Kelly's Corner

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Immmportant to Comment on Proposed ADA Regulation Updates

The American Foundation for the Blind has an important and thoughtful alert talking about the need for the public to comment on proposed updates to the regulations for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As you would expect, the alert highlights issues of interest to people who are blind or have low vision. The deadline for comments is August 18. Take a read of the alert and follow the instructions for commenting.

Music From Dolores Park

Aimee and I were in San Francisco last weekend for a short break visiting a good friend. On Sunday the three of us opted to head out to the city with no real agenda beyond visiting Mission Dolores and then to see where Bay area transit and our feet would take us.

As we left the mission we started hearing some sort of announcements coming from loud speakers down the street. I'm drawn to these kinds of public sounds I guess because there's a part of me that's always curious about what's going on.

As it turned out, this happened to be an annual event from the San Francisco Symphony where a free outdoor concert is put on in Dolores Park. What a great serendipitous discovery and quite the pleasant afternoon.

The first half of the concert featured a trumpet soloist by the name of Alison Balsom. Here's a bit of the music we heard that afternoon.

I'm definitely going to have to hear more of this artist. I won't claim to be any kind of expert but I really enjoyed Balsom's interpretation on the music and found the way she coaxed a softer sound out of the trumpet particularly intriguing. You always hear the big bold brassy sounds from trumpet players with the rapid flourishes and such and Balsom handled those smoothly. I was really impressed with the way she softened the trumpet's sound at times though and I'd like to hear more of her work.

Madison, WI Is A Pricy Flight

Sometimes what the news has to say is no secret. I caught a news article in several arenas lately talking about how expensive it is to fly to Madison, Wisconsin. Surprise me not!

When returning to Wisconsin, Madison is our first choice if at all possible because the city was once home and is closer to relatives. But according to this article, flying to Madison is the third most expensive city one can fly to in the U.S.

The Dane County Regional Airport had the nation's third-highest average daily airfare among the top 100 airports during the first quarter of 2008, according to a report this week by the federal Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The Madison airport, which ranks 98th based on the volume of originating passengers, had an average daily fare of $454.91, which also was more than $100 higher than average fares at the competing Milwaukee and Chicago O'Hare airports. The average daily fare at all of the 100 largest airports was $332.

TAG, Try It

The folks over at All inPlay have another fun game for you to try. TAG, short for The Anagram Game, is currently a free public beta version where you can challenge your word making abilities against folks from around the net. Links to download and play the game along with instructions and mailing list subscription info are available at http://www.allinplay.com/games/beta.php.

Game play is straight forward after you download and install the 1.7 meg software. Choose a table from All inPlay's web page and the game itself launches. You play with others from around the net and are given 20 seconds to review the phrase for that game. You are then told to begin making words and hear the point total for each word you make. As with other All inPlay games, you can quickly check how others in the game are doing and get some fun sounds as you play. There are various difficulty levels and levels of social chat available from the game tables. There's even an option to challenge yourself and get familiar with how the game works. I found the game entertaining and a fun challenge during the time I took it for a test drive.

A Summer Night of Music with a Hike Tossed In

Well, I'm not sure if 50 degrees and winds of something between 10 and 20 MPH qualify as summer, but we took in a summer evening of music on a bit of a road trip to see Crosby Stills and Nash. We were unable to get tickets to the local version of the show, so opted to drive about three hours away to see the group's summer tour at the Maryhill Winery.

Crosby Stills and Nash or the other variation of the group, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, is one of my favorite musical groups. The music's been a part of the fabric of society for decades and ranges from old classics that we can all sing by heart to some of the best political protest music of this era.

It was eight years ago that we saw CSNY in their Y2K tour in Portland. Hands down of the numerous concerts I've been to, that show was the top. It was passionate, filled with great music and there was an energy in the Rose Garden that you could feel during the full show. CSNY have some of the best harmonizing going in music and their musicianship is incredible.

I mention the older tour because had last evening been my first experience seeing CSN live, I think I would have been disappointed. The show wasn't bad, but unlike the show from eight years ago, the group's age showed at times. Harmonies were a bit off, especially on the first number of each set and the event had more of a feeling of nostalgia as much as anything else. The Seattle Times ran a review from the concert in Seattle and it strikes pretty close to what I'd say about the one we saw.

The Maryhill winery itself seems like it could be a nice place for a summer concert. The weather when we went was chilly and windy but the setting itself by the Columbia River was pleasant. It offers an amphitheater with a little more than 1,000 reserved seats with hill seating for a few more thousand. Overall acoustics at the venue are reasonable for an outdoor facility but when there's a strong breeze, sound from the stage gets a bit wavy.

