Darrell Hilliker

Alternate ACB Radio Interactive Broadband Listening Stream Now Available

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ACB Radio Interactive listeners now have an alternate listening option, thanks to additional streaming bandwidth provided by Paul Merrell. Please feel free to utilize this option at any time in cases where you experience any breakup, buffering or outage of the primary broadband stream.

Once again, we at ACB Radio thank Paul for his generous donation!

Opportunity to Participate in New Web Accessibility Evaluation Project

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The University of York in the United Kingdom, along with a consortium of other organizations, is embarking on a project to evaluate the web accessibility needs of people with disabilities. Let’s all visit Amfortas – Test Case Evaluation Framework and provide our expertise and insight to this potentially valuable effort. It appears there may be an opportunity to earn some compensation in exchange for time and energy spent conducting the requested testing. Even better; I’m signing up now!

PhoneFactor: A Potential Answer to Accessible Two-Factor Authentication

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Once again, we learn that authentication based on sight alone is not the only game in town. A company called PhoneFactor delivers a two-factor authentication scheme in which the second piece of authentication material is literally your telephone. In simple terms, here’s how it works:

  1. Supply your traditional username and password as prompted.

  2. Your telephone rings.

  3. Press the pound sign!

  4. That’s all there is to it!

The potential of this solution to deliver security while ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities simply can’t be ignored!

PayPal Security Key: Do Blind People Deserve the Same Level of Security as the Sighted?

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Recently, PayPal began offering account holders the ability to use a Security Key as an additional means of protection. The Security Key is a small piece of hardware that connects to the computer’s USB port and displays a sequence of numbers that change every 30 seconds. Once the key is activated, users must supply these numbers in addition to their typical PayPal username and password in order to be granted access. No accessible version of the PayPal Security Key is offered at this time. Though the Security Key is not required, there are a couple of significant concerns.

At this time, use of the Security Key is not required in order to continue using PayPal. One may decide to avoid purchasing and activating the Security Key, while still retaining access to their account. This may seem to represent a mitigating factor, except for one dirty little truth. The availability of the Security Key to only sighted PayPal customers automatically means that blind and visually impaired customers are not afforded the same degree of security! That’s right. While the sighted may now enjoy two-factor, virtually unbreakable authentication, we blind folks are stuck with the traditional username and password approach. This inherently makes the blind more vulnerable to fraud, identity theft, loss of PayPal funds and all manner of other imaginable nastiness. Alas, that’s not all!

While the Security Key is currently an optional enhancement, we can see the day in the near future when PayPal will begin requiring use of this authentication method for all account holders. At that time, blind and visually impaired people will be completely locked out of their PayPal accounts, unless an accessible version of the Security Key is made available. When that happens, PayPal will be giving its blind customers the boot, showing them the tightly barred and locked door featuring the infamous “No Blind People Allowed” sign.

Multifactor authentication is not new to PayPal. It is rapidly extending to the web sites of many banks and other financial institutions. It is absolutely critical that we, as a blind community, begin to effectively address issues of visual CAPTCHA and multifactor authentication before we find ourselves locked out of online participation and even separated from our money! Let’s act now with respect to PayPal! We urge all of you to ask PayPal for information about their intentions toward blind and visually impaired customers with respect to the Security Key. Please post any responses from PayPal as comments to this article.

New Travel Web Site Provides Information Focused on Accessibility for People with Disabilities

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Tamas Babinszki reports that he has built a new travel oriented web site that provides information about various points of interest, including hotels, museums and restaurants, from the accessibility perspective of people with disabilities. The CLUEniversal site is organized into a database of clues (Convenient Locations for Universal Enjoyment) contributed directly by users who have firsthand experience visiting the points of interest featured on the site.

Mr. Babinszki writes the following concerning his new project:

I travel quite a bit, and often times I find it very frustrating that when I have a couple of hours between meetings and I plan any activities, I am greatly disappointed, because the sites I visit are not accessible, and I waste the little time I have instead of having done something more interesting. However, you don’t know this until you visit the sites. I could review other sites for user recommendations, but in most of the cases it does not provide enough information for me from the accessibility point of view. For example, a museum can be wonderful, but I would like to know if there is something to touch there or things are behind glass. I would rather pick a less interesting or less famous museum when I know that they have hands-on objects. Also, I’d rather pick a guided tour with many long stops where I have an opportunity to experience the sights, as opposed to a long bus tour where all I have is the tour guide’s explanation, if any.

