Coming up on Main Menu and Main Menu Live for the week of June 6

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This week on Main Menu, we hear from Bill McCann with Dancing Dots all about the company’s CakeTalking product which provides access to CakeWalk Sonar for users of the JAWS screen reader. During the second hour of Main Menu Live, Bill joins us to discuss CakeTalking and other Dancing Dots products. Feel free to call or chat with us on MSN / Windows Live Messenger all about music and technology from a blindness perspective.

The number to call into the show is 866-400-5333. You can email your questions to mainmenu@acbradio.org. You may also interact with the show via MSN Messenger. The MSN Messenger ID to add is mainmenu@acbradio.org.

Would you like to interact with a group of Main Menu listeners about the topics heard on Main Menu and Main Menu Live? You can do this by joining the Main Menu Friends email list. The address to subscribe is main-menu-subscribe@googlegroups.com. Come join an already lively group of users.

Would you like to subscribe to podcast feeds for Main Menu and Main Menu Live? The RSS feeds to add to your podcatching application are:

Main Menu – http://www.acbradio.org/podcasts/mainmenu

Main Menu Live – http://www.acbradio.org/podcasts/mainmenulive

Main Menu and Main Menu Live can be heard on Tuesday evenings at 9:00 Eastern, 6:00 Pacific, and at 1 universal on Wednesday mornings on the ACB Radio Main Stream channel. To listen to the show, just click this link: http://www.acbradio.org/pweb/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=8&MMN_position=14:14

Jeff Bishop and Darrell Shandrow

The Main Menu Production Team

Blind Access Journal Comment Policy

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It has been my longstanding policy not to censor comments posted to Blind Access Journal. I feel the concept of freedom of speech is paramount not only for me as a writer but also for anyone who wishes to provide their feedback, whether it happens to be in agreement or disagreement. There are a couple of categories of comments I feel I must, however, not approve for publication:

  • Unsolicited spam comments not relevant to the content of this blog.

  • Comments containing prophanity, excessive references to adult situations or statements urging others to engage in activities a reasonable person would consider to be illegal in most parts of the world.

  • Comments posted with the sole purpose of personally attacking a third party by way of this blog.

Yesterday evening, I was forced to censor a comment fitting within two of the categories just listed. I really hate censorship, and dislike doing it on my blog even more than experiencing it being done to me.

I have, thus, decided to devise a comment policy for Blind Access Journal, which comes down to the following:

  • Absolutely no spam will be tolerated. All comments are moderated as a way to prevent spam without the need to use visual verification (CAPTCHA). Spam is always ignored.

  • Extreme use of prophanity is unacceptable. Comments deemed to contain certain curse words or an excessive amount of cursing going beyond a “reasonable” community standard will be rejected outright.

  • Use of this blog to personally abuse or attack a third party is totally unacceptable. All comments meeting this description will be rejected outright.

  • This is a family safe blog. All comments of an explicit adult nature will be rejected.

This comment policy is going to be strictly enforced from now on. Such enforcement is currently on a “I know it when I see it” basis. Constructive comments should not be in any danger of violating this policy, so you can bet on having your comment approved if you keep this in mind. Please feel free to read The Blogger’s Guide to Comment Etiquette for some great ideas on how best to compose and post comments that are acceptable on most blogs. Blind Access Journal has a diverse readership among both the blind and the sighted. Let’s all continue to make certain it remains a welcoming place for everyone.

Mike Calvo: Separate But Equal is a Myth

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This is just too important and thought-provoking to exist only as a relatively obscure comment on a couple of blogs.

Separation by definition means that the separated parties will develop in response to different factors and sooner or later inequality will result. That is why Serotek has always focused its mission on accessibility anywhere. Our goal, within our sphere of influence, is to remove all barriers and eliminate accessibility or lack thereof as a reason for separation and discrimination. We believe accessibility is a right, not a privilege.