On the way home we stopped off at the Boulder Creek National Recreation Trail for a bit of a hike. It was a great hike along the edge of a creek down to a cave that's thousands of years old. The path winds through a forest and the sound of the wind through the pines and the smells and sounds of the forest remind me how much beauty Washington has to offer.

I enjoy these sorts of hikes also because they are a great way to exercise mobility skills. There's nothing like walking along a trail with a cliff on the edge to heighten you're the attention you pay to where you are walking. This trail offered many twists and turns and moderate hills and it was especially nice to be able to handle the hike with success with some of the vestibular issues I've been working on for the past year.

Addressing a Web Page

I work in the software industry. I also have a large circle of people who rely on me for computer support. I'm occasionally reminded of the things I take for granted as common knowledge that really do not fit that category.

One of these is the method people use to navigate the web. For me, ctrl+o or alt+d and the web address of choice are second nature when web surfing. Yet I encounter numerous people with a different surfing method.

Tonight for example during a telephone support call, I learned that one person's navigation strategy involved closing the browser after reading each web page. When asked why this method was used, the person replied, "I thought that's how it worked."

I really wonder how many other people think this. We need to do better in software design to help people understand even these basic uses. Here's hoping the person I spoke with tonight, who now knows how to get to this blog, remembers how the address bar works.

Trying to Connect the Dots at Pandora

Pandora, available at http://www.pandora.com, is one of the more innovative music services I've found on the web. The basic premise behind the service is that there's a genealogy to music. A FAQ for the service says in part:

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you'll love.

It's powered by the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken, the Music Genome Project: a crazy project started back in early 2000 to capture the complex musical DNA of songs using a large team of highly-trained musicians.

From a musical perspective my experience with Pandora has been nothing less than outstanding. I've discovered countless new artists and music since I started using Pandora more than a year ago. It is the first online music service I've actually subscribed to as the $36-a-year fee to stream Pandora through my Squeezebox has been well worth the cost.

The web version of Pandora uses Adobe's Flash technology. The Pandora help pages acknowledge that this can cause some problems for screen readers and give some hints about working around many of the issues. Perhaps the biggest hint is to use http://www.pandora.com/backstage to bypass some of the Flash. However, account creation, a one time sign in per computer where you want to use Pandora and things like station deletion are not available from this interface. Pandora support was helpful in the sense that they offered to assist me by phone with account creation and such which was a step in the right direction.

Still, I've used examples of very accessible Flash and started to engage Pandora support in a discussion around making the Flash interface work with screen readers. This is where the disconnect comes in.

Web accessibility frequently requires at least three things to happen to be successful. First off the base technology being used needs to support accessibility. Second, screen readers and other assistive technology must support whatever accessibility solution the given technology is using. Finally, web sites using the technology in question must use whatever accessibility mechanisms the technology requires.

Anyone familiar with Flash accessibility likely knows that this pattern is what's had to happen for Flash to be usable. We started with no accessible Flash, accessibility support in the form of support for Microsoft Active Accessibility was added, screen readers added support for Flash and now at least some web sites are using Flash to support more accessibility. Adobe has a good resource center on Flash accessibility at http://www.adobe.com/resources/accessibility/flash8/.

The challenge with Pandora is that they seem unaware of the ability to make Flash accessible. Each time I interact with their support team, I'm told to urge Adobe to enhance Flash to support accessibility. Here's one example of a reply from their customer service team.

You are correct-- many features within Pandora such as deleting a station, do indeed require the Flash interface. It's a tough balance to find a universal platform, like Flash, that will provide the experience many folks have come to expect from a modern website, while maintaining some level of functionality for folks using screen readers. Ultimately, we hope that the developers of Flash (the Adobe corporation) will incorporate more technology in the future to make Flash accessible for screen readers and similar tools. Feel free to write to them encouraging this kind of development work.

I've replied on several occasions alerting the folks at Pandora about Flash accessibility but never hear back from that point. Hopefully one of these times some progress will happen. I'm going to try leaving this same feedback on one of their blog posts. I hope other Pandora listeners will urge the company to embrace accessible Flash as well.

Accessible Credit Reports

Previously I blogged about the inaccessibility of the legally mandated annual credit reports that consumers are entitled to from the various credit reporting services. I'm pleased to report that progress has been made in this area and we should be able to obtain accessible credit reports by the end of October of this year.

Washington, D.C. (April 23, 2008) – The nation's three major consumer credit reporting companies today unveiled a comprehensive program to provide improved access to important credit information for people who are blind or visually impaired. The initiative, crafted with the American Council of the Blind, its California affiliate and several individual members of the blind community, will help protect the credit information of individuals who cannot read a standard print credit report.

