As Your World Changes

Resilience: Bouncing Back from Vision Loss

slger — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:30:13 +0000

Definition: Resilience: : an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change
Miriam Webster

This post assembles some thoughts on resilience in adjusting to vision loss. Sighted readers of this blog will learn more about how to help Vision Losers with their various challenges. Visually impaired readers may glean both encouragement and practical tips to facilitate a reliant approach to vision loss. Three books are referenced: Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards; A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts; and What Blind People Want Sighted People to Know about
Blindness’ by Harry Martin. This post builds on emotional themes from the past 2 years.

Book: Resilience as Articulated by Elizabeth Edwards

Listening to the May 21 Diane Rehm interview with Elizabeth Edwards on her new book got me thinking about the factors that affect my personal resilience regarding vision loss. Let’s forget the modifier “easily” in the above definition but consider success measured in timeframe’s of months and probably other units relative to individuals, such as employment, relationships, or education. The main point is that some people seem more resilient; now, why is that?

Edwards is out there talking about her adversities because she has a limited life span in which she believes her testimonies will positively affect others. That worked for me. Her loss of parents is, of course, common to all of us, in my case, a mother’s 20 year battle with lupus and crippling arthritis while raising three children and helping her own parents. Edwards lost a 16 year old son in an automobile accident, trusting his ability to drive in slightly challenging situations, the feelings I still face with 20 somethings and remember from my own youth. Her unusually unpleasant and public problems with a philandering politician husband while fighting cancer even under the best possible financial basis are not what anyone wants to contemplate. Contrasted with early death, vision loss seems less of an adversity and more like a life alteration.

So, how did Edwards survive?
Well for one thing she finds it helpful to use her public position to talk and inspire others. Another approach is to make a major life change, like having an additional pair of children after the death of one. For her, now, the source of happiness is her start up furniture business where she has a total different framework of expertise, decisions, and colleagues.

I’ve written about energy management in the context of my Vision Loser tenets. Assuming one isn’t the type to just sit around in an adversity like vision loss, it’s interesting to examine what generates or consumes or wastes personal energy. Edwards so clearly expresses her energy rising from her furniture business in both the Diane Rehm interview and her book. I suggest that we introspect for what makes our energy levels ebb and flow, often evident in our -voices. Co-incidentally, our heroine interviewer Diane Rehm exhibits her own resilience for voice loss.

Book: The World’s Greatest Traveler, circa 1840

Jason Roberts’ book ‘A Sense of the World’ was recommended to me by a book club member. In a nutshell, British youth James Holman follows his mysterious vision loss in his early twenties with a lifetime of adventures becoming dubbed ‘The Blind Traveler’. Travel in that time period of the early 1800s is horses, coaches, boats, and feet with no way to make reservations at a motel chain or stop at fast foods at the next intersection. For sure, the travel stories are interesting, especially in Russia and France. And this is against a backdrop at home of inhospitable social treatment of blind individuals.

So, how did this blind man achieve his adventures of traveling 250,000 miles on his own. Actually, the book doesn’t describe much of what must certainly been some trying times, but here are a few factors. First, Holman had already accomplished one career in the British Navy, starting at age 12 and rising to a captain around age 16. His character was formed and he had just plain toiled very hard during his teens while France, Britain, and the U.S. battled politically and commercially. This gave him a status of officer and gentleman throughout his life, making him ever more welcome as he seemed to have accepted his vision loss and developed cheery manners for gaining help from others. Second, he found a really great gig in a philanthropic support for unfortunate naval officers, including rooms near Windsor and a bit of stipend and community. Third, he always stood out with his cane and blindness attracting attention and help. And fourth, he had a mental knack for geography and so the rigors of travel were endurable in the short run because he never seemed totally lost.
. Finally, he had a cute way of tethering himself to the moving carrier for exercise and escape from passivity.

Holman had established status as a paraprofessional who had studied chemistry and medicines at Edinburgh and his father’s pharmacy. In one travel saga, he carefully packed and memorized locations of a variety of medicines, anticipating that nobody could read the label, him from lack of eyesight and others not speaking the label language. This return to his hard won education and training to remain practically valuable to himself and others must have exhibited and facilitated resilience.

This is definitely an enjoyable book with a few additional lessons when reading and thinking about resiliency. Today with all our technology, we might not be able to get ourselves anywhere near the adventures of Holman. Logistically, we might feel obligated to gear up our GPS, WIFI for weather, and download GB of reading materials. Just packing all our adapter cords is a challenge. Moreover, safety is frequently a barrier as we face … And help along the way is often problematic. I am often asked if I need help when I pace around an airport. Sometimes I am trying to sort out the restrooms but often I just want a little exercise, but people sure think I’m lost. Even worse, occasionally people grab my arm and force me to lose balance if it looks like I’m coming too close to a chair or potted plan. Training strangers to be helpful and not hurtful just to carry on with simple travel necessities is a lot harder and more stressful than it might seem. .

What were the technologies for reading and writing in that time period?
Holman made part of his living from writing travel books, indeed invited into the Royal Society as well as battling another jealous and less talented writer. As described, he used a writing device of wires and carbon paper that could be transcribed later and free him from dictating. Now, continuing handwriting when you cannot see what you write is a skill I really admire, as I can barely sign my name!

Book: What Blind People Want Sighted People to Understand about Blindness

I find this self-published book by Floridian Harry Martin interesting in many ways but mainly as a mission I wish I could accomplish in my own life with my confusing states of eyesight and changing skill sets. Martin lost vision in his 30s and took full advantage of services provided for veterans. He doesn’t talk much about technology, but rather emphasizes relationships.

One illustrative discussion is how to tell somebody what you do, and do not, see, especially if they haven’t asked. Sure, this is a painful topic, probably more so for the sighted than the well-adjusted Vision Loser. It’s often difficult to understand how a person cannot see the food on a plate, suffering perhaps an unfortunate confusion among horseradish, mashed potato’s, and roast beef. Yet that person can walk along a contrasting sidewalk with speed and assurance. This consistent ambiguity is a routine stressor for the visually impaired.

Martin describes many aspects of mobility training, including living with a guide dog.
It’s not clear if Martin has any employment history as disabled but bases much of his social experience on community interactions. This author has used his time, energy, and organizational skills to assemble insight from many other blind people to complement his own experience.

I was especially grateful to feel included as a person with considerable residual eyesight but requiring the stamina and adjustments of print disability and mobility limitations. I also find it useful to know the extent and types of training that are available in regimented rehabilitation settings, way out of my league of experience with meager social services.

My Resilience experiences

It wasn’t until listening to Elizabeth Edwards talk about her life and book with the “national treasure” interviewer Diane Rehm that I could put a name on some of my own thinking. Indeed, a therapist tells me, “psychological resilience” is an important and well documented subject, especially related to childhood traumatic experiences. There, a “cookie person”, some one, just one person, taking an interest in a troubled child is often the most significant factor in how well children survive.

My bounces from interviews and books

Looking back 3 years to my “disability declaration day”, I can identify two major factors that moved me ahead. First was fortuitous listening to podcasts by author Susan Krieger on Dr. Moira gunn’s Tech Nation and on KQED Forum. I felt an instant recognition “yeah, vision loss in late career years, but look how she’s turned it into a positive personal and professional experience”. Although Krieger’s vision loss was unexpected and mine was anticipated for more than a dozen years, I got a sense of where I was heading. Krieger’s generous demonstration of her reading and writing equipment also provided me information I had not found available in my own community, and with the authority of her own written words.

The second factor for me was Bookshare.org. As soon as I could legally check the box for print disability, I took the simple authorization form to my optometrist, who faxed it in and within a matter of days I was registered at Bookshare and downloading. As soon as I realized I had loads of books I’d never have to pick up or return to a library outlet, no longer an easy trip for a non-driver, I really felt comforted. Then came a tangle of experiences with technology for reading, first a PC software book reader where I realized it was tough to read in bed with a Toshiba laptop. Then I investigated CD DAISY readers and ran across the APH Bookport on which I have since read hundreds of books. Bookshare’s newspaper outlet via NFB News Line enticed me to buy the Levelstar Icon Mobile Manager which provides hours of email, RSS, podcast, news, bookshare, and, recently, Twitter pleasure. Ironically, I’ve never managed to get paperwork into the NLS government provided service and remain uninspired by DRM and special equipment hassles.

But, oh, those social services

So, my passage into vision loss was relatively easy, illustrating resiliency from my technology fluency which lead to outreach beyond my current network. It’s true that to this day I have received very little help from social services which are directed to people in worse shape than I am, either financially or emotionally, often from aging. The one service that made an enormous difference was long cane training that followed my Identity Cane adoption and reflection on changed realization as a disabled person. This training and $35 device is absolutely essential for safety and mobility and only a supremely ungenerous society could deny its citizens access to safety. However, that’s how smaller, richer communities operate, as I compared with Southern Arizona Visually Impaired services.

