Uncategorized

Jamal Mazrui’s PDF2TXT tool for rapidly converting and reading PDF documents has literally saved my job! I highly encourage all of you to read Jeff Bishop’s announcement below and join him on Marlaina’s ACB Radio MainStream show to meet Jamal and learn about all his accomplishments.

Hello Friends,

Now that all of you have partied the New Year in, it is time to get back to some since of normality on the Marlaina program.  Marlaina and Gary the Board Guy are sailing the ocean blue for the next two weeks, so I will be filling in for Marlaina.

This week we present a fascinating guest.  Jamal Mazrui joins us this week to talk to us all about himself.  He is the author of such computer applications as pdf2txt (a PDF to Text file conversion utility), FileDir (a very robust file manager), TextPal (a very accessible text editor) and many more.  All of these applications are free.  Who is the man behind all of this work?  Come and listen to this fascinating interview all about Jamal. We will discuss with him his childhood, career, and some on his programming skills (from a non-techie perspective of course).  Many of you know his wife Susan who works for Cingular and we will touch a bit on that as well.  A new baby joined the Mazrui family and we will ask Jamal how he and
Susan are doing with all of that, like how he can continue to pump out all of these tools with a new little one in the house.

During the second hour, the phones will be open.  What New Year’s resolutions have you made?  What gifts did you receive for Christmas? We will also be announcing a new show debuting on the Main Stream channel starting the week of January 21st.  It will be a very exciting show, so come
and find out what is up on Main Stream.

All this and more is up for grabs on the next Marlaina, heard on ACB Radio MainStream. It all starts on Sunday night at 8 PM Eastern, 5 Pacific, which is Monday
morning at 1 Universal. The program will replay for 24 hours, and of course, is available via podcast from the ACB Radio replay page. As always, we’ll take your calls at our toll-free number, 866-400-5333. I can’t wait to spend time with you there!

Feel free to distribute this announcement to others whom you think may be interested.

Jeff Bishop

The folks at Applian have released another update that represents another significant accessibility improvement. Though minor for most users, Replay A/V 8.03 resolves a critical issue involving the use of the space bar in the program’s main window. A keyboard shortcut conflict has also been resolved. If you are a Replay A/V user, this update is definitely a must-have.

The poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is especially appropriate to start a brand new year. Let’s all be willing to take the road less traveled when it would be easier to walk down the path of least resistance. Listen to this reading done by Karen on New Year’s Eve. We intended to broadcast this on the Desert Cafe, but it was not quite ready in time for the show.

Hello Everyone,

You won’t want to miss tomorrow’s special edition of the Desert Cafe show on ACB Radio Interactive.  We’ll be talking about and asking all of you what
you gave and received for Christmas, playing inspirational music for the New Year and just generally having a great time.  The Desert Cafe can be found on ACB Radio Interactive tomorrow (Monday) from 22:00 to 01:00 Universal time, that’s 2:00 to 5:00 PM Pacific, 3:00 to 6:00 Mountain, 4:00 to 7:00 Central and 5:00 to 8:00 Eastern time.  So come on over and join us to start off the New Year just right!

Happy New Year,

Darrell, Karen and Dougie

Karen, Dougie and I would like to wish all our loyal friends and supporters a very happy, prosperous New Year in 2007!

This evening, Karen and I will listen to Marlaina’s New Year’s Eve show on ACB Radio MainStream, watch the movie When Harry Met Sally, eat snacks such as chicken wings and pizza bagle bites, take in the television coverage of New Year’s Eve in Times Square with Fox News and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, toast in the New Year with sparkling apple sider and, finally, go to bed no later than 12:30! Karen must work tomorrow, but after that we will have Tuesday and Wednesday off together.

Don’t forget to listen to Marlaina’s show coming right up in about 40 minutes on MainStream. It promises to be a great time for all!

Applian Technologies has now released Replay A/V 8.02, and it is more accessible than ever! After some initial accessibility setbacks in versions 8.0 and 8.01, Applian is getting back on track with this release.

Replay A/V 8.02 now sports a standard menu bar at the top of the window enabling access by pressing the alt key and featuring keyboard shortcuts. Previously defined alt key commands have been switch to the control key to relieve conflicts with menu shortcuts. The Application key or Shift+F10 command can now be used to access the context menu for each show in the list. My only gripe is the presence of a quirky “hints” dialogue box that pops up with a check box and OK button that do not seem to be accessible using either the space bar or enter keys. The screen readers mouse movement and left click commands must be used to access these controls. Read this Product Update notice for more details. If you are a current Replay A/V 7 user, this upgrade can now be highly recommended. We thank the folks at Applian Technologies for listening to the blind community by making Replay A/V accessible.

It is unfortunate that, at this time, there is no permanent text on our web site providing contact information. This will be corrected by either modifying the Blogger Beta template or by way of the new layout feature once that becomes available for blogs published using FTP.

In any case, please feel free to contact us by way of the editor (at) blindaccessjournal.com e-mail address. We would be happy to hear from you directly!

The move to the new Blogger Beta has now been completed. Please feel free to e-mail us if you experience any issues or concerns.

Karen and I are also having a great time visiting with the Bishop family in Tucson.

Karen and I wish all of you a very happy Thanksgiving!

Download and Listen

Our show, The Desert Cafe, on ACB Radio Interactive is moving to a new time. We are about to start our regular time slot from 13:00 to 15:00 Universal, but, starting this afternoon, we are moving to 22:00 through 01:00 UTC. That’s Mondays for three hours starting at 2:00 PM Mountain, 3:00 Pacific, 4:00 PM Central and 5:00 PM Eastern. Catch us now and at our new time!