AFB’s AccessWorld Magazine is conducting a survey to find out how people with vision loss access their mobile telephones. You are invited to participate by completing this survey and providing your feedback.
The Bloglines people have just come out with their beta representing the future of the service. As it stands, things don’t look very good for us blind folks with respect to its continued accessibility. Once we lose Bloglines, there will be no accessible, web based RSS feed aggregator for blind people! Let’s all urgently provide our feedback to the Bloglines team reminding them of our existence and asking them to keep accessibility in mind.
If you have been looking for easy to use, fully accessible online television listings, your search is over! The TV Guide Wireless service for mobile PDA and smart phone users is just the ticket. Simply select the TV Listings link, enter your zip code and select your provider to find out what’s on TV right now. The listings are provided in a simple text format showing the channel number, channel name and title of the currently playing program. If you want to know what’s on for a different date or hour, accomplishing that is straightforward as well. This service comes highly recommended for both its usability and full accessibility to blind and visually impaired computer users. If you agree that this is the most accessible resource for TV listings, please consider submitting your feedback to TV Guide. Let’s make sure the company is made aware we are using this site, in hopes that it remains both accessible and available to us in the future.
If you’re blind or severely visually impaired, imagine that you wake up one day to find…
We should be afraid, be very afraid, of the clear and present danger posed by inaccessible CAPTCHA, visual only multifactor authentication schemes and other technologies that do not reasonably accomodate our needs. Our fear should not result in our cowering in a corner waiting for it to happen. Instead, we must become angry enough to start really doing something about it! Anger is not always a bad emotion. It is often a response to injustice, which we can choose to channel into taking positive action. As a blind community, are we up to the challenge of absolutely insisting that our need for equal accessibility be reasonably accomodated? As a blind individual, what actions will you take right now and later to ensure a brighter, more accessible future for you and your blind brothers and sisters? Don’t choose to remain in the dark one more second! Please feel free to take our poll on accessibility and provide your feedback by way of posting a comment to this article.
The folks at Twitter have now added an audio CAPTCHA to their signup process, thus affording blind and visually impaired people the opportunity to register and participate alongside their sighted peers. See New: Accessible Captcha with Recaptcha for all the exciting details.
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!
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:
The potential of this solution to deliver security while ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities simply can’t be ignored!
I have just discovered that blind and visually impaired people are not permitted to post comments on the PayPal Blog due to an inaccessible CAPTCHA. This is weird, since an audio CAPTCHA is utilized elsewhere within the E-Bay and PayPal sites.
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.
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.