BlindConfidential

It's Been Fun

2009-05-20T09:20:00.001-05:00

Over the past few months, I have received a bunch of private email
asking where BC was hanging out and when we could expect him to
return. Well, after a long stay away from writing articles for this
blog, BC has decided to move on and let BlindConfidential fade away
into blinkosphere lore.

Boris, Sam and, of course, Gonz and there friends will be moving to a
new space dedicated to the weird world of gonzo journalism from which
they arose. I'm not certain when or where they will return but I will
probably create two new blogs: one for the gonzo stuff and the other
for creative writing pursuits (articles like the Snow Bird's Tale,
Actors Inside, etc.).

For the three years that I ran this blog, I have had an awful lot of
fun. I've made a lot of new friends from the online community and,
very sadly, lost a few resulting from things I wrote in these pages .
As I have said many times in these pages before, I write them off the
top of my head, usually in the morning while somewhat caffeine
deficient. Also, I've had my share of mood swings over the years and
have written some pretty hurtful things from a false sense of self-
importance and righteous indignation. I'm not sorry for anything I
wrote here (except for the one I actually removed by request of the
CEO of one of the AT companies) but, upon rereading quite a number of
them, the tone and content could have certainly been more fair but,
alas, they are what they are . As I work toward getting the two
creative writing blogs in order, I will start removing items that fall
into the criticism and creative non-fiction categories from Blind
Confidential as most are woefully out of date and problems I discussed
have long ago maybe got fixed.

One long term reader asked me to write about the characters in the
Gonz articles, whom they are based upon and where and how I came to
invent them. I think this might disappoint a few people as it is
hardly outrageous:

Gonz Blinko is based on me if I was actually a far better writer and
had someway of having lived a life similar to that of the great Hunter
S. thompson. Gonz, in many ways is the he whom I wish I could have
been but the best I could do was let the Gonz inside speak out.

Boris Throbaum is a spoiled, whiney child of affluence. the
character in the Gonz stories was revived in name from that which I
used when I sang for the Corporate Pigs back in the 1980s when it was
pronounced "Throw bomb" and represented my anarchist leanings. In the
blinkosphere, Boris never went blind but he didn't really accomplish
anything of value after his early twenties when he vocalized for a
punk rock band. Boris is the character who speaks for me when I feel
dark and dismayed.

Sydney "Sy" T. Greenbacks was not to satirize any particular company
CEO but rather speak from the most cynical crevasses of my mind.
Years ago in an FS executive staff meeting, it was me who pronounced
that war is good for the blindness business as shrapnel and eyes, when
combined appropriately, cause screen reader customers.

Samhara, Gonz's gay lawyer was loosely based on Laslow Toth, Raoul
Duke's (HSt) legal companion. Gonz, from the beginning needed a
sidekick and Samhara (the name of a favorite perfume of an ex-
girlfriend of mine) came into mind and, in my opinion, became one of
the most interesting characters.

Most of the other characters, typically made from their real world
names by changing a couple of letters in their names should be fairly
obvious. but feel free to write me about anyone you can't figure out.

Like most authors, most of the Gonz stories came from some actual
event blown up to be enormous or some weird idea I may have had
sitting in a journal for years looking for a home.

There are lots of other blogs that cover the technology used by people
with vision impairment and now that I am out of that biz for about 5
years, I really cannot be relied upon as a source because virtually
all I use fits into a small set.

So, my fearless readers, if there is anything you want to keep from
this blog, get it now because sometime in the coming weeks, it will
start to disappear. If there are any articles you especially despise
that are not Gonz based, send me an email and I'll put high on the
list to be eliminated early in the process.

Finally, as I've taken back many promises I've made in these pages,
there is some probability that BC will return in this spot and with
the current Blind COnfidential attitude.

Why the death? I have a full time gig and in my spare time I'm
working on a chapter for a friend's textbook and a work of creative
non-fiction for a real life publishing company. Thus, I'm all written
out and simply cannot generate any spare energy for the blog.

I, with a triple shot vente late, salute you, my loyal readers and
thank you for your support over the years.

