library at
  htp://www.apodder.org

Audio Replay of July 2007 Postings

Here is an audio version of the first month of “As Your World Changes”, july 2007, to serve several purposes.. First, my blog readers can download and listen to the blog entries wherever they like, an alternative to reading. Second, the blog postings are spoken in a variety of voices as the basis for a future posting on how our brains are “wired for speech”. Third, I (the partially sighted blog author) use audio for improving my writing, not only for tone and style but also for editing mistakes. There is no particular significance to the choice of gender or age sounds of voices. Feedback on this writing and listening practice would be appreciated.

Synthetic voice reading of posts, listen in mp3: Welcome, TextAloud reading application, Bookshare.org,Mouse Hacks, 5 Facets of Living with Vision Loss, and Lucky Vision Losers.

Voices are: Neospace Kate and Paul; ATT Natural Voices Mike, Crystal, Claire, Julia; Cepstral Diane, David, and Emily.

Again, the link for the mp3 replay is

http://www.apodder.org/blog/AYWC-7-07.mp3