For me, the greatest lesson in resilience in all of the above is that the individual must find a way to move ahead, action to couner the sense of loss, and immersion into the process of change. One goal of this blog is to display how well technology can provide that momentum and a range of partial solutions. This should motivate all of us to reach out to baby boomers who are technologically adept but not yet exposed to assistive technology. Note that the traditional low vision services and medical professions do a poor job, continuing to push optical solutions when audio is more appropriate.

I often read on MDSupport.orgabout the extensive and ongoing treatments for wet macular degeneration that delay and mitigate the effects of MD. I wish more people were aware of, and starting to practice use of, assistive technologies before what must be exhausting bouts of treatment. I’m convinced that medical insurance battles and the ups and downs of continued series of injections would have sapped my resiliency.

Now, there are also the daily bouts that require bouncing back. The hardest slaps for me are where I feel “professional betrayal”, like computing websites that really suck at accessibility. I also feel a twinge of demoralization when I am driven through a major intersection that I fear to cross walking because it lacks warning signals and is frequented by drivers saving a few seconds on there way to nowhere. Lack of public transportation and a richly designed community center reachable only by driving sadden me at poor public planning. But that’s another purpose of this blog, to do whatever I can to explain, illustrate with my own experience, and persistently nudge and complain. I never realized how much effort and precious energy went into activism, especially if it’s not a natural part of one’s personality.

I realize I’ve complained about lack of social service that are unevenly distributed across the U.S. Were I residing near a larger city I’d be attending more daily living classes and would have received far earlier mobility training. For me, this isn’t asking for government handouts but rather bemoaning the lack of trained personnel available to hundreds of thousands of people off the rehab grid, still active but needing different training. I simply cannot imagine what it’s like to be resilient without technology. Even ten years ago, I would have been unable to escape community limitations via technology.

Yet, I keep returning to my deepest appreciation for a $35 white stick and a few lessons from a part-time mobility trainer. Amazingly to me, the cane provides an altered sense of body location and control that in fact is a different sense of sight. Moreover, unfolding the cane causes my mind to click into independent but disabled mode, thinking every moment about what I cannot see. Also, reluctantly, I feel that I am now a symbol of both need and resilience.

Book Links

All books are available to members on Bookshare.org.
Note: I link to Amazon as an easy way to buy these books. But please do not buy the Kindle reader until
Amazon and universities stop discriminating against blind students. The issue here is that the Kindle has not been fully equipped with text to speech in its menus and operations so that all students have equal access to text books. Even then students who cannot physically hold and manipulate buttons will be left out.

Hear Me Stumble Around White House, Recovery, and Data GOV web sites

slger — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:20:30 +0000

This post takes a tour by screen reader of the new U.S. government web sites
whitehouse.gov,
recovery.gov, and
data.gov.
Using recorded sessions, I analyze my techniques and problems. Sighted readers will experience some of the confusions and frustrations of a visually impaired person trying to learn the interaction and structure patterns of these website’s. Visually impaired users may glean some ways to avoid pitfalls and determine the value of these government information resources for their purposes. I complain about absence of headings, careless links, and tricky interactions beyond my capabilities although I appreciate the effort to provide high quality government information.

Why is “Hear Me Stumble” useful?

I’ve tried this practice several times in the past year with a mixture of consternation and learning. Basically I record myself using a website to the best of my abilities, talking to myself as I go. The results are useful in several ways:

A historical snapshot of the website under study, the tools I’m using, and my skills is now recorded for posterity.
I use the recordings to diagnose my own deficiencies and document changes in my own web practice.
With increasing confidence in my knowledge of the field of accessibility, I try to explain deficiencies in terms that website designers can understand to improve their designs and implementations Ditto, tool developers such as screen readers and browsers.
The recordings also describe ways of testing that could and should be used before website release to improve the experience for visually impaired users and to meet statutory requirements.
.

Yes, if you listen to these recordings, you’ll hear a good bit of frustration with my own mistakes as well as some depressing practice, indeed perhaps malpractice, on the part of website designers. In the case of the .gov websites, we’re watching the expanded use of the Internet for citizen interaction so appropriate corrections of certain problems could have a highly amplified effect across the population of U.S. citizens. Fortuitously, if we apply the ‘curb cuts’ principle, fixing certain problems will likely make the websites better for everybody, disabled or not, and we’re all disabled in the long run. Furthermore, the current websites are exhibiting trends using social media beyond the knowledge of many of my generation, the baby boomers and beyond. In effect, many of the populace who need data available from U.S. government websites are those least likely to be able to benefit.

A big caveat here is that these websites are “young” and experimental, sort of like new drivers proud of their licenses and wheels but not fully understanding the rules of the road. Anxious to get their acts in gear, these drivers are sadly vulnerable to mistakes that might make unfortunate hood ornaments out of senior citizens, ignoring limits of other vehicles and pedestrians using the same roads in different ways. Continuous partial attention dictates websites that change every few seconds, seeking to hook users into feeds and social web practices. This is the most important time in the evolution of these websites to instill good sense, modesty, empathy, etc. as well as correcting patterns known to be detrimental, if not outright illegal. Ok, end of lectures I’ve given many times to teenagers, especially as I become more wary as a non-driver in a cell phone and vehicular world.

An audio tour of WhiteHouse.gov

First, go to http://apodder.org/stumbles to retrieve the two recordings in MP3 format, a total of around 60 minutes.

On May 29, 2009, President Obama and government officials released a cyber security policy statement that I sought to find on the website. The main events described in the recordings were:

I took a “headings tour” of the website, trying to build a mental outline of sections and subsections wherever I heard like “Briefing Room heading 2″. This heading outline seems improved over my January explorations, but perhaps I’m only more familiar. Here is how whitehouse.gov looks to the WebAim WAVE analyzer. Notes: this link will show the current version of the web page not what I say on May 29. Also this is the established accessibility tool, not the newly announced Google W A V E.
I was thrown off by the slide show at the top of the page. Once I hit the cybersecurity story, the next time I traverse this section the story was about the Supreme Court nominee. Earlier, I had stumbled over the 1-2-3-4 series of boxes but not connected them with the slide show. This time, a fairly good eyesight day, I could see the images were changing.
So, listening to the recording, I ask myself, why I didn’t use the search box I found at level 2. Well, some introspection revealed I have been tricked too many times by website searches that bury what I really want in favor of getting me to products or just plain showing irrelevant material. I did try the search for “cybersecurity” the next day and indeed find the relevant references, but cannot determine whether the search would have yielded good results immediately after the announcement. I also found some silly references in the additional results about some conversations with the press secretary. Next time I will try the search, correcting my behavior.
Several times I ran across uninformative links like “Read this post” and “Learn more”. Since I often traverse a page by link, reading one of these links is annoying. I must read backwards through the text to find the subject of the link, muttering to myself “learn more about —- what?”. This is symptomatic of a website design that hasn’t been tested with a screen reader by a member of the web site team. Ok, maybe these web designers like to hear “learn more” repeated six times in a row, but, come on, why not rewrite the text to attach the link to something meaningful and distinctive.

In summary, visually impaired users must come to terms with a slideshow that regularly changes the content of the page without any evident alert (that I could detect). The heading structure helps traverse the page but isn’t entirely intuitive. Link texts are annoyingly un informative and should be changed if the white house web designers want better usability. This web user will give the search box a try earlier next time, recognizing the inevitable need to sort through results but hoping for the most important and relevant content to be highlighted.

An audio tour of recovery.gov and data.gov

Sorry, I just have to rant here. Neither page has significant headings. So, how am I supposed to know what’s on the page without reading line by line? Find my way to the action parts of the page? Ever regain respect for an agency that doesn’t know the mantra — It’s the headings, stupid!!!”. Is this HTML malpractice?

Whoops, I’m mixing metaphors. Is this reckless driving? driving without a license? Certainly, there’s no certification of 508 or other stamp of approval, just wishful reassurance that “we’re trying on accessibility, really” and “we’re a new website, don’t expect too much”. But, hey, this citizen says, why not pay attention to the dozens of websites that and even you tube videos that advocate headings. What about running your pages through validator’s and getting clean reports from nationally recognized accessibility gurus, like WebAim WAVE report on recovery.gov and WebAim WAVE report on data.gov accessibility.

Comments on recovery.gov

I did not have a specific task here, so just wandered around.