Under the plan announced today, Equifax (NYSE: EFX), Experian (EXPN.L), and TransUnion have begun working to make online credit reports and related information accessible through their jointly operated website, AnnualCreditReport.com, the official site to help consumers obtain free credit reports. Accessible credit reports for people with visual impairments will be available online by October 31 of this year. By the end of the year, the companies will also make credit reports available in Braille and other formats at no charge to qualified individuals who cannot access print information.

Dinner, Ice Cream and Reality TV

Living in the Seattle area for me is often a mixture of old and new. Old because my father lived in the city of Seattle as a child and frequently speaks of favorite places with fondness. Old too because as a youth of 11, I visited Seattle with part of my family on a vacation to the area. Little did I know that some 22 years later I'd make my home here.

The new of Seattle comes in large part from the fact that, unlike my father, I live outside the Seattle city proper in the city of Redmond. This means that there are still many times when an evening out involves going to all new locations in the city.

Last evening was one of those adventures of discovery to the West Seattle area for dinner and a play at a small local theater. The night was made especially nice because dinner and the play were both better than expected. Then too, there was some ice cream tossed in for good measure so how can one go wrong?

The evening started off with dinner at the Elliott Bay Brewery Pub. While the menu is largely the typical pub grub, I'd have to say that Elliott Bay is well above average in the pub category of restaurants. Service was also topnotch. I also liked the fact that tables were spacious and roomy. There's nothing worse than eating at a restaurant feeling like you are sharing your table with guests at the surrounding tables because the establishment is cramming too many diners into a cramped location.

After dinner we stopped off for some ice cream at the Husky Deli. This is by any measure a Seattle institution famous for ice cream that's been in business since 1932. I'll confess to not having heard of it before but Aimee tells me my father always speaks glowingly of it and a quick phone call to him asking if he could guess where I was and a mention of Seattle and ice cream confirmed this fact. Last evening might have been my first visit, but I'm sure it will not be my last. The deli offers a wide assortment of flavors, all made locally at the deli. The Swiss Chocolate orange comes with my personal recommendation and at $2 for a cone the price is more than reasonable.

There's a video of how the ice cream's made available. If you are using a screen reader, activate the Flash button named 0 to start the video.

After a stroll around the West Seattle neighborhood, we headed over to the ArtsWest theater to attend a performance of "The Dead Guy".

The play was billed as a comedic look at reality TV where for a week's worth of fun and one million dollars a contestant agrees to let the audience choose the method of his death. My brother Joel's passing is still pretty raw for me so I wasn't entirely certain how I'd react to the play because there's a part of me that knows better than ever that death is no laughing matter. Still, I'm somewhat of a student of the media and the general plot of the play appealed to me. I also suspect that in some corners of the media industry the ideas from this play are more than just satire.

The ArtsWest theater was a nice discovery by itself. It is a small 149 seat intimate theater where the front row is less than two feet from the non-elevated thrust stage. I really enjoy productions in these types of theaters because of the real sense of connection you feel with the performance. That level of intimacy is simply not possible in larger theaters and no matter the quality of the production, the emotional impact suffers.

For me "The Dead Guy" didn't entirely work. Sometimes the sum of the parts is not better than any individual item and for me this was one such case. The theater was good, the performance from the actors strong and some of the ideas in the play's dialog thought provoking. Yet the end experience has left me feeling like there was some untapped potential just waiting to be drawn out.

Action in the play bounced between the comedic and the maudlin with bouts of preachiness tossed in as well. As an example early in the play the main character attempts to reconcile with a girlfriend only to be rebuffed with a humorous line about her not wanting to be a widow at 21. Yet by play's end, the two have found love which is consummated by her bringing the man whose death is less than 15 minutes away a bakery treat he cherished from his youth. Unfortunately none of the emotions were delved into enough to leave an overall lasting impression much beyond the closure of the theater's exit door. Then, perhaps that was in part the intent of the playright as reality TV seems to be in and endless race to push the boundary of believability with events that are really more and more unreal.

Technology Accessibility Still Needs Major Work

This article in Computer World is pretty accurate with respect to where accessibility stands today for individuals who are blind. While I think the writer's emphasis on the shortcomings of Narrator creates somewhat of a false impression of how full screen readers work, the main themes of the article are pretty accurate. People who are blind still have to work way too hard to use computing technology and far too often one upgrade or web site change can set things back. There are also far too many instances of blocking accessibility issues encountered almost daily.

The comments are also worth a read.

The article has also been making the rounds at Slashdot.

Report on Proposed Updates To Section 508 Standards Available

As some may know, a committee of folks from throughout the accessibility arena has been working on a report that recommends changes to the section 508 U.S. federal standards around accessibility. The report was recently made available. A news release talking about the report is available at http://www.access-board.gov/news/teitac-report.htm.