Jonathan Mosen of Freedom Scientific has said that adaptive technology is a business, not a religion, and we agree. In fact that very perspective has pushed us towards solutions that are increasingly mainstream. The reason is that when a company focuses on solutions only for the blind community, its direction is shaped by the economic forces that govern that community. That means that government funding has a disproportionate role in sale and distribution of its products. It means that the overall market does not have the volume potential that governs the consumer or business technology markets. It takes AT out of the price/performance curves that shape the market for all manner of digital toys and tools. Instead, the people who might benefit most from digital technology are stranded and forced to seek out subsidies to pay the exorbitant prices that AT producers have to charge. And these same AT producers, because their markets are so limited, do not have access to the capital mainstream technology companies can tap and thus tend to lag the industry in applying advances in technology or in bringing innovative, cost/performance improving changes to their product offering.

The capacity and adaptability of human beings is such that sight or lack thereof makes little real difference in the potential contribution a person can make to an organization in most functional roles. There are blind people who can match any sighted person in sales, accounting, product design, information technology, promotion, production, supervisory or executive management. There are highly capable blind janitors and CEOs; blind lawyers and accountants; investors and inventors; teachers and technicians. But a great many of those jobs are several times more difficult for a blind person to get and accomplish than a sighted person because the information that is essential to accomplish the job is not as accessible to the blind person. And that, we believe, is just plain wrong. That inability to access information is a barrier separating accomplished individuals from competing for jobs that they are otherwise qualified. Unfortunately, because our industry has developed and marketed adaptive technology to the “blind” community, it does a poor job of making it easy for businesses to make their information world accessible. Using conventional technology, the cost of making all corporate information accessible in a large corporation or government organization could easily be tens of millions of dollars. And for what? To give one person a chance to compete for one job? The economics as you can see push us to separation. And that keeps the blind community in its box.

At Serotek, our goal is to make that barrier go away. We don’t think it should cost very much to make the world accessible. We think the accessibility should be built in, available for those who need it to tap into it. Accessibility should be a simple “plug-in” that can be added to any application or database. It shouldn’t require an enormous investment in dollars by the organization making the information accessible and it shouldn’t require an enormous investment in training to the individual who wants to use the tool.

Five years ago when Serotek came on the scene, this kind of thinking was fantasy. Now it is well within the realm of possibility. We aren’t there yet, but we can see the day on the horizon when there won’t be an adaptive technology industry. The accessibility tools will always be built in. This kind of thinking requires that we see the blind community as part of the mainstream. It means that blind kids grow up side by side with sighted kids doing the same things. It means that asking whether or not someone is sighted is as taboo as asking their color, sex, or religion. It is not relevant information for most employment or other human activities. For Serotek that means we do think mainstream. We try to make our accessibility tools work for anyone. Our RIM and RAM products, for example, do not discriminate between blind and sighted trainers and technicians. The tools work equally well for either. As information access becomes increasingly mobile and ubiquitous, the need for hands free and eyes free access increases. Our System Access tool can browse the Internet or access an application for a sighted person unable to look at a screen just as well as it can for a blind person.

The Adaptive Technology industry is, we believe, on the cusp of a transition. We see the economics of accessibility changing as it becomes increasingly an important mainstream functionality. As that happens, the technology gap between the tools used by the mainstream community and those available to the blind, will go away and with the disappearance of that gap, the cost/performance factor for accessibility tools will catch-up to the mainstream. Think about it. That will change the entire culture of this industry and the change may not be much to the liking of those who have shaped their business around the traditional economics of AT. Some sacred cows of accessibility, such as Braille, may struggle to find a place in a world where anything stored or transmitted digitally is accessible. Now before I get tuns of email saying I don’t want to see Braille live, I just want to say that I believe that Braille is an important part of a blind person’s life however creating Braille from accessible content is what we should shoot for. I will reserve any other comments I have about Braille for another time.

Serotek is, as far as we know, the only significant AT company where the CEO, CTO, and the majority of employees are blind. Yet our focus is very much on making accessibility a tool for bringing together, not separating the blind community from the mainstream. Accessibility anywhere and everywhere we believe benefits all.