The text size adjustment option bemuses me. My browser does that for me. Reading the increase or decrease text size labels are tedious if the page reads from the top. More problematic, is that the text size graphics and buttons are off the displayed section of the page in my browser in some circumstances. In other words, someone who needs them might well not see them off to the far right.
Those pie charts and graphs in the slide show look interesting but they go too fast for me to zoom or magnify. Sigh. This website, indeed the whole U.S. government if its going to work this way, needs a chart explainer or some gentler way of providing data. The timeline is so cool, too bad I cannot use it. I can see it scroll by but how do I read it?
A popup tries to notify exit from recovery.gov. In my browser setup, I have no speech notice, just a box hanging on the screen with a Close button if I can find it. In the recording this threw me off. Why is such a notice needed, anyway?
PDF documents may be standard with a free reader, but they are not pleasant for visually impaired users. I personally almost always crumble a PDF into its TXT form if it’s worth reading for transport to a mobile reader. Actually, I did not encounter any PDF format files to download and try but I’m sure they are there somewhere.
Note: I just discovered more “Learn more” links on the News page. See above.

Comments on data.gov

This page is mainly a large search form. Now, I’m a veteran web and data searcher, but this one got me.

The text is flat without headings. A heading for each part of the complex form would make the difference between usability and frustration. Turn those section titles into headings, please, please.
Components of the form appear not to be labeled properly, if at all. Nothing new here, just good practice for a decade or so, and really important for a person with a screen reader to know what a form field is doing there.
I got hung up in an unfamiliar, and perhaps nonstandard, kind of form. A list of agencies with check boxes is encompassed in a scroll window. This wasn’t apparent to my screen reader so I heard a lot of naked “check box” phrases unless I used line up and down. Since I didn’t know what I was in, I could not find the search button. Looking again the next day, I found the button, decoded that I needed to get out of edit into browse mode to finish the search. I declare this just plain tricky. The technical problem is many agencies that could be represented in a list except that multiple selection from a list is also hard., although standard.
Ok, so if I did get a search performed, how usable are the search results? I did not find an easy way to jump to the search results, nor to navigate through them.

Uh, oh, this is an unhappy camper! How do other technologists feel?

Yep, I really don’t feel very comfortable or welcome at these web sites, despite my tax dollars at work. Granted the websites are juvenile in stages of development and that much work has gone into creating the back ends to deliver the data to the web pages. It’s really exciting that citizens may become data analysts, exploring trends and comparing communities, in the spirit of Jon Udell’s blog on ’strategies for Internet Citizens’. It is also admirable that so many semi-commercial and open source software products are being tried, albeit without a strong accessibility requirement.

But still, so many sensible, well known rules seem to have been broken that it’s hard for me to believe that accessibility is high enough priority I can feel better about future improvements. Consistently using headings is so simple, it’s sad to see the trade-off of a standard accessibility practice with the greater glitz of scripted slide shows which further mess up accessibility.

I’m just plain disappointed in the Obama administration’s approach to web design.
And I’m not alone, e.g.
Webaxe podcast analyzing recovery.gov and
Jim Thatcher’s analysis of whitehouse.gov,
developers of accessible interactive components,
critique of recovery.gov platform software

. There are people around the country making a living from building accessible websites. There are training programs, such as John Slatan Access U and WebAim Training. Why isn’t this expertise being used in the premiere U.S. websites?

Does feedback matter and how is it solicited and used? Will these websites improve?
For a broader perspective on transparency, currency, and other qualities, check out
Grading the White House from Washington Post, which needs an accessibility panelist.

This post updates and illustrates ‘As Your World changes’ post on whitehouse.gov from January. Rationale for my headings rant is post on “Let’s all use our headings!”. And here is the uplifting message of the curb cuts principle.

For repeating results, I was using NVDA screen reader from NVAccess, version 0.6, Firefox version 3.0.x, Windows XP, Neospeech Paul voice, and PlexTalk Plus as audio recorder. See WebAim tutorial on NVDA accessibility testing describes some of the NVDA operations.

The Pleasures of Audio Reading

slger — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:18:53 +0000

This post expands my response to an interesting
Reading in the Dark Survey
Sighted readers will learn from the survey how established services provide reading materials to be used with assistive technology. Vision Losers may find new tools and encouragement to maintain and expand their reading lives.

Survey Requesting feedback: thoughts on audio formats and personal reading styles?

Kestrell says:

… hoping to write an article on audio books and multiple literacies but, as far as I can find, there are no available sources discussing the topic of audio formats and literacy, let alone how such literacy may reflect a wide spectrum of reading preferences and personal styles.

Thus, I am hoping some of my friends who read audio format books will be willing to leave some comments here about their own reading of audio format books/podcasts. Feel free to post this in other places.

Some general questions:
Do you read audio format books?
Do you prefer special libraries or do you read more free or commercially-available audiobooks and podcasts?
What is your favorite device or devices for reading?
Do elements such as DRM and other security measures which dictate what device you can read on influence your choices?
Do you agree with David Rose–one of the few people who has written academic writings about audio formats and reading–that reading through listening is slower than reading visually?
How many audiobooks do you read in a week (this can include podcasts, etc.)?
Do you ever get the feeling form others that audiobooks and audio formats are still considered to be not quote real unquote books, or that reading audiobooks requires less literacy skills (in other words, do you feel there is a cultural prejudice toward reading audiobooks)?
anything else you want to say about reading through listening?

This Vision Loser’s Response

Audio formats and services

I read almost exclusively using TTS on mobile readers from DAISY format books and newspapers. I find synthetic speech more flexible and faster than narrated content. For me, human narrators are more distracting than listening “through” the voice into the author’s words. I also liberally bookmark points I can re-read by sentence, paragraph, or page.

Bookshare is my primary source of books and newspapers downloaded onto the Levelstar Icon PDA. I usually transfer books to the APH BookPort and PlexTalk Pocket for reading in bed and on the go, respectively. My news streams are expanded with dozens of RSS feeds of blogs, articles, and podcasts from news, magazines, organizations, and individuals. Recently, twitter supplies a steady stream of links to worthy and interesting articles, followed on either the Icon or browser in Accessible Twitter.

I never seem to follow through with NLS or Audible or other services with DRM and setups. I find the Bookshare DRM just right and respect it fully but could not imagine paying for an electronic book I could not pass on to others. I’m about to try Overdrive at my local library. I’ve been lax about signing up for NLS now that Icon provides download. No excuses, I should diversify my services.

I try to repay authors of shared scanned books with referrals to book clubs and friends, e.g. I’ve several now hooked on Winspear’s “Macy Dobbs” series.

Reading quality and quantity

I belong to two book clubs that meet monthly as well as taking lifelong learning classes at the community college. Book club members know that my ready book supply is limited and take this into consideration when selecting books. My compact with myself is that I buy selected books not on Bookshare and scan and submit them. I hope to catch up submitted already scanned books soon. Conversely, I can often preview a book before selection and make recommendations on topics that interest book club members, e.g. Jill B. Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight”. I often annoy an avid reader friend by finishing a book while she is #40 on the local library waiting list. This happens with NYTimes best sellers and Diane Rehm show reader reviews. No, I don’t feel askance looks from other readers but rather the normal responses to an aging female geek.

At any one time, I usually have a dozen books “open” on the Bookport and PlexTalk as I switch among club and course selections, fiction favorites, and heavy nonfiction. However, I usually finish 2 or 3 books a week, reading at night, with another 120 RSS feeds incoming dozens of articles daily. I believe my reading productivity is higher than before vision loss due to expedient technology delivery of content and my natural habits of skimming and reading nonlinearly. Indeed, reading by listening forces focus and concentration in a good sense and, even better, performed in just about any physical setting, posture, or other ambient conditions.
Overall, I am exquisitely satisfied with my reading by listening mode. I have more content, better affordable devices, and breadth of stimulating interests to forge a suitable reading life.

Reading wishes and wants

I do have several frustrations. (1) Books with tables of data lose me as a jumble of numbers unless the text describes the data profile. (2) While I have great access through Bookshare and NFB NewsLine to national newspapers and magazines, my state and local papers use content management systems difficult to read either online or by RSS feed. (3) Google Book Search refuses to equalize my research with others by displaying only images of pages.

For demographics, I’m 66 years old, lost last sliver of reading vision three years ago from myopic degeneration, and was only struggling a few months before settling into Bookshare. As a technologist first exposed to DECTalk in the 1980s, I appreciate TTS as a fantastically under-rated technology. However, others of my generation often respond with what I’ve dubbed “Synthetic voice shock” that scares them away from my reading devices and sources. I’d like to see more gentle introductions from AT vendors and the few rehab services available to retired vision losers. Finally, it would be great to totally obliterate the line between assistive and mainstream technology to expand the market and also enable sighted people to read as well as some of us.

