Blind Access Journal

Check out this brief summary of the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference where many new friends were made in the podcasting community. Thanks go especially to Allison, Steve and all the others who have made a lot of potential new opportunities to evangelize accessibility possible!

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Shownotes

Apologies for the brief shownotes. Much more was actually covered, so listen!

Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code #275 on the Licensed Music Crackdown

From the not at all surprised department: the big boys at RIAA and similar licensing organizations are trying to crash the party and suck out all the fun… We won’t let ’em; Podsafe music to the rescue!

Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference

This conference is being held in Ontario, California on Friday, November 11 and Saturday, November 12. I’ll be there!

Natalie Brown

Listen to her song entitled Confused at the end of this episode of the podcast.

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Blind Access Journal was completely unavailable for approximately thirty hours from Sunday afternoon through Monday evening due to a total outage of UltraHost, the web hosting provider on which we rely. I received the following note from Jeff, the owner of UltraHost, on Monday in response to my status request on resolution of the ongoing outage.

From: Jeff – The Ultra Guy

To: Darrell Shandrow

Subject: Re: Status of outage?

Hello Darrell, you wrote:

We’re just writing to ask for an update on the UltraHost outage that began yesterday afternoon. Thanks.

The server hosting your site was compromised. I had to reload the operating system, reconfigure the server and restore all user accounts from backups.
It has taken me all day, but all user accounts have now been restored.
I apologize for the downtime and any inconvenience it has caused. Fortunately, this is an unusual situation.

Jeff

UltraHost.US Customer Care

This morning, following last night’s resolution of the outage, I sent him this note:

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the response and the ultimate resolution to the issues. I am, quite honestly, concerned with both the length of the outage and the lack of proactive
communication concerning the cause of the problems and status of resolution. Frankly, the timing of this long outage couldn’t have been worse as I am
preparing for the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference next weekend. I was beginning to wonder if I would need to switch to another host very
quickly or face the potential of going to a conference to promote accessibility while having blindaccessjournal.com and shandrow.com, the two domains that
make up the blog and podcast, hard down during the event and for awhile afterwards. At the same time, I am impressed at the completeness of restoration.
I expected to have to do a lot more work in order to bring everything back to a state of relative normalcy, but, in fact, almost none was required.
Could you please give us some details as to what steps have been taken to help insure the security breach is not repeated?

Thanks.

It has become apparent to me that it is virtually impossible for a one man shop to meet my web hosting needs with the reliability I must have in order to effectively spread the message of accessibility evangelism around the world. Sadly, I must say, I am open to all recommendations for good web hosting companies that provide a similar level of functionality as UltraHost along with lots of bandwidth and file storage space for the blog and podcast. Thank you all for any feedback you are able to give.

Jeff Bishop of The Desert Skies has been working with Amazon this morning. It seems the accessibility issue may be a side effect of a problem the company considers to be serious, thus a team of developers has already begun work on a prompt resolution.

Hello Everyone,

This has now been given very high priority status at Amazon and a team is on it.

I have an Amazon update. OK, I just spoke with Amazon.com and got a ticket submitted to their development team. We did quite a bit of diagnosing on this issue and I will report when I hear more. The developer will call me or contact me via email sometime next week once he hears more on the problem/resolution. You are taken to a gift central web site it seems, and this is a new piece of functionality rolled out this weekend by Amazon.

Jeff

A reliable source tells us that the launch of the new Gift Central functionality may have been premature and that this issue was certainly not intended. Amazon representatives reported to our source that they will resolve the problem and appreciated our bringing the matter to their prompt attention. Stay tuned for late breaking news on this situation as it continues to develop.

We just received and verified some extremely disturbing news on the inaccessibility front. It seems Amazon.com has given the blind a rather unwelcome present for the Holiday Season in the form of yet another of the ever increasing “No Blind People Allowed” signs. Blind users of the JAWS screen reader developed by Freedom Scientific, the most widely used screen reader in the world, are apparently no longer allowed to perform essential shopping tasks such as reviewing product information on the web site. Though Amazon does offer a separate accessibility site, it provides a level of functionality that is far, far inferior to that found on their home page.

The letter below, provided by a highly competent user of the JAWS screen reader, serves to illustrate the difficulties. It is absolutely critical that everyone who is blind or cares about what happens to the blind write Amazon concerning this matter, asking and insisting that they work with the blind community to correct the situation promptly. Make no mistake, this issue and others like it are not simply “frustrations” but are serious, often intractible challenges to our ability to participate in society. Inaccessibility in an online store is tantamount to walking into a brick-and-mortar store and being told to get lost because you are of the wrong ethnicity. The currently imposed state of affairs represents an example of yet another “No Blind People Allowed” sign we must challenge at every possible opportunity.