BlindConfidential: Blind Advocates and Executives

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In his post, Blind Advocates and Executives, Blind Christian states in part:

In Darrell’s post, he suggests that two thirds of all AT executives should also be users of the products.  Referring back to the post I did the other day about the need for multiple screen readers, I’m not sure that this would be possible in a relatively complex business like FS or Humanware.  There are zero accounting programs that work properly with a screen reader, thus a CFO and/or comptroller could not also be a blind person.  Virtually none of the human resources software packages work properly with screen readers, nor do most enterprise solutions, project management tools, drawing and diagram programs, etc.  Until the tools that executives need to use are made accessible, blind people are virtually locked out of many senior management jobs.  Thus, I think that two thirds of senior management might be an ideal but I doubt sophisticated investors like those that own Freedom Scientific and Humanware would trust blinks to do the jobs that their own products cannot provide access to.  

He makes an excellent point, but I must ask the critical question: Why aren’t those tools accessible? Yes. Part of the responsibility should rightly fall on the mainstream developers of the tools. All the same, accessibility is a meet-you-halfway process. The screen reader makers also need to step up to the plate and put some serious effort into improving the accessibility of some of this software. It is wonderful that our major blindness assistive technology vendors are working hard to attain and enhance access to Internet Explorer, Office 2007, Windows Vista and other high-demand mainstream products. Unfortunately, access to those programs just isn’t sufficient to perform the duties of most jobs. In addition to accounting, finance, project management and scientific applications, we also need our blindness assistive technology developers to be working hard on access to AJAX, Silverlight and other “Web 2.0” technologies. If we don’t start seeing access to these technologies coming very soon, we risk falling further and further behind. If it hasn’t already happened, we will soon see the day when blind people are losing their jobs due to something like AJAX!

BlindConfidential: Traveling Trials and Tribulations

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Absolutely love this post by Dena on Blind Confidential. Karen and I experience all these issues with air travel. Alas, I am also not sure how the problems can be easily resolved, though her suggestions sure are a great place to start. I wonder just how likely it is that anyone is going to listen until something really discriminatory happens that causes a blind person to become stranded and that person is actually willing to raise enough stink about it to prompt positive changes? See BlindConfidential: Traveling Trials and Tribulations

NPR, Others Challenge Online Royalties

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NPR, Others Challenge Online Royalties
May 31, 2007 – 3:12pm

By SETH SUTEL
AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – National Public Radio is teaming up with online radio
broadcasters to appeal new music royalties that they say would put smaller
operators out of business and force others to sharply scale back their
online music offerings.

NPR filed a notice with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington Wednesday
signaling that it would challenge the ruling by a panel of
copyright judges that would sharply raise the amount of royalties that NPR
stations and others
have to pay record companies for streaming music over the Internet. NPR
also said it was filing a request with the same court on Thursday along with
other Webcasters for an emergency stay blocking the adoption
of the new rates, which are set to go into effect July 15.

Several NPR member stations such as KCRW in Los Angeles have significant
online audiences for music programming, and would have to drastically
cut back those offerings under the new royalty rates, NPR says. NPR
spokeswoman Andi Sporkin, in a statement, called the decision by the
Copyright Royalty Board on May 1 "ill-conceived" and said it would cause
"irreparable
harm" to member stations by forcing them to cut back on streaming music
online.

In addition to NPR, smaller Webcasters and a group representing major
Internet companies including Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit and
RealNetworks Inc. were expected to join in the motion for a stay on
Thursday.

Separately, a bill seeking to block the new royalties and implement a
different payment system is gathering steam in Congress. The Internet
Radio Equality Act has 100 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and
has also
been introduced in the Senate, says Kurt Hanson, who operates a small online
radio company called AccuRadio. Hanson says the new royalty rates would put
smaller operators such as his out of business. Currently, smaller Webcasters
pay a portion of their revenues – usually from advertising – in royalties,
amounting to about 10 percent to 12 percent. The new rates would require
them to pay each time a song is heard by a listener, as well as minimum
amounts per channel.

The royalties in question only apply to digital transmission of music, such
as over the Internet and through satellite radio. Sirius Satellite Radio
Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. have their own agreements with the
music industry, but those are also being renegotiated. Normal radio
stations don't pay those royalties for regular broadcasts since radio
airplay is seen as having value for promoting sales of music CDs. Both
traditional radio stations as well as online broadcasters pay separate
royalties to the composers and publishers of music.