References and Notes on Audio Reading

Relevant previous posts from ‘As Your World Changes’
- ‘What’s a print disabled reader to do? Bookshare! on using the Bookshare.org service for individual and U.s. special education organizations. Personally, I walked out of the retinal specialist office with my legally blind designation, filled out the Bookshare form, got it signed by my OD, and entered a book filled world I could not have imagined, the perfect cure for disability depression. Thanks, Jim F. eta al.
- ‘Does twitter make me fitter? or fritter?” describes my entry into using twitter on the Icon and Accessible Twitter.com. Twitter has its own book community including major publishers like OReilly and authors on tech topics. Accessibility gurus post helpful links and tips that help me prioritize and expand my reading. Yes, I’m fitter but I still fritter a little.
- Synthetic Voice Shock Reverberates Across the Divides characterizes a problem for those losing vision in later life. I am working on a training package that might help the ease the transition into audio reading using TTS.
- ‘Literacy lost and Found: Keystrokes, pie charts, and Einstein’ bemoans my loss of ability to read data.
- ‘Seeing Through Google Book Search’ expresses my dismay that the research library growing within Google is inaccessible to me. I recently suspended a talk on a seminal 1975 paper I co-authored because I could not read the comments, critiques, or follow up work often displayed in paragraphs on big blobs of white page images.
  Interview with Susan Gerhart on Jon Udell’s itConversations series where I try to explain ‘from seeing to hearing’
Audio reading technology
- LevelStar Icon Mobile Manager and Docking Station is my day-long companion for mail, RSS, twitter, and news. The link to Bookshare Newsstand and book collection sold me on the device. Bookshare can be searched by title, author, or recent additions, and I even hit my 100 limit last month. Newspapers download rapidly and are easy to read — get them before the industry collapses. The book shelf manager and reader are adequate but I prefer to upload in batches to the PC then download to Bookport. The Icon is my main RSS client for over 100 feeds of news, blogs, and podcasts.
- Sadly, the American Printing House for the Blind is no longer able to maintain or distribute the Bookport due to manufacturing problems. However, some units are still around at blindness used equipment sites. The voice is snappy and it’s easy to browse through pages and leave simple bookmarks. Here is where I have probably dozens of DAISY files started, like a huge pile of books opened and waiting for my return. My biggest problem with this little black box is that my pet dog snags the ear buds as his toy. No other reader comes close to the comfort and joy of the Bookport, which awaits a successor at APH.
- Demo of PlexTalk Pocket provides a TTS reader in a very small and comfortable package. However, this new product breaks on some books and is awkward managing files. The recording capabilities are awesome, providing great recording directly from a computer and voice memos. With a large SD card, this is also a good accessible MP3 player for podcasts.
Article supporting Writers’ Guild in Kindle dispute illustrates the issues of copyright and author compensation. I personally would favor a micro payment system rather than my personal referral activism. However, in a society where a visually impaired person can be denied health insurance, where 70% unemployment is common, where web site accessibility is routinely ignored, it’s wonderful that readers have opportunities for both pleasure and keeping up with fellow book worshipers.
Setting up podcast, blog, and news feeds is tricky sometimes and tedious. Here is my my OPML feeds for importing into other RSS readers or editing in a NotePad.
Here’s another technology question. Could DAISY standard format, well supported in our assistive reading devices become a format suitable for distributing the promised data from recovery.gov?
Here is a interview with DAISY founder George Kerscher on XML progress.
Another physiological question is what’s going on in my brain as I switch primarily to audio mode? Are there exercises that can make that switch over more comfortable and accelerated than just picking up devices and training oneself? I’m delving into Blogs on ‘brain plasticity’
(WARNING PDF) Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Reader – an essay by Mark Willis asks whether audio reading can cope with the critical thinking required in a complex and sometimes self-contradictory doctrine like Thomas Kuhn’s “Scientific Revolutions”. This would be a great experiment for psychology or self. Let’s also not forget the resources of Book Club Reading Lists to help determine what we missed in a reading or may have gained through audio mental processing.

Audio reading of this blog post

The ‘Talking ATM’ Is My Invisible Dream Machine.

slger — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:29:53 +0000

A twitter message alerted me to a milestone I surely didn’t care about a decade ago, but really appreciate now. This post explains how easy it is to use a Talking ATM. People with vision impairment might want to try out this hard-won disability service if not already users. Sighted people can gain insight and direct experience with the convenience of talking interfaces. But, hey, why shouldn’t every device talk like this?

The Milestone: 10 years of the Talking ATM

The history is well told in commemorative articles published in 2003. References below.
Pressure from blind individuals and advocacy organizations circa 2000, with the help of structured negotiators (lawyers), led banks to design and roll out Automated Teller Machines equipped with speech. Recorded audio wav files were replaced by synthetic voices that read instructions and lead the customer through a menu of transactions.

first, I’ll relate my experience and then extrapolate on broader technology and social issues.

My Talking ATM Story

As my vision slid away in 2006, I could no longer translate the wobbly lines and button labels on my ATM screen to comfortably perform routine cash withdrawals. Indeed, on one fateful Sunday afternoon I inserted my card, then noticed an unfamiliar pattern on the screen. Calling in my teenage driver, we noticed several handwritten notes indicating lost cards in the past hour. I had just enough cash in hand to make it through a Monday trip out of town, and immediately called the bank upon return Tuesday. A series of frustrating interactions ensued, like my ATM card could only be replaced by my coming in to enter a new PIN. But how was I to get to the office without a driver or cab fare when I was out of cash?

This seemed like a good time to familiarize myself with audio ATM functions, to lessen risk of having another card gobbled by a temporarily malfunctioning station. With lingering bad feelings about the branch of the Sunday fiasco, I recalled better experience at a different office after my six month saga on reversal of mortgage over-payment. Lesson learned—never put an extra 0 in a $ box and always listen or look carefully at verification totals.

I strolled into the quiet office and asked customer service to explain the audio teller operations. The pleasant service person whipped out a big headset and we headed out to the ATM station. Oddly, most stations are located in office alcoves or external walls. This one was outside the drive-by window to be shared by pedestrian and automotive customers.
ok, waiting for traffic to clear, we went through a good intro. I wasn’t as familiar with audio interfaces at that point in my Vision Loser life but I eventually worked up courage in the next few weeks to tackle the ATM myself with my own ear buds.

Well, 3 years later, I’m a pro and can get my fast cash in under a minute, unless my ear buds get tangled or I drop my cane. First problem is figuring out how to get in line, like standing behind a truck’s exhaust or walking out before a monster SUV. Usually I hang back, looking into the often dry bed of Granite Creek until the line is empty. Next step is to stand my white cane in a corner of the ATM column, feel around for the audio opening hidden in a ridged region, wait for the voice to indicate the station is live, shove in my card, and ready to roll. The voice, probably Eloquence, usually drones into a “Please listen carefully as the instructions have changed…”. Shut up, this will only take a minute and I don’t need to change volume or speed. Enter, type PIN, retype PIN if commonly hit a wrong key, and on to Main Menu (thinking of ACB Radio’s Technology jingle). 6 button down to Fast Cash, on by 20,…100,…, confirm and click, chug comes cash, receipt, and release of card. Gather up receipt, card, cane, and — important — remove ear buds, and I’m on my way.

Occasionally things go wrong. Recently, my receipt didn’t appear and customer service rep and I did a balance request and out spat two receipts, both mine. Kind of nerve wracking as somebody else could have intervened and learned of my great wealth. The customer service rep vowed to call in maintenance on the ATM, but I bet a few more receipts got wadded up that afternoon. Electro-mechanical failures often foil sophisticated software.

Another time, I finished my Fast Cash and waited for card release only to be given a “have we got a good deal for you” long-winded offer of a credit card. I wasn’t sure how to cancel out and still get my ATM card back. since I lecture family on the evils of the credit card, I was fuming at a double punishment. Complaining to the customer service rep inside, I learned sighted people were also not thrilled at this extra imposed step.

Now, to reveal the identity of the ATM, it’s Chase Bank, formerly Bank One, on Gurley Street near the historic Whisky Row of downtown Prescott AZ.
Although I haven’t performed any complex ATM interactions, it’s fair to say I’m a satisfied user and would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone with good hearing unafraid to perform transactions with engines and radios and cell conversations roaring all around. An indoor ATM would be a good step someday but, hey, this is a conservative town, not particularly pedestrian friendly. Mainly I appreciate that I can get my cash as part of a routine just like other people and I don’t even use up extra gasoline waiting in line.

Broader Issues of Talking Transactions

Does the ATM voice induce Synthetic Voice Shock?

I coined the term in Synthetic Voice Shock Reverberates Across the Divides to explain responses I heard about voices offered in assistive technologies to overcome vision loss. Personally, I hated Eloquence when I first heard it demonstrated but I rapidly grew to love my Precise Paul and friends as I realized that (1) the voices really were understandable and (2) I didn’t have any choice if I wanted to keep reading. I now wonder how people like me, slowly losing vision while off the rehab grid, learn about Talking ATM and related services. It hurts to think people give up that one step of independence from not knowing whom to ask or even if such services exist. And supposing someone does step up to an ATM ready to listen, are they tuned in to hearing synthetic speech sufficiently to make an informed choice whether the Talking Teller is an appropriate service for them? Did the Disability Rights movement fight through a decade only to have a generation of drop-outs from oldsters with difficulty adjusting to vision loss, a panoply of technology, and no-longer-young nerves?