The report itself is at http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/refresh/report/. Details on the update process are available at http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/update-index.htm. I'd encourage anyone with an interest in accessibility to get familiar with this report and to watch for updates from the access board and opportunities to comment on proposed updates to Section 508.

IE8 Beta 1 Available

With apologies to anyone who's already read this on my Webwatch e-mail list, I wanted to mention that beta 1 of Internet Explorer 8 is available. This is the product I work on at Microsoft so it is always nice when something I work on is available publicly.

I know blog readers sometimes try beta releases from different companies. I wanted to give folks an alert about IE8 beta 1 should you opt to take it for a test spin. We are still working through some issues with various screen readers, including JAWS, Window-Eyes and ZoomText. Sso if you install the IE beta, please pay attention to the release notes.

The release notes talk about some key problems with the shipping versions of several products where web content will not be available and the IE menus will not speak. There are two reg keys detailed in the release notes you can use to work around these issues but if you do not, IE will seem extremely broken.

The blog announcement talking about IE8 beta 1 is at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/05/internet-explorer-8-beta-1-for-developers-now-available.aspx

The release notes are at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787

Although it isn't mentioned in the blog post, IE8 beta 1 contains Microsoft's initial support for Web ARIA. If you are not familiar with ARIA, it is a way to make complex web applications more accessible and do things like assign roles we are familiar with such as trees, menus and more to HTML elements. This is a very simplified example. Personally I think ARIA holds a lot of potential to make the web more functional for screen reading users. You can learn more at:

ARIA Best Practices - http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/

ARIA Working Draft - http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-aria-20080204/

If you opt to try the IE8 beta and have feedback/bugs/issues please feel free to ping me. We definitely want to know what doesn't work for the ways you want to use IE. We also have a blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/05/ie8-beta-feedback.aspx that details the other feedback mechanisms for the beta.

By the way, we still have an open test position to help us with accessibility testing across the product. The link for more details on that position is at http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=EDC85083-8FD9-4E16-BE2B-1B736C30E3AC&start=1&interval=10&SortCol=DatePosted. If that link doesn't work for you use job code 186473 and search US jobs off of http;//Microsoft.com/careers.

New Microsoft Accessibility Blog

Just a short blog update to let folks know that Microsoft has started a new Accessibility Blog. Subscribe to it in your RSS reader of choice at http://blogs.msdn.com/accessibility/rss.xml.

Joel Brian Ford, R.I.P. 1969-2008

On January 16, 2008 my youngest brother Joel unexpectedly passed away. If accessibility in the web world means we have access to more information, then I guess it means we have access to more sadness because reading my baby brother's obituary for myself has been part of the most profoundly sad experience of my life.

These words were read at Joel's funeral and I share them here knowing that Joel is and always will be with us in spirit.

Joel,

Days and nights of our youth were filled with endless hours of play. In summer baseball, swimming, camping in the backyard and countless adventures to the store where fifty cents made us feel like millionaires. Spring and fall were witness to the weather's change but the love of two boys growing and learning together remained the same. Football, Halloween candy hunts, roof top jumping to the leaves piled so high. Never mind that dad said to stop, it was an adventure that was waiting to be experienced.

In Your teenage years I marveled at your basketball prowess. So many championships, so much success for you.

As we grew our adventures changed. How exciting as two young people to have some pocket change and experience together the excitement of video games. Like all you put your mind to in life, you were never content to just play the newest game. You climbed the mountain and conquered each opportunity that was put before you.

My first job. My first bicycle. Bent handle bars, body over the hood of a car. How much more memorable the experience when you didn't let me know about that parked car. The humor and laughter ring true even today. How much more memorable the experience than just two boys out for a bike ride. As the officials of your beloved basketball would say ,"no harm no foul."

Like the two roads in Frost's The Road less Travelled, our paths diverged at times. What a joy to have them connect again in Portland, The Rose City. You then a father and how wonderful to see the pride and joy you took in building a world for your angelic Jessica.

As adults it was back to the games of our youth. Baseball and cookouts in the backyard, adventures to Seattle to watch the Mariners. The joy of rediscovery of the brother of my youth.

Scientists tell us that in the universe for every action there's an equal an opposite reaction. Some of that "book learning" of mine, I know. My heart hurts so much but I know it is only because the equal and opposite reaction is the joy you brought to so many in this world.

I love you my brother. I love the strength of conviction you showed in all you did. Your beliefs were those of your own and you stood strong for what you believed was right.

Father, brother, son, friend. Four words I know but these say so much and you lived up to all of them. You were and always will be Joel, a father to Jessica, a brother to myself and many others and a friend to so many more and most importantly a son to mom and dad.

Some brotherly advice too my dear Joel. Heaven's your new home but please give God a break before you start telling him how to run the joint. I know you can do it better so go easy on the guy.

I love you my brother. Rest in peace.

Kelly