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presentations twitter

EASI Webinar: Twitter And Web Accessibility

On the first of February, Web Axe host Dennis Lembree gave a live webinar presentation “Twitter, Its Uses and Its Accessibility Issues” as part of the EASI Social Media Series. In addition to Twitter, the 4-part series covers Second Life, Facebook and YouTube. Here are the slides and an nice HTML version.

Here is the slide presentation embedded from Slideshare:

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interview podcast

Web Axe in BBC Podcast

The author and main host of Web Axe, Dennis Lembree, is interviewed in a podcast on the BBC! It’s in the show entitled Haiti, BIL and accessibility on the BBC Pods & Blogs section. The BBC podcast can be found here, but is only available for seven days as it is then replaced by the following week’s program. (The interview starts at about 14 minutes 30 seconds into the podcast.)

The show notes state:

New and social media should not be left out of the equation of course. Dennis Lembree makes the Web Axe podcast about accessibility and has also created a Twitter reader that he says is 100% accessible.

Much of the phone interviewed was edited down, but it’s still another win for awareness of web accessibility. In addition to Web Axe, Dennis mentions AccessibleTwitter.com and the Detroit Podcasters Network.

Addendum

Just before Dennis, accessibility expert and evangelist for Yahoo, Artur Ortega is interviewed.

You can download the BBC podcast here! (It’s no longer available on the BBC page.)

Categories
"assistive technology" apple book

iPad Is Assisitive Technology But No Killer

One may plainly say that Apple’s new iPad is an assistive technology device. Like the iPhone, it includes many accessibility features such as:

  • VoiceOver
  • screen zoom
  • white-on-black display
  • mono audio
  • closed-captioned content

But as pointed out in the article Accessibility and the iPad: First Impressions, it additionally has the following helpful features:

  • Large size (for visually impairments)
  • External Keyboard (for mobile impairments)
  • Speakers (for visually impairments)
  • Simple Interface (for cognitive impairments)

Although I feel that the iPad is certainly better than Amazons’ Kindle, I believe that the iPad will not “kill” the Kindle, mostly because of the price difference. The iPad is much more expensive ranging from $499 to $699 while the Kindle is $259. For more on this, check out Apple Tablet Could Be A Kindle Killer.

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alt captcha news screenreader socialmedia twitter webaim

Twitter Roundup – January

Wow, this first month of 2010 flew by! So much going on in the Twittersphere, as usual. Here’s a quick summary of some great articles mentioned in the Twitter accessibility community. Please comment with anything outstanding that I’ve missed!

Also, on a sad note, we recently mourned the loss of Jack Pickard; a huge loss in the web accessibility community. Jack was a great web accessibility expert and advocate.

Categories
articles screenreader survey visual

More on WebAIM’s Screenreader Survey

WebAIM’s Screen Reader Survey a few months ago (October 2009) sure drew a lot of attention, and for good reason. It is a much needed and well written survey, performed by one of the leading organizations in web accessibility, WebAIM. Here are some articles written in response to the survey. If you know any others, please leave a comment and let us know!

Related Articles

My Observations

Some of the more outstanding results of the survey I believe are:

  • 75% of respondents said they do NOT have JavaScript turned off (most had it on).
  • The most problematic items seem to be the same predictable items, unfortunately. The top 10 includes CAPTCHA, Flash, alternative text, forms, and headings.
  • 42% surveyed said they didn’t know ARIA Landmarks for navigation existed. I highly suspect this number will steadily decrease.
  • Although over 66% of users reported JAWS as their primary screen reader, almost half said that free or low-cost screen readers (such as NVDA or VoiceOver) are currently viable alternatives.
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