Are Audio E-voting and Talking ATM’s Close Cousins?

I have described my experiences in 2008 voting without viewing. The voting device is a keypad like offered by the ATM I use while the voice is a combination of human narrated candidate and race announcements interspersed with synthetic speech instructions and navigation. I found this mode of voting satisfying, compared with having someone read the ballot to and mark for me. However, even my well-attuned ears and fingers seemed to get in trouble with speech speedup and slowdown, which I blame on poor interaction design. Note that many ATM and voting systems have origins in the NCR and Die bold product lines so usability and accessibility research lessons should carry over.

Why aren’t all check-out services as easy as banking?

I buy something at a store and then have a hassle at check-out finding a box on a screen or buttons I cannot see for typing in a debit card PIN. I’ve never understood why I can give a credit card number over a phone without signing but must sign if I swipe it on checkout. And giving a PIN to a family member or stranger isn’t good practice. Sometimes check-out can get really nasty as when a checker wouldn’t let me through because my debit card swiper was only age 20 – it’s my debit card, my groceries, my wine, and I’ll show you a social security age ID card. Geez, now we’re nervous every time we check out a Safeway since Aunt Susan has a short fuse after a tiring shopping session. If only the Point of sale thing talked and had tactile forms of PIN entry. I ask Safeway when accessible check-out will be possible and let them know the store has a visually impaired regular shopper.

Is audio interaction a literacy issue?

We are actually on track to a world where everything talks: microwave ovens, cards, color tellers, security systems, thermostats, etc. Text to speech is a commodity additional feature to onboard processors in digital devices. Indeed, we can hope this feature slips out of the aura of assistive technology into the main stream to enlarge the range of products and capabilities available to everybody. Why shouldn’t manuals be built in to the device, especially since the device is soon after purchase separated forever from its printed material? Why shouldn’t diagnostics be integrated with speech rather than provided on bitty screens hard to read for everybody? How about making screens the add-on features with audio as the main output channel?

Let’s generalize here and suggest the need for a simple training module to help people with recent vision loss get accustomed to working keypads accompanied by synthetic speech. Who could offer such training? I asked around at the CSUN exhibits and haven’t yet found an answer. There are multiple stages here, like producing a book and then distributing to end users via libraries or rehab services. My experience is that social services are hard enough to find and often more available to people who have already suspended independent activities.

The outreach problem is real. Finally, I’d like to express my appreciation to the activists, educators, and lawyers who convinced banking organizations and continue to work on retailers to make my “money moments” conventional and un stressful. The “talking ATM” shows what is possible not only for business but also for the broader opportunities sketched out above. Let all devices talk, I wish.

References on Talking ATMs

Background and excellent overview compiled by Disability Civil Rights Attorney Lainey Feingold>
Blind Cool Tech demos of talking devices
Talking ATM on wikipedia
Swedish choice of Acapella voices for ATMs for more modern sounding speech. Demos available on website.
Chase bank and Access Technologies ATM collaboration
(PDF) 2003 case study of Talking ATM upgrades. Bundled features with speech included better encryption and streamlined statement viewing.
The electronic ‘curb cuts’ effect by Steve Jacobs
Portfolio of talking information based on ATT technology
‘What to do when you meet a sighted person’ (parody)

Great!! Twitter has Less to See, More to Say and Hear.

slger — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:10:33 +0000

This post relates my experiences using the micro-blogging system “twitter”. For once, accessibility issues drift into the background and the educational, emotional, and entertainment aspects of the technology engage me in the social media movement. In summary, an undisciplined person can fritter away mountains of time on molehills of information that pop up in the Twitter landscape created by following choices. However, a person with self-directed interests can find bubbling brooks of content pointers and insights with occasional gold nuggets never otherwise revealed. An alternative title might be “Does Twitter make me fitter? or flitter?”

Please, please, explain twitter

First, what’s the “twitter model” of information flow? Blogs have gained popularity because individuals believe their special interests and expertise attract like-minded readers who can contribute feedback and merge to reach higher goals. Let’s admit that it takes courage to make that first blogging step whether for business survival or personal growth. Twitter concentrates the writing and reading into 140 characters per message, roughly a headline, topic sentence, or link reference. The underlying technology builds on the Publish-Subscribe model that you put your information someplace, others find its location, assess its quality and relevance, then add the location to automated systems, dubbed “clients”, to fetch the latest messages. The Twitter lingo is that you “follow” somebody, others “follow” you, and Twitter central facilitates the broadcast of messages by allowing clients to send and receive messages, including its own website twitter.com. The power of twitter also comes from distributing following-follower lists, enabling, in computational thinking terms, symmetric and “transitive relationships”, where “I follow X ho follows Y who follows Z” and “oh, look, A is following me, looks interesting, so I’ll follow A who also follows B, etc.”.

How does a person, sighted or not, use twitter?

Accessibility issues are minimized to only getting past the account sign-up anti-spam CAPTCHA image or audio at twitter.com. since the main functions of using twitter are inputting 140 or fewer characters and links or buttons to handle following activation, user interfaces are simple, non-visual, and enabled by an API (Application Programming Interface) at Twitter Central.

I use two twitter clients. The Levelstar Icon Mobile Manager Version 2 software provides basic capabilities for sending messages, updating the so-called “tweet roll” of messages from people I follow, as well as checking out my followers and followees by profiles and thei follow contexts. A web interface Accessible Twittter.com applies many principles for making web pages easily usable with a screen reader. Another useful interface, Mobile Twitter offers a spreadsheet look, good for fooling bosses and quick to read.

So, how does one get started in twitter?

After getting my account, Twitter Central showed me some highly followed people, one of whom I knew by name, Slate journalist John Dickerson. Then I thought up people I respected from blogs, podcasts, and books, adding Jon Udell, John Batelle, W. David Stevenson, Danah Boyd, Francine Hardaway, and Denise Howell. That gave me a well-rounded expansion of people whom I respected and could trust to follow worthy thinkers and doers. At some point, I believe centered on Accessible Twitter creator Dennis Lembrée of WebAxe podcast brought me into transitive and cyclic lineages of accessibility gurus. Fortuitously, these folks were organizing a “tweetup at CSUN accessibility conference and I was quickly following a few dozen people I didn’t know who were building a community for sharing their blog writings, insights, complaints, and traveling.

On the other side, now with my own account, I had to figure out what to say, personal and professional, more later on this dilemma.

Why twitter makes me fitter

My take on “social media” is that individuals in society need to both maintain their past affiliated relationships, like co-workers, while expanding their options and facilitating personal growth. This gets very interesting when generations, genders, and interests cross traditional social boundaries. My selection of people to follow has one common criterion: independent thinkers, solo proprietors, those who “own their minds” with any company affiliation in the background. I care not a wit for any organizational tricks or complaints. Messages from such people are often like “well, here’s this great insight, but nobody here to tell, except the cat/dog, a good mid-afternoon tweet treat for myself”. More often I see the straightforward “worth reading to learn X, here’s the link”. For me, as receiver, this adds up to a dozen or so tabs and web pages lined up in my browser, kind of a morning clipping service. Since I’m learning about accessibility and assistive technology, I’m getting a daily reading list and lessons from experts whom I trust to know what’s important.

The cross-generational aspects of twitter are fascinating. In physical life, I attend lifelong learning courses and book clubs where, at age 66, I’m often one of the younger members, so story telling extends back before WW II and parents in the Depression (the previous one). Not surprisingly, one sometimes hears grumbling about “those kids and their toys”, which I also co-exist with at home. On twitter, I’m an elder lurker, used to being the invisible older woman, trying to inject my own decades of experience, expecting little interest — “who cares about email in the 1970s?”.

Also intriguing is the cross-over of geographical and technical interests, e.g. learning about Jon Udell’s “Calendar Curation” project, including nitty-gritty technical things I can still understand, if not perform. I also keep up on electronic publishing, government data,Arizona entrepreneurs, and general technology, almost anything except boring past professional organizations and hard to find local connections.

To cite one of those nuggets of gold, my tweet role is currently filled with reports of the Trends at a European conference on accessibility for the Aging. Just hearing the stream of topics provides the collage of technical and social concerns, while I register mentally those slides I want to peruse for my recurring theme posting on vision loss, including advice for care-givers.

How does twitter make me flitter?

One thing I do get better at with age is managing my energy level. The rules are simple. “Add a follower, measure whether you’re at a limit of time or interest, demote something”. Also recognize “context switching takes energy, so confine contexts to current interest”. In other words, you cannot keep up with everything, so must, always, be trimming back. This gets harder when you must delete yourself as a follower of a person you like but don’t need. Sadly, hey, if I have to keep skipping or reading tweets I dislike or don’t care about, I’m soon going to disregard that person, so better drop this relationship sooner. Snip, see you later.