My Thoughts on the Relationship Between Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies, Consumers and the Blindness Assistive Technology Industry

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It seems to be the unfortunate truth, at least here in the United States of America, that there exists a relationship between the blindness assistive technology industry and the system of state Vocational Rehabilitation agencies that does not usually include the consumer. The Vocational Rehabilitation agency is the customer, so the industry listens by and large to the agency rather than the consumer receiving the products or services they need in order to live, learn and work. The assistive technology companies have no business incentive to do anything contrary to the desires of their high-dollar agency customers. The Vocational Rehabilitation agencies, with perhaps a handful of small exceptions, do not tend to listen to their clients and put their recommendations into practice. It is ultimately up to the consumers of assistive technology within the blind community to make a positive difference. Here are some thoughts on the hard decisions that need to be made and the things I believe need to happen in order to radically change the relationships between assistive technology companies, consumers and the agencies:

  • Consumers need to fully research and take full responsibility for their assistive technology acquisitions, whether that be accomplished through relatives, service organizations, Vocational Rehabilitation or their own financial resources. This research could be conducted through Tech Act centers, the International Braille and Technology Center and other blind community resources. We must exercise due diligence to determine which technologies will meet our needs and desires. Even when the funds being spent are not our own, we must do all we can to responsibly act as though it is our money on the line. After all, isn’t the purpose for obtaining and learning to use assistive technology to better our lives through education, business ownership or gainful employment?

  • Vocational Rehabilitation should ultimately help only with aspects of education and employment that impact the person’s disabilities. For example, VR should not fund the individual’s tuition, which is a cost shared by people with and without disabilities. VR should, however, fund expenses such as the hiring of readers and the purchase of duplicate books required in order to reproduce them in accessible formats. From an assistive technology point of view, VR should not purchase computers, but should purchase Braille displays, note takers, screen readers and other items specific to the needs of the blind or visually impaired consumer.

  • The ability to receive Vocational Rehabilitation services should be based largely on the severity of the disability and its relationship to their perceived functional limitations in employment rather than on income. Even people with high incomes combined with disabilities pay taxes into this system and, thus, should be able to receive the same service levels.

  • A lifetime amount of funding should be set aside for the individual receiving service to be spent by that individual in a responsible manner. The individual should do the spending themselves, which could be capped at a maximum annual rate. Once the funds have been spent, there should be no more funding granted to that individual, without exception. I am essentially advocating a voucher program. The Vocational Rehabilitation agencies could devise a comprehensive, vendor-neutral list of suppliers through which consumers could contact in order to directly spend their VR funds. If a Vocational Rehabilitation client wanted to purchase JAWS, they could contact Freedom Scientific or an authorized dealer to make that purchase against the remaining funds in their VR account. Similarly, they could contact a Code Factory dealer to directly use their funds to purchase MobileSpeak Pocket for their Smart Phone, or contact Serotek to acquire RIM for use on their new job. The bureaucracy would be totally removed.

  • The Vocational Rehabilitation counselor’s role should switch from one of ultimate control to one of advisor.

  • The success of counselors and other Vocational Rehabilitation “professionals” should be based on much more than just entry-level employment. For example, their case closure scores should be higher if they help a consumer earn a job that pays significantly above minimum wage. This would serve to encourage these professionals to do more than the bare minimum for their clients.

  • Consumers should also be held accountable. If a consumer is receiving assistance with college related expenses, but that consumer is consistently earning poor grades, then there should come a point where that college related funding is suspended.

  • Services ought not always be provided to the “lowest common denominator” of consumers. If a consumer is deemed incompetent (unable to manage his or her own affairs) by a qualified entity such as a court of law, then that person’s legal guardian should be involved in their Vocational Rehabilitation case. In all other situations, consumers should always be treated as competent adult individuals.

If some of these ideas were implemented, I’m rather certain I could guarantee the relationship between assistive technology companies, consumers and Vocational Rehabilitation agencies would change radically for the better. After all, despite the agencies, it would ultimately be the consumer making the purchasing decisions, thus compelling those companies to listen to us directly.

