Early Voting: Accessibility Experiences of 3 Blind Americans

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Shownotes

Steve, Karen and I all participated in early voting. While Steve was afforded an accessible, secret ballot, Karen and I certainly were not. Listen to our podcast to hear what happened and learn how you may be able to avoid issues on Election Day. We thank Steve Holmes for taking some of his valuable time to share his accessible voting experience.

If you find that you are unable to cast your vote independently on Election Day, call the following telephone numbers right away:

  • Your local County Recorder’s office.

  • Your state’s Secretary of State’s office.

  • Election Protection Coalition at 1-866-687-8683.

  • Department of Justice at 1-800-253-3931.

  • NFB HAVA National Compliance Hotline at 877-632-1940.

As Americans, it is our patriotic duty and obligation to participate in the democratic process through voting. It is our expectation and hope that all Americans who read this blog and listen to this podcast will have cast an absentee vote, voted early or will vote on Election Day, November 7.

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Avoiding Microsoft’s Upcoming Automatic Internet Explorer 7.0 Update

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Since the current versions of much of our assistive technology do not yet fully support Internet Explorer 7.0, most blind and visually impaired users may want to avoid installing the browser upgrade at this time. See IEBlog : IE7 to be distributed via Automatic Updates! for more details on Microsoft’s plans for providing this update.

In the meantime, follow these steps to avoid the automatic update on Windows 2000, 2003 or XP:

  1. Click the Start button.

  2. Point to Settings and choose Control Panel.

  3. Choose Automatic Updates.

  4. The default setting is to automatically update without prompting. Select one of the following options instead:

    • Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.

    • Notify me but don’t automatically download or install them.

  5. Click OK.

Note: You will now be notified before any updates are installed. Watch the list and uncheck Internet Explorer 7 when it appears.

VIP Conduit Now Compatible with Internet Explorer 7.0

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This important information is provided by Parker from VIP Conduit concerning the availability of an updated voice chat client that is compatible with Internet Explorer 7.0.

If you have installed Internet Explorer 7 and can’t access the chat rooms, you need to download and install the latest version of the client.  It was updated sometime back but the download was not forced. Just click on the download the Communicator link on the rooms page to obtain a version of the client that will function properly with Internet Explorer 7.0.

Beware: Internet Explorer 7.0 Not Fully Supported By Some Current Screen Readers

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Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7.0 this morning, but you may not want to jump on the banwagon yet. It is known to work well with Window-Eyes 5.5, but is not fully supported by other current screen readers such as Freedom Box System Access and JAWS 7.1. It will be necessary to await an upcoming release of an upgrade of these screen readers for Internet Explorer 7 support. In some cases, full screen reader support for Internet Explorer 7 is going to require payment of an upgrade fee if the user does not hold an active Software Maintenance Agreement with the vendor. Before downloading and installing Internet Explorer 7, please, do yourself a favor and ask your screen reader maker if they fully support the latest version of this web browser before plunging ahead. Taking this prudent step may prevent a lot of unnecessary grief.

BlogLines Officially Announces Accessibility Improvements

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We thank the developers of BlogLines for once again restoring access to the service to us. The following announcement now appears on the BlogLines home page.

We believe in providing the best service for each individual. To that end, we recently released some changes to the tree in the left pane to make things a bit easier on those with visual impairments.

The folder toggle icons now feature an alt tag which dynamically changes, letting a screen reader know the state of a folder. In addition, we changed the markup for folder labels, making it easier to navigate within the tree.

Last, a special thanks to Darrell Shandrow and Jeff Bishop for their help with the new tree.

– The Bloglines Team