I’m luckily immune to most pop culture, but occasionally do need a dash of heart tugging or mockery or irritation. Ok, I confess, I couldn’t tell you one thing about American Idol but I’m compelled to keep up with Britain talent Susan Boyle phenomenon. Those judges smirking at her age and looks, telling her they’d laughed at her, gets my feminism and ageism ire going. But seeing somebody have a lifetime high moment, and do a fantastic performance, well, that makes me feel ever so human. Don’t tell me the show is rigged.

Twitter for the Vision Loser

I hope you’ve now seen that Twitter is a great match with needs of this Vision Loser, maybe others.

With a text-based technology, there are no complex interfaces to master. Indeed Accessible Twitter is designed with the best practices to streamline reading and writing in Twitter.
The twitter user world, millions of people with varied interests, offer a mixed blend of personal, professional, and avocational content. Find the people you like, the people they like, and you can be on the fringes of ongoing conversations to deepen and broaden your interests. Yes, this is like over-hearing art experts discussing a portrait in a gallery, but what’s wrong with that?
Most charitable organizations are now on twitter, e.g. Red Cross, Lions Club, NFB, etc. Vision-related advocacy cropped in the
Amazon Kindle publisher guild petitions and protest. VisionAware and Fred’s Head from APH offer a steady diet of news about vision related topics and assistive technology. And this VisionLoser formed her own self-study of the accessibility field from trickle down tweets.
Step out yourself by replying to tweets when you know something relevant. That’s one way to gain followers and enter the community. And start your own follower-ship by invitation and productive posting.
Pay no attention to the million-follower celebrity races unless you dig playing their games. You can find your own playground and make your own acquaintances. And, ugly words like “friend
“, as in somebody’s name added to a list, is cultural inanity. However, real relationships do build over time by reading blog or twitter thoughts.
But oh, that very first tweet, like any “first”, can be scary. The prompt is “What are you doing?” which can be translated into now, right this moment? today’s big challenges? for the rest of my life? You can start out personal or think for 2 days, but probably nobody cares either way. In a month or so, you develop your own rhythm and style of posting. That’s where personal growth comes in, as you discover what matters enough to post or withhold, how to condense a though into 140 characters, and integrate twitter information flows into your reading and learning. Twitter is seductive, like writing a journal, and evaluating your goals and progress.
Suppose you succumb to “twitter fritter” and waste scads of time with little return? We all have that problem and need to find our own self-control mechanisms. For me, this is an internalalization of battery drain with intellectual and emotional energy signaling the value of certain communications. Another problem is privacy concern, since you’re giving away your whereabouts and daily routine, but that’s part of what we have given up for a technological society, or formerly living in a small village.
Here are a few general readings:
- Getting Things Done with Twitter
- The Twitter Revolution by Michael Malone, Wall Street Journal, April 18 2009

Follow me on Twitter at slger123

Honoree for Ada Lovelace Day — Pat Price for AccessibleWorld.org

slger — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:10:15 +0000

The Accessible World Community

Ada Lovelace Day resulted from a petition to recognize women’s role in technology. The woman I am recognizing was not strictly a technologist but rather a businesswoman in the insurance industry. I did not know her but have often used a web-based community she founded for learning about technology, sharing ideas and books, and fostering nonprofit as well as commercial projects through an outlet for recorded chat sessions and tutorials. The arena of service is the broad range of visually impaired people, multi-generational but especially supportive of older folks. She herself was mostly blind, with some periods of vision where technology could help, also dealing with deafness and crippling deterioration.

As my own vision was leading me to adopt more audio support, I repeatedly found myself wandering around Accessible World.org. My beloved Levelstar Icon Mobility Manager was discussed in tutorials and online user group sessions. A steady stream of low vision products and tutorials were referred to in mailing lists leading me to drop into the archives. Friends of Bookshare.org knit together veteran volunteers and book lovers into book groups I occasionally visited to complement my own local clubs. I was inspired to hear the pleasure of communicating impressions about plots and characters, knowing that these book lovers were reading from Braille and audio devices as fluently as from print.

The Visionary behind Accessible World

This lady, Pat Price, of Indianapolis Indiana died Feb. 1, 2009, with Memorial from Friends of Pat Price, conducted using the Accessible World and Talking Communities web communication. One memorable testimony described her as “outrageously productive”, not only at age 80 but throughout her life, quietly organizing people from disparate realms of life to address problems of the visually impaired.

Lessons for technologists from Accessible World

What can technologists learn about the roles of women? First is that technology really, really matters to disabled people, allowing us to roam the world in contact with others, often nearly housebound after active professional lives. Second, the web is so stupendously cost-effective that a few individuals as webmaster, tech support, event coordinator, and publishers can form a tight-knit community where newcomers can learn about both culture and opportunities. Third, a woman could lead this contribution without being a technologist herself but rather providing the vision, energy, spirit, wisdom, and patience to lead others with the necessary technical skills. For me, Accessible World was a wonderful source of insight into a cross-section of the blindness world as technology progressed within and around it.

Conversely, there’s a sense of admonition and embarrassment I feel as a technologist myself. since web sites mean so very much to the visually impaired, it is supremely callous and unprofessional of those web sites that fail us. Indeed, it is even up to the level of cruelty when considering the extra pain , yes, pain, imposed upon tired hands forced around a keyboard until finding the search box or heading outline that provides equal access to the page’s purpose. It is dispiriting to fail when a web service like Blog Talk Radio builds around an inaccessible chat client rather than one such as Talking Communities used by Accessible World. And then I lose respect for podcasters who choose services without regard to accessibility. In the ideal world, there would not be a separate Accessible world ignored by those technologists not yet disabled or accepting of their roles as care-givers or respective of social justice. Sadly, that ideal world is easily within reach if only we began to hold our own professional organizations to higher standards of universal design as a goal and minimal usability as requirements for all software, gadgets, and web sites.

More about Ada Lovelace

My Accessibility Check: Images and their Surrogates

slger — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:45:51 +0000

This post is part of a series on my experiences with web accessibility. Each post condenses what I’ve learned from before and after as a real-life Vision Loser continuing 30 years of Internet use and as a new student of accessibility theory and practice. Sighted readers will learn a bit more about how a low vision persons uses the web and other Vision Losers may sense some of the rationale behind the annotation of graphics.

Why are ALT tags Rule #1 of web accessibility

Ok, so web pages are inherently visually motivated to exploit the power of browsers and graphic images to convey information to users. But does that mean that images can be used freely, for either decorative or information roles, without the slightest indication of their purpose on a page? Wouldn’t that be cruel to people without vision? Of course! And with increase in use of mobile devices with smaller screens, images may also be problematic for sighted people. And browsing without images showing remains common where bandwidth is limited by availability or cost. Hence, providing surrogates for images acquired the primary position in accessibility rule making.

Web standards make it implicit that web content should be perceivable necessitating alternative textual descriptions of graphics. That implementation of this rule is dead simple, to write a description as an accompaniment, denoted by the HTML identifier ALT.

Are ALT tags simple and easy to use?

Well, yes, it’s easy to add such tags. Creating web pages the power user way, with a Notepad, one adds ALT=”the description” to accompany the location , denoted by SRC, of the image. No big deal, but what would the description say? the color of the image? ithe who or where? the artful ambience? The trick here is that the ALT description should give exactly the information needed to place the image usefully in the context of the page, no more, and no less. Ouch, that requires thinking, like why have the image in the first place and what’s its role in the narrative of the page, in addition to attracting eyes and stimulating visual cortexes?

And, wouldn’t you know it, there are more messy questions as described in Web Accessibility Gone Wild from webaim.org. some images are purely decorative and some are used for layout of the page, neither of which require a real ALT description, which would only get in the way of screen readers. And there are charts and graphs where the data displayed is integral to the point of the web page. And some images just take a lot of words to describe. Furthermore, images are often associated with links where the descriptions overlap. Happily, the above article provides good commen sense practices for these situations.

Examples of Accessibility Issues for ALT and images

Images without ALT tags are often cited as “obstacles for the unsighted”, but this Vision Loser has only one experience like this. As described in previous post on “pie charts and literacy” inability to read a pie chart may have doomed my retirement funds during an analysis by my ‘Wealth Manager’. Not really, we’re all doomed, but inability to read the pie chart of asset allocations was a real bummer for me. The problem here is not so much that the pie slice relative sizes and labels were unavailable in a PDF document, but that I could not get my hands into the original data. Pie charts are not so much images as representations of data that stimulate questions about relationships within that data. I am still looking for the pie chart I can manipulate to get those relationships out of the data imprisoned in documents.

Generally, it does help to have image descriptions like ““bicyclists using curb cut in complex intersection” to force my brain into thinking about physical locations and moving objects. But rarely do I find the absence of a good description as a barrier to understanding the content of a page. With low vision myself, I don’t have much practice using images and ALT text, requiring a sighted helper to assure images are what they say.