Keep The Books Talking

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Keep the Books Talking
Congress should fund the digitization of a vital audio library for the blind.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
A HALF-MILLION Americans stand in danger of losing their public library. They are
the nation’s blind, and their library is Talking Books, through which the National
Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped of the Library of Congress
(NLS) provides 500,000 Americans with free audio recordings of about as many books.
Unlike the “books on tape” that are sold at retail bookstores, these recordings are unabridged, extensive and diverse — and are designed for people who have no other
way of reading print.
Unfortunately, today’s Talking Books technology is ready to meet its maker. The program currently uses half-speed audiotapes that patrons listen to on special devices. These tape players, like the Talking Books record players that preceded them, are obsolete, and are no longer even being manufactured. To bring the program into the 21st century, the NLS hopes to digitize its entire library and create new players. It has spent 17 years researching, building and testing new products, and it is ready to manufacture a fully accessible flash-drive player. The Library of Congress has asked Congress
to appropriate about $76.4 million to produce the players and digitize thousands more books.
A forthcoming Government Accountability Office report, however, may derail the NLS’s plans. In a draft version of the report completed several weeks ago, the GAO faulted the NLS for not considering existing commercial products such as CD players and iPods instead of creating a new device. This sounds like a reasonable concern, given tales of exorbitant government spending on $792 doormats and $400 hammers. But creating special, noncommercial players is crucial to the continued existence of Talking Books.
Commercially available products, which often use visual screens and are not labeled in Braille, are not accessible to the visually impaired. More important, to comply with U.S. copyright law, Talking Books can record and distribute only audio books that cannot be played by commercial devices.
Should the GAO keep this misguided criticism in its final report, lawmakers should not be swayed by it. Instead, Congress should fully fund Talking Books’ digital upgrade, a project that will grant many disabled Americans the same literary access afforded to the sighted.
SOURCE: Washington Post

New Skype Version 3.2.0.158 Fixes Options Dialogue Accessibility for Most Screen Reader Users

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I am able to confirm, through my own testing as well as reports from others,
that the Options dialogue box in this new version of Skype is now fully
accessible with JAWS 8.0.2107 and System Access 2.3. The tree view of
option categories is not spoken at all in Window-Eyes 6.1 at this time.

Skype version 3.2.0.158 is now available and one place where you can
download it from is at www.majorgeeks.com/Skype_d4245.html.

Here are the changes in this version:

feature: Getting Started Wizard improvement
bugfix: Installer error 1603
bugfix: Sound setting not saved on Vista
bugfix: Accessibility problems with screen readers resolved
bugfix: Delay when playing notification sounds
bugfix: Incoming call is not sent to Voicemail if user rejects it
bugfix: On some rare cases conference call participants were muted
bugfix: Skype crashes sometimes when ending a call
bugfix: NTLM proxy authentication did not work
bugfix API:App2App transfers did not work as expected
Language files updated

Thoughts on Building the Blind Community and Integration with the Sighted

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Shortly after posting my thoughts on the current state of the blindness assistive technology industry, I received a telephone call from a concerned friend.  He expressed some worry about my assertion that I believed two thirds of the senior management of any blindness assistive technology company needed to be blind or visually impaired.  After thinking about this for awhile and losing some sleep (I really should be in bed at 11:00 at night if I am getting up at 4:30 in the morning) I finally decided to get up and post some hopefully clarifying thoughts on this subject.
 
My friend was worried that I might be taking a FUBU (for us, by us) attitude.  He cited a couple of examples involving the ways in which other minority groups have handled civil rights and other political issues in the past.  There are two possible extremes with which we can choose to handle our role in society as blind people.  
 
On one side, we could choose to deny our blindness as much as possible and fully integrate into the sighted world.  This approach would mean that blindness simply becomes another characteristic, such as hair color or one’s height.  From an assistive technology point of view, all blind people would utilize absolutely the bare minimum amount of assistive technology products to function in the sighted world.  We would still use Braille displays and screen readers, but we would not use specialized note taker or PDA type devices such as the BrailleNote, BrailleSense, Icon or PAC Mate.  Some who lean more in this direction would say these specialized devices represent part of the “blind ghetto” mentality.  Instead, we would all be using Symbian or Windows Mobile based products running screen readers like MobileSpeak Pocket, PocketHal or Talks.  I dare to suspect that we would also do as little agitation for accessibility as possible, choosing instead to accept greater dependence on sighted readers and other less effective work arounds for the sake of getting along with the sighted.  
 