Therefore, I put together CLUEniversal, a site where people can enter locations, similar to other travel sites. This site, however, is different, because when people enter a new location, they can answer numerous questions about the accessibility of a place. If a restaurant has a Braille menu, if a museum has a guided tour, if the hotel has airport transportation, etc. This way people with disabilities would have a greater chance to find locations which they would enjoy visiting. 

This site, however, is not built for people with disabilities only. It is primarily designed for all, this is what I stand for, this is what CLUE’s mean. CLUEniversal: Convenient Locations for Universal Enjoyment.

People can choose which questions they do or do not want to answer. Also, once a location (CLUE) is entered, visitors have an option to provide general, and accessibility related ratings and comments. 

This site is totally free. I believe people should have access to such information free of charge. It is, however, optional to register, I would like to provide incentives for people who contribute the most to the database, which requires an e-mail address and a user name, and only the user name is publicly available. 

The site is a Beta version. While I have most of the concepts worked out, the database only contains a few items. Also, more categories will be added, together with more questions in order to determine the enjoyment and accessibility level of a location. 

As of now, I’m looking for people who are willing to test the site, provide more locations and offer suggestions on how to make this site a more useful experience for them. 

This new site is in the early beta stage. It holds tremendous potential to make travel much more enjoyable for those of us whom happen to be blind or visually impaired. Let’s all give him a hand by adding the points of interest we visit on a regular basis.

EdSharp 1.2 released

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http://www.EmpowermentZone.com/edsetup.exe

Version 1.2
Released August 18, 2007

Fixed the default EdSharp.ini overwriting the Import and Export sections of
the user's EdSharp.ini configuration file. Fixed commands such as Quote
(Control+Q) producing an error if no text was at the cursor position
(because the document was empty or the cursor was at the end).

Added support for enhanced speech messages when using the System Access
screen reader from
http://serotek.com

Enhanced Find and Replace commands (Control+F, Control+Shift+F, and
Control+R). The Text you enter in Find or Replace dialogs may now include
tokens that represent nonprinting characters. This syntax is available for
strings in the C programming language and its variations. Common tokens are
a pair of characters consisting of a backslash and letter, such as the
following: \r for carriage return (ASCI 13), \n for line feed (ASCII 10),
\t for tab (ASCII 9), and \f for form feed (ASCII 12). Such tokens allow
you to search for text, say, at the beginning or end of a line (use \n for a
line break in EdSharp).

The trade off for this flexibility is that backslash and quote characters
must be preceded by a backslash when intended literally (not part of a
token), i.e., \\ for backslash and \" for quote. Since this doubling of
characters may be cumbersome with search terms such as a file path, however,
EdSharp supports use of an initial @ character to indicate that the
following characters should be interpreted literally rather than as possible
tokens. For example, if searching for a file in the document, you could
enter the term
@c:\temp\temp.txt
rather than c:\\temp\\temp.txt
If you need to search for an interpreted string that begins with the @
character, precede it with a backslash, e.g.,
\@\c:\\temp\\temp.txt

The Open Other Format command (Control+Shift+O) now shows the command line
attempted by a custom converter if it failed to produce text. Added several
converters distributed with EdSharp. External converters are stored in the
Convert subfolder of the EdSharp program folder, e.g., in (default
installation):\Program Files\EdSharp\Convert

Besides the pdf converter mentioned previously, the default EdSharp.ini
configuration file (in the EdSharp program folder) now includes the
following conversions. GetText.exe is configured for importing from Windows
Help (.hlp) and Microsoft Word (.doc) — thereby eliminating the need to
load Word for this purpose. chm2txt imports Compiled HTML Help (.chm).
htm2md.exe imports from HTML and variations (.htm, .html, and .xhtml) to a
text format called Markdown — explained at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
md2htm.exe does the reverse, exporting from Markdown to HTML. EdSharp
supports Markdown as an aid to developing web pages.

Jamal

Visual Verification: FeedBurner’s Audio CAPTCHA Appears to be Broken

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After attempting to subscribe to this blog via e-mail using the FeedBurner widget for this purpose, I have discovered that the supplied audio CAPTCHA appears to be broken. No matter how many times I listen to and enter the numbers, I am unable to complete the subscription process! A message has already been sent to support@feedburner.com concerning this serious problem. I urge all of you to do likewise. Let’s get as much visibility to this issue as possible so the FeedBurner folks will fix it right away!

Update: A FeedBurner support representative tells me that the problem appears with both the audio and visual CAPTCHA. It involves a timeout issue with certain browser and Internet service provider combinations. While it works fine with Internet Explorer 7.0 for one user, it works only with Firefox 2.0 for another. Those encountering this ongoing inability to complete e-mail subscriptions should include their browser version and the name of their Internet service provider in messages to the support team.