On the other hand, now that I’m an accessibility advocate, it is annoying to find violations of Rule #1 because this may show a rather serious ignorance of or callousness toward accessibility. I recently found this in a left unnamed output of an NSF project on Broadening Participation in Computing. An excellent project to entice student interest in computing through a journalist pathway produced a newsletter with articles illustrated by images that read out to me as “497″ and “2934″. All I could think of was a missed opportunity to raise the awareness of student authors about accessibility issues, like “how would your great-grandpa’s bad eyes read this page?” Our tax dollars should be properly used only when results are fully accessible. But don’t get me started on university and professional organization web sites!

What next for ALT?

Of course, there’s more to graphic media with Flash and animation. But the message of ALT seems to be:

Leave off ALT tags if you want to put up a clear “No blind need apply” sign to your visiting potential clients and students.
Put in the time thinking and checking out your web pages for image usefulness. Turn off images in your browser and see what’s missed. Do images still matter? Are they well supplemented by ALT descriptions?
Decorative images may be vestigial ways of thinking about getting column 2 of text to start at position 43 when that’s going to interfere with text sizing requirements or be bungled in one or another browser. Or, even worse, really stupid cases are when a screen reader reads out “spacer, spacer” between words, indicating you didn’t know how to or care to test with a screen reader.

The Techie Caregiver Conundrum: Support, Training, and Growth

slger — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:10:37 +0000

The Techie Caregiver Scenario

You are in your mid-forties, a busy, still employed, computing professional. Family members need your help to maintain their independence and life styles.

Dad recently retired and is bummed out because an elbow injury limits his golf rounds. As a former executive, he’s not really comfortable with computers, keyboards, and Internet dependence (think John Mc Cain). Dad also has a hearing problem in certain frequencies in addition to his sore elbow.

Grandma is a spry octogenarian but her ten year old PC cannot keep up with book club planning, PDF newsletters, and You Tube entertainment. She is developing macular degeneration, with increasing difficulty reading books, newspapers, and the never-ending stream of forms required for transactions, such as banking and insurance.

You, by the way, are in the 5% of the population with significant color blindness that alters your perceptions of web pages and applications displayed on screens.

The Caregiver’s Problems

Besides being a dutiful child, you recognize the long run benefits to all family members of keeping Dad and Grandma independent, happy, and healthy. So, it’s time to think through the situation and do some planning.

It looks like you will have several roles:

Tech Support for buying, setting up, and maintaining computers, networks, and phones
Trainer on new hardware, software, and business practices
Tour guide to show Dad and Grandma the web services, entertainment sites, information sources, and spy ware dangers.
Advocate when an extra 0 goes into a credit card payment, a service charge shows up,, insurance change forms get lost, etc.

Groan, this could be really time consuming and cause family friction. What to do?

Where do you learn the technology options for your family needs? Your practices don’t seem appropriate for their specific challenges?
Where can you get support for yourself when times get frustrating? How do you develop the attitude for helping without anybody seeming burdened?
How can you bring some professional growth for yourself? Where do you learn about so-called assistive technologies, accessibility practices, and technology trends that meld generational differences with your company’s product lines?
Hey, there must be some business opportunities here since your family elders are typical consumers with social needs that match the national costs of health care, citizen involvement, lifelong learning, and longer active life spans.

Fast forward a few months

Ok, Dad and Grandma have new, remarkably affordable notebooks, home wireless, and a bunch of web service accounts. But there have been several surprises:

Dad cannot adjust to the notebook keyboard, and refuses to use the typing tutor you bought.
Grandma loves using high contrast black displays that complicate your explanations over the phone, since you see even more differently than the color blindness you’re used to.
Dad likes his mp3 player but cannot get the hang of transferring files, sync, and storage limits.
Grandma learned about a handheld thing called Victor Reader something that will read books to her now that she has overcome Synthetic Voice shock.
Follow up on this scenario: helping the caregiver

In a couple of months, I’ll post a list of services, tips, etc. and welcome suggestions to slger123@gmail.com.

Thought Provoker community inspires me to try a similar challenge for computing communities. Especially with disabilities and seniors on the Obama agenda this is one way to accept responsibility and generate interest in problem solving. I am willing to nag the computing professions to overcome their thoughtlessness and ignorance of relevant technologies and practices, as I was in that attitude and knowledge state myself recently enough to remember and cringe. Also, I’ve had to deal with caregiver issues in my own family, friends, and physical circles. I would appreciate any help in bring Caregiver Assistance into the open and make pragmatic progress.

My Accessibility Check: Let’s All Use Our Headings!

slger — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:07:03 +0000

Cringing all the time, I am cleaning up my web sites and these blog pages to conform to accessibility standards and my own growing experience with usability. I plan to break down this effort into HTML facets prioritized by the trouble I have using these features as I browse and perform transactions: headings, links, forms, navigation, graphics, etc.

Sighted readers of this post should learn more about the importance of headings to guide low vision and blind readers. New Vision Losers may learn some benefits of and tricks for using a screen reader. Listen to an excellent video on the importance of headings.

The Values of Standards

For this exercise, I will be using the WebAIM simplified WCAG checklist. . The w3 standards are certainly thorough, technically rooted, and well stated. But each facet of web use is complex in its own way with technical lingo related to not only browsers and HTML but also human psychology and usability studies. Even richer are the problems of maintaining and using the ecosystem of trillions of web pages created in only 15 years by several generations of web developers using constantly changing web technology. Anyone approaching a standards activity is faced with numerous trade-offs, in social as well as technical values. So any checklist like this appears neutral about the relative importance of each criterion, leaving it up to accessibility statements to identify their values and responses.

If one were to assess values, questions would include: how much harm would be done by violation of a certain criterion? how many users would be harmed and to what degree? My accessibility checking process is based on my personal difficulties, with occasional harm to me but more often to the web page purveyor if I give up or move away in disgust. I have gradually zoomed in on Headings as a key criterion for usability of a web page design intent and execution, regarding the content and use cases for the web site.

Headings 101

Since the big inning of HTML time, an ea on ago around 1993, came the simple system: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. Browsers agreed to display these in different font sizes. Headings were a direct take-off on the section structure everyone learns in creating documents:, like chapter, section, subsection, etc. These looked really great in early browsers and conveyed the transferable semantics of sections and subsections, especially when heading wording was carefully crafted so that the headings alone conveyed a good outline of the page.

Then came page styles, with more concern for fonts, colors, and page layout. Standard heading styles didn’t always mesh well with desired look as pages were divided into frames, columns, and navigation bars. So headings became more problematic and lost use. Search engines have been said to apply extra weight to heading terms on the assumption these were chosen to emphasize a section’s purpose and content. But super powerful indexing of terms on a page lessened the impact of headings.

Now, what do the standards say? Right up front, in 1.3.1 calls for semantics on web pages, not only headings but also proper tagging for lists, quotes, and real tables of data. “Semantics” means “meaning”, i.e. a heading covers a block of the page and lower level headings are lower in those sections. Following this logical argument, a page has a subject at level H1, sections that correspond to both content and use of the page. Here come some tricky parts if headings are used faithfully, e.g. what is the level of a search box, or page maintenance information, or, for that matter, the main content of the page?

The Webaxe podcast and blog on accessibility is an excellent tutorial and reference to other webs sources on accessibility. Here is WCAG 2.0 Guidelines for section headings

Rationale for using headings

Usability for screen readers

A screen reader strips out the visual only aspects of web pages and reads out the primary content: headings, lists, tables, graphic descriptions, links, etc. as well as paragraphs. My NVDA screen reader has explicit settings as to which HTML elements to read out as well as settings for the voice, e.g. amount of punctuation and indication of capitalization.

The first thing I do using Firefox and NVDA screen reader reaching a new web page is hit the h key to tour the page by headings, listening to both the descriptions and the levels, trying to build a mental map of the page. I can also use the 1,2,… keys to traverse the page by level of headings.

You tube video demo and appeal for using headings tells the story exceptionally well. With headings on a page, you are off and running into the content immediately. Without headings, I try looking for meaningful links, then lists, tables. Failing along the way, I grow increasingly grumpy if the page is long and must be covered line by line or by tabbing among HTML elements in the top-bottom, left-right reading order.

General readability and write ability

Just as I am never really satisfied with my own heading structure, I react to the intuitive flow of reasoning I discover in a page’s outline. The screen reader has a marvelous way of building or destroying confidence in the underlying design of the page and content. I can “feel” the flow of a page and the thinking of its authors.

With headings, I can drill down into the subjects that interest me, traverse backward and forward in skimming fashion, and maintain an understanding of the page’s content and my location within it. No headings and I must read linearly or traverse lower level elements, which often is appropriate for list elements but not strings of graphics or paragraphs.

