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Happy New Year!

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Shownotes

Karen and I wish you all a very accessible, happy and safe New Year! This is our brief 2005 year in review podcast. Enjoy.

  1. Karen and I become engaged on April 1. The proposal is the focus of Jeff Bishop’s The Desert Skies radio show on ACB Radio Interactive that Friday night. The show is also the first semi-official podcast of Blind Access Journal.

  2. Karen becomes part of the Distinguished Service Team on her job, showing once more the value of blind people in employment.

  3. Darrell is Employee of the Month in June of 2005, also exemplifying the recognized value of the blind.

  4. Darrell attends the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference where awareness of accessibility concerns is effectively raised.

  5. Darrell gains significant exposure of accessibility issues as he has the opportunity to chat with Leo Laporte and his gang of TWiTs on This Week in Tech live from the expo.

  6. Darrell works with the GoDaddy Office of the President, resulting in positive, promising developments in the correction of the company’s currently inaccessible visual verification scheme. We will continue following up this communication in the new year.

Please work with us in 2006 and beyond to help insure an accessible world of technology in which blind people are allowed to participate on terms of equality with the sighted. Happy New Year!

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Blind Users v. the Internet

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Until recently I have been passive-aggressive on the entire visual verification issue, but today while attempting to reply to e-mail in Yahoo! Mail I was presented with Sender Verification. This is visual verification that yahoo is now placing on *every* outgoing e-mail you send.

I have verified it is every e-mail by sending a very simple message to myself with no trigger words.

The yahoo solution is the same stupid phone solution they have for other services that may or may not work.

Ladies and gentlemen now that Yahoo has extended this to its e-mail service it is only a short time before the problem reaches to other services like Hotmail.

Therefore, I am declaring war on all sites and systems of web based or electronic access that use visual verification in any way.

Big things will be happening on this front in the new year. I call on DREDF, DRA Legal, and any other interested parties (i.e. NFB or ACB) to take all necessary and appropriate legal action to address this growing problem online.

I personally don’t expect much to come from the two major consumer organizations in the United States on this since they seem more interested in other things like identifying money and fighting DVS.

I’m heading to Washington, DC in February and this *will* be on my agenda for discussion if it is necessary.

I will take personal action as well if I deem the other groups named above are not moving to address the problem.

However, until such time as public interest groups take up this issue I encourage you to go to the following website PlanetFeedback.com. You do not have to register, just choose the complaint radio button on the home page and in the search box that you tab to after the radio button enter yahoo or Google or any other company that you find using visual verification and then press enter. If the company name or any similar is in the database the site will return results. You also have to choose a category for your complaint. For our purposes you need to choose site navigation. If not in the database you have the opportunity to enter the companies contact details. If you cannot find a companies contact details to enter in the database send me an e-mail at rlynch80 at sbcglobal.net and I’ll get its information for you.

Once you have the company you need to write a detailed and well thought out complaint letter to the company. I suggest writing this letter using notepad and then copying and pasting it into the field you are provided by PlanetFeedback. You will also have a field for what you want the company to do. Here I suggest you discuss an audio feedback system or better yet for sites that you need to register for they can use an e-mail based verification or even a question based system like How do you spell dog, or What color is a red rose.

More coming on this in the new year, and oh yeah Marry Christmas.

Christmas Preparations, GoDaddy Visual Verification Update, New Baby Marin and More

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Shownotes

Only two full days till Christmas begins!

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FreedomBox Enables Access to a Major Component of the Podsafe Music Network

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Shownotes

We applaud FreedomBox for their willingness to enable access to a major component of the Podsafe Music Network, allowing blindcasters to add tracks to their playlists for downloading and playing on their podcasts. Will Podshow fix their broken HTML code that continues to deny most blind podcasters this capability? Will other screen reader developers like GW Micro and Freedom Scientific rise to the challenge by enabling this ability for their customers?

Check out Sean Patrick McGraw on the Podsafe Music Network.

Karen’s sister, Mary Beth, goes into the hospital tomorrow to have her second baby, making Karen an aunt for the fifth time. Will the child be a boy or girl? Stay tuned for all the details!

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Yahoo! Mail May Soon Become Inaccessible

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Jim, an avid Yahoo! Mail premium subscriber, reports that the company’s latest beta is almost completely inaccessible to those of us whom rely on screen readers. True to form, Yahoo! has not yet chosen to respond to Jim’s concerns. Yahoo! has been ignoring our need for accessible visual verification for a long time now without consequence. It seems the blow off of the blind continues with this latest beta. Any additional news on this front would be quite welcome.

I deeply regret having to report that the beta of the new yahoo mail
has been made mostly inaccessible to us as screen reader
users. While it is hit or miss possible at times to route the mouse
cursor and click some of the controls and have them work, it is not
reliably accessible by any means and certainly is not practical to
use in such a state. The technology they are using as of the beta
does not allow the screen reader to work with the controls in many
cases. For example messages no longer show up as a link that you can
activate to open them and there is no longer any checkbox to check to
perform actions on messages. You can no longer even see anything
that allows you to get to any subsequent pages of messages in a
folder beyond the first one. Some of the controls such as folder
names, compose, reply, forward, etc are now on mouse over links which
actually can be manipulated more or less depending on which version
of your screen reader you have. That we could live with. The bottom
line is that yahoo mail has gone, practically over night, from being
a wonderful user experience that I personally have been a paying
subscriber to their premium services for a number of years and it has
been fantastic for my needs to a mostly inaccessible unusable
service. I have written to them via their beta feedback form twice
now. One time on Friday Dec 16, 2005 categorizing it in their
predetermined list of categories as a problem using the product and
also on Sunday December 18 selecting the category of technical
problem. In both cases I spelled out the problem and referred them
to the screen reader manufacturer web pages of GWMicro and
freedomscientific as well as offering them any help I could provide
in determining and resolving the issues. I have not gotten any
response to either message as of Monday morning December 21. I will
certainly let you know if that changes.