On the opposite extreme, we could choose to stay only within our small blind community, focusing almost exclusively on our blindness as a severe handicap that constantly keeps us down and out.  This approach would tend to portray the blind as victims in constant need of care and pity for their limited, tragic lives.  From an assistive technology viewpoint, focus would be placed on devising specialized, simplified user interfaces blind people could use to accomplish the small number of jobs deemed blind friendly enough to be made accessible.  For those few blind people who even reached the point where a note taker or PDA type device were deemed necessary, products like the BrailleNote and BrailleSense would be the exclusive domain of the blind, with no need for the ability to run any third party software not already built into the product.  Even the Icon and PAC Mate wouldn’t completely meet this pure focus on blindness, since they involve a more direct connection with the device’s underlying operating system and the use of numerous third party programs to perform important tasks.  Taking this extreme, there would also be little need for accessibility evangelism, since we would be sheltered in our own little world, far away from the one in which the sighted live and work.
 
Obviously, neither of these two extremes is desirable for most blind people.  We need to find a middle ground.  I feel it is, indeed, vital that we grow and nurture a strong, healthy blind community.  At the same time, we must live and work with our sighted peers, doing our part to make our own accomodations when it is at all practical and insisting on equal accessibility when that is the only way we can participate on equal terms.  From an assistive technology point of view, we must be granted the ability to choose from a plethora of products and services manufactured by dynamic, innovative companies that listen to our input and turn what we have to say with our dollars and words into even better products and services.  Since I have been using note takers as an example, let’s complete that thread.  Blind people need to be able to choose between a more specialized device like the BrailleNote, a middle of the road solution like the PAC Mate or a device used by the fully sighted such as a Nokia 6682, a Black Jack or other PDA or Smart Phone running the Symbian or Windows Mobile operating system adapted with a screen reader like Talks or MobileSpeak Pocket.  It is conceivable that a blind person might start with a BrailleSense and graduate to a Windows Mobile device once their technical skills have improved. 
 
Our blind community might be said to exist as a kind of nation.  Though we are separate from the sighted in some respects, we must grow, nurture and maintain positive diplomatic relations with our sighted counterparts.  When a seemingly intractible accessibility issue crops up, we may need to occasionally launch initiatives, special operations or maybe even outright war with a very small segment of the sighted population until we can arrive at a satisfactory resolution that fairly meets the needs of all involved parties.  We must never be quick to resort to adversarial means, but we all must be ready, willing and able to insist on the accessibility and reasonable accomodations we must have in order to fully participate in the world around us on terms of equality with the sighted.
 
It is highly likely that well under 10 percent of the sighted population can be said to inherently understand our needs as a diverse blind community.  It is also critical that the decision makers within the companies that provide us with the products and services on which we rely in order to learn, live and work in society understand our needs so they will have the best possible chance of delivering solutions that really meet our needs out here in the real world.  For this reason, I feel it is vital that a majority of a blindness assistive technology company’s senior management and, preferrably, its entire staff be blind or visually impaired.  Please understand that I am saying that a majority should represent our population.  I am not saying that representation must be 100 percent.  There are many examples of sighted people who have made momentus contributions to the blindness assistive technology industry.  Those people should be honored and encouraged by all means to continue their participation with gratitude from the blind community.  Further, more blind and sighted people should be encouraged to develop the necessary aptitudes to create the innovative devices and software we will need for an ever increasingly dynamic technology future.
 
Finally, what I think I am really saying here is, let’s all work cooperatively together as a blind community and in the blindness assistive technology industry to constructively take actions that will result in our increased ability to participate in the sighted world around us!  Pointless litigation between companies in this small industry does not, by any stretch of the imagination, do anything to promote this critical goal. 
 
Darrell Shandrow – Accessibility Evangelist
Visit http://www.SaveSerotek.org and ask Freedom Scientific to stop suing!
Information should be accessible to us without need of translation by another person.