Quality control and maintenance

Software engineers gradually learn the value of design, following templates, working top down, modularizing content, and many other principles. We learn that lack of structure will kill us when we need to make changes, which will happen sooner or later. We also understand a process called re factoring that systematically moves functions, expands classes, and regularizes parts of a system. It’s only a belief on my part, but I wonder if a page developer not using headings really knows what the page should be saying. Of course, real life suggests that the original developer is often long gone and the page owners are maintain the page themselves as their situations change. No wonder pages turn out so messy!

Another reason I react to poor heading structure is that I know the page has not been adequately tested with a screen reader and an at tentative human. If the only headings on a page are H5 and H1 that’s better the nothing, but why would the tester not recognize and fix this anomaly? Often this signifies that the page developers are following standards without real understanding or care. Another reason is the industrial origins of screen readers with $1000 price tags and adverse licensing that makes it difficult to test a page. NVDA obviates that reason, but there are still difficulties with the tester’s ability to understand a synthetic voice and work screenless.

Examples of headings

Here are some pages I like and dislike for their use of headings. Other visually impaired readers most likely will have other feelings based on their skills, tools, interest in the web site and content, and mental state.

Good use of headings

W3.org web standards parent makes the tradeoff of using mostly level H2 sections with many additional pages in this large site. More subheadings could be used, it seems to me, for example in the months for presentations on the talks page.
WordPress.com>/a> maintains excellent structure in its templates and working pages, such as tags. However, the main page jumps around from H1 to H6, obviously in search of some look I cannot appreciate via screen reader.
google search results are organized by H2 for sponsored and search results with the results in a list at H3 level. Since headings are also links, this makes browsing a list of links quite rapid. However, in a stroke of inconsistency, news results and some other types of searches are not so tagged with headings., making the results far less useful with a screen reader.

Poor use of headings

Word Web Online has only an H1 and would benefit from subsections for parts of speech, e.g. immediately calling a noun usage and telling other uses. Also sections for other dictionaries and linguistic tools would help.
Association for Computing Machinery acm.org is the premiere computing professional association, that I unfortunately belong to for access to its digital library of publications. The heading structure is H1, H5, H5, H5, H1. What were they thinking? The page is not so badly organized but the heading read out is jarring.
Computing Research Association has no headings or semantic cues. The page is laid out in visual sections but without any of that information transmitted via screen reader.

Exceptions from using standard headings

While main Amazon.com is a royal mess with a page full of links difficult to classify by headings, alternative mobile accessible amazon.com/access has no headings at all. I find this acceptable in the spirit of minimalism that can be traversed in a few tabs or immediately to the product search box.

How did we stray from the wisdom of headings?

One reason for haphazard use of headings is certainly the conflict of the visual appearance of headings with desired look of pages, although this can be cured by style sheets. It is also difficult to reconcile section headings with navigation elements and actions from use cases on the same page as descriptive content. However, my bet is that a little more thinking could come up with palatable heading descriptions that would satisfy a screen reader user as well as a visual user. Additional arguments based on engineering principles for quality and maintenance are difficult to teach within software engineering but gradually become the stuff of bitter experience for truly professional web developers.

So, what do I advise?

Use as many headings on your pages as you have logical groups of elements. If This one step is the most accessible step you can make for the broadest range of users.
Try but don’t fuss too much over the true hierarchy, i.e. an H4 under an H2 or H2 topics not really at the same level. Using a screen reader will be much easier although the anomalies will be noticeable. However, each anomaly is something to question about your overall page structure.
Of course, there are really no-win situations. An example is the use of headings within a blog post that don’t fit into the levels of a posting list as in wordpress tag surfer.
Test your page using NVDA or a proprietary screen reader listening carefully to the sections and page outline. This is easy. Just start NVDA, set the preferences to the page elements you want, bring up Firefox with your page and type the h key around your headings. Other browsers may perform differently and you might need a more soothing synthetic voice but this should be part of any test environment.

Obama whitehouse.gov accessibility almost on target

slger — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:07:42 +0000

I could not resist testing the new Obama whitehouse.gov for my pet peeves and latent hopes.

It was great to find an Obama administration agenda for disabilities. And right there on the home page were the RSS feeds for my enthusiastic subscription.

However, I immediately hit a few accessibility snags that suggest a bit more analysis and alterations would get the techno-government off to a better start.

Overall I like the page layout with site map in the footer, a design goal described in the whitehouse.gov accessibility statement.
My current pet peeve, subject of my own web site improvements and a future blog posting, is the logical page structure presented in well described section headings and a clear page outline. I quickly became confused as I toured the home page using my heading key and hearing the headings and their level. The w3 semantic data extractor profile tells
the story in its own outline of the page’s HTML.

Now any accessibility complaint has several components: the page itself, tools used by the user (NVDA screen reader, for me), the user’s skills (improving), and the user’s mental state and surroundings for perception and processing the page content. I’m confident there is an implementation problem here, although other visually impaired users might not find any difficulty or diagnose differently.

Ok, so I head off to the Contact page, and, whoops, a few more problems. Sigh, my immediate reaction to any form is a sense of impending doom as something always goes wrong and uses up a good part of my day’s energy. First, I could not figure out the actual required fields, so I had to fill all. I was not hearing any label read for each form field so had to tab around to find the field name. Missed the zip code and got an error message after submission. The comment box had a 500 character limit, with notice below the box so I exceeded my quota using the above web link. And I was unsure exactly which item was the submit button, actually labeled “contact us”. Now, this only took a few minutes and was typical of form-filling torture — I survived. Then I made another round to complain, sorry comment, about the form itself.

What is going on here? Is this web site a success or failure for one, picky partially sighted citizen? Overall, I’m pleased at the effort and general concept but disappointed that disability feedback did not fix the flaws that muddled my Inauguration after glow. My constructive suggestions are:

Untangle and reconstruct the heading structure. A screen reader has an uncanny ability to reveal presence or absence of underlying logical thinking about page parts and their functions and relative importance. That’s the “semantics” in the w3 validator. In the long run, this quality of thinking about page organization will also pay off in maintenance as the web site grows.
Rework the contact form. It’s doable but should be model of ease and functionality if the government is moving toward increased use of online forms for transactions, information, and oversight. And, by the way, why do I need to supply my zip code to make a comment?

Updates on whitehouse.gov accessibility

January 28 2009 Observations

I am still befuddled by the Heading outline of the main page. It jumps around phrases like “Peril” to “search” and “blog” . I just cannot envision the underlying logic of the page although I can understand each of the parts when I get there. On the Disabilities page, the heading order read by my screen reader is H3, H2,H4 so I’m a bit confused at levels within the agenda.
Last week I skipped over some mystery 1, 2, 3, 4 reading. This time I poked around more and discovered these bring up a short description of a feature above the boxes. But this dynamic content is not notified to my screen reader. Similar patterns of web design using this tricky interaction of web page with browser read by screen reader could cause great confusion if the content is really important. Right now, the numbers and features are just a bit of glitch in the way of accessibility.
I subscribed to blog feeds on my Levelstar Icon PDA but nothing has come through. I need to check whether this is a non-standard feed that is not added properly to my RSS client.
Just guessing when revisiting the comment page, that required fields are marked by asterisk. But I have punctuation speaking turned off in the screen reader so miss such a notification. As observed in another critique, the form lacks labels where the word Required or Optional might be spoken. This is pretty rudimentary accessibility practice covered in standards. Shame!
The w3 Semantic Data Extractor link above produces the error message:

Using org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser
Exception net.sf.saxon.trans.DynamicError: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the ‘&’ in the entity reference.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the ‘&’ in the entity
reference.

This might be a minor syntax error on the whitehouse.gov home page or a flaw in the validator. More later on whether other validators work. Also see the very interesting comment comparing whitehouse.gov with the British PM website.

Update Feb. 14 2009

More feedback from a partially sighted pro-Obama citizen using Mozilla Firefox 3 and NVDA screen reader. Let’s make sure only the best web techniques trickle down from whitehouse.gov to the rest of *.gov.

Good!! The comment form fields now have labels and read like “First Name Edit”. However, I didn’t hear any label for zip code. And I still don’t know which fields are required.
The 1-2-3-4 boxes for new features displayed in dynamic updates still did not provide any audible notice of change, just a different blurb of text I could see changing on the screen.
I clicked “watch the movie” for the First Lady talk on “Do the right thing. Either the movie widget is invisible to me by either or seeing or the link failed. A good practice is to always tell the user if a plug-in or external app will launch, if in a new window, or other actions. I do know what’s going on here, sigh.
Link description is drifting into the poor practice “Read this post”, “Read this post”, “Read this post”, … Why not merge this link with the post title?
Headings? Schmedings!
Overall, I still like the page layout and spaarceness of front page content with links to blogs and agenda issues for more details.
Hey, let’s all import that Aussie free open source screen reader NVDA, buy a little TTS (text-to-speech) voice choir, and listen to our web sites for accessibility, usability, and friendliness.

Other reactions?