Hi folks

From the looks of things here, Amazon.com, one of my favorite sites on the net, no longer works with JAWS 7.0. You click on a link to take you to the information page for a specific product, but instead you are taken to a page to buy a gift certificate. From what I’m told, they made some kind of visual change to the site using javascript. It looks more visually pleasing, but JAWS doesn’t display the page properly. so you press enter on a link thinking you’ll land on one thing but you land on another. So I’m going to call the customer service line on Monday because even i, a pretty compident JAWS user, couldn’t find the contact us link. Well, i found the link but not the right page. Really frustrating. If anyone else has had a similar problem, or if you give the site a try and experience the same problem, I’d like to know. This way i’ll have as much information as possible when I make my call.

Last month, The information technology department at the state of Massachusetts announced it would soon initiate a move to the use of open source Office applications and the associated Open Document Format as the standard of choice for conducting state business. Disability related organizations, including the National Federation of the Blind, have gone on record in opposition to this move due to the lack of accessibility features found in applications like Open Office and Star Office as compared to the reasonable levels of accessibility currently found in Microsoft Office when used with screen readers like JAWS and Window-Eyes. Read The Middle Click: An Open Letter to the Disabled of Massachusetts, review the comment I submitted in response and let me know your thoughts.

Thank you for the well thought out open letter. As a blind person, I have lost numerous employment opportunities due to inaccessible technology. I fear this loss of opportunity and its associated consequences will only get a lot worse before they ever start to get any better. Inaccessibility is all about the consequences. In a downsized future, the very lives of the blind and others with disabilities may be at stake. I absolutely love open source software, using a number of such applications on a daily basis. All the same, I don’t much care these days whether the software involved is commercial or open source, so long as it is reasonably accessible and ongoing development is underway to improve its accessibility as the software evolves. Microsoft Office is mostly accessible right now. Years of testing and ongoing development have been put into this accessibility. It works with the JAWS and Window-Eyes screen readers I must use in order to learn, do my job, take care of my personal finances and accomplish all of my computing tasks right now, not at some point in the future. The analogy of the disabled to an abused wife is, sadly, not at all accurate. Though it is extremely difficult for a wife to leave her abusive husband, it can, ultimately, be done if she has the fortitude. In contrast, fortitude or not, we can’t simply walk away from our disabilities. We can and must, however, do all we can to reduce the artificially imposed accessibility barriers, what I like to call the “No Blind People Allowed” signs, that serve to hold us down and out of participation in society on terms of equality with our sighted peers. Though I love the concept and implementation of the open source community, I must, sadly, throw in my lot with Microsoft on this one for the sake of the ability of my blind brothers and sisters in Massachusetts to obtain and retain their rightful status as gainfully employed human beings.

Thanks to the new Comment Moderation feature, it is now possible to safely resume the posting of comments to Blind Access Journal! Each comment will be submitted for approval by the moderator before being published for all to see. Please, do comment away! Enjoy.

Listen to The Desert Skies tonight on ACB Radio Interactive where Jeff Bishop will be spinning a triple-play of Natalie Brown’s excellent, podsafe music. The show is on between 6:00 and 8:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, that’s 02:00 to 04:00 UTC. Don’t miss it!

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At a critical moment, Rosa Parks made the decision to stand up for what was right by not simply giving up her seat on a bus to a white person. This event helped to spark a seachange in American society that has served to enable African-Americans to fully participate in all that the USA has to offer all its citizens. As I boarded the Red Line to work this morning, I learned that the name of the route has temporarily been changed to the Rosa Parks Line in her honor as a tribute to her life and all she did for the Civil Rights Movement. The Mayor of Tempe was riding the bus earlier in the morning, and some flowers were placed in the front seat, just behind the driver.

The tributes to Rosa Parks remind me that we, too, must not simply be forced to get up and step aside while the rest of society passes us by on an ever increasing pace. We must struggle against discrimination and segregation and for the acceptance and accessibility we must have in order to participate in society. Will we, the blind, ultimately stand up for what is right, or will we get up and step aside? The decision is up to each of us. Let’s make the right one and follow the hard, winding road toward a better, more inclusive future for the blind!

As we struggle for our right to survive in an increasingly inaccessible digital world, the following quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to mind:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

This quote is an excellent reminder that we all must speak up when it comes to advocating for the accessibility we need in order to participate in the world around us on terms of equality with our sighted peers. Equal accessibility will not happen automatically, and industry won’t pay attention if only a small portion of the entire blind community’s population advocates. We must all hold our weight to evangelize accessibility, to get the word out to the world that we are capable human beings deserving of equal consideration and reasonable accomodation in all areas of life.