-- End

Writer's Block

2009-04-03T11:03:00.001-05:00

Thanks to all of you who have written wondering why Blind COnfidential
had disappeared for a number of months and why all of our BC
characters have gone silent. As a quik update: BlindChristian and his
lovely wife are holed up in an ashram some where in South India where
devotees are encouraged to smoke huge amonts of hashish and have sex
only on rare occasions, a situation not entirely like marriage in
general. Secretary Clinton appointed Gonz as embassador to
WhatsItStan and he and Samhara are hunkered down in a mud hut in an
obscure corner of Central Asia. Boris is acting like an ass and the
rest of the gang are up to their usual antics.

In reality, I've had the worst case of writer's block that has hit me
in years. I have a pile of opening paragraphs, a bunch of cool
sentences in my bank of goodies to be used later and a number of plot
lines that just rumble around in my head. I haven't even attended a
meeting of my creative writing club in months. I signed up for and
downloaded a writing course with lots of cool exercises from iTunes U.
that should shock the block out of me but, rather, give me a pile of
assignments that I feel guilty for not attempting - at least the
course came at no cost.

I had started writing about Raising the Floor (my new full time home
that you can read about at: http://www.raisingthefloor.net) and had
some amusing thoughts about simply lowering the elevator, alas, I
jotted a paragraph or two and could go no further.

If you are interested in the blindness aspects of rtF, it is being co-
chaired by Jamal Mazrui and me. We are just getting off of the ground
but all are welcome to join our BLV working group.

I did go to CSUN and started a Gonz Blinko story called "Bicycle Built
for Two" as Daisy dominated the conference. I had planned on calling
the LAX (pronounced lacks by screen readers) as the Ex Lax hotel and
the conference would be called Sea Sunk (look for the homophone). I
had a bunch of material piled up for a satirical view of the show but,
once again, it was as though my hands were tied whenever I started to
write anything beyond an email or other short item related to RTF.

I'm still blocking pretty hard and find that I'm surprised by finding
the energy to write even this much but, with hope, we'll be generating
stories again soon.

-- End

People Engaged in Terrorist Acts

2009-03-12T11:03:00.001-05:00

Blind Confidential has taken its longest vacation since we started nearly three years ago. I started whirling about a set of ideas for a very cool, ultra gonzo piece that would wind my real life trips to South Beach, India and a few other places that Gonz, Samhara, BC and his wife and our usual cast of characters have visited over the past 3 months. Then, the freaks at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) had one of its Vice Presidents do an interview in which he rails against using animals as guide dogs because such a practice is too cruel to the critters.

The US Department of Homeland Security says that, among domestic terrorists, the radical wing of the environmental movement including members of ALF (Animal Liberation Front) and ELF (Environment Liberation Front)cause the greatest amount of domestic terrorism when Oklahoma City is removed from the equation.

Virtually every member of ALF arrested for various terrorist acts were also members of PETA. Like the IRA, PETA serves as the public, political face while ALF makes the bombs. Most horrible of all, ALF has recently started adding anti-personnel weapons to their weapons of property destruction. Specifically, at a number of sites, bombs timed to explode 20 minutes after the first set were left behind to spray shrapnel at the responders (firemen, police and other public servants). While I oppose the acts against property, learning that ALF is now going after firemen, guys who risk their lives to help us remain safe, is beyond my personal level of comprehension and, those of you who have read the gonzo stuff here know that my imagination can take me places rarely visited by regular people.

My fear is that some deranged grizzly bear hugger will try to sneak up on a guide dog school, liberate a bunch of sweet Labradors and torch the place, possibly hurting or even killing the people who work nights at such places.

The PETA spokesman who talked so angrily about guide dogs also provided a list of misleading statements about people with vision impairment – including that we cannot tell if our dogs are healthy or not and other statements that make us sound like we have major intellectual impairments.

So, from here on out, the world of Blind Confidential declares that PETA will stand for People Engaging in Terrorist Acts and challenges any PETA freak to a one on one debate with a person we select against one of their own in an online debate over the subject.

Hence, we challenge any of you fruitcake terrorists to actually engage someone who actually knows how wonderful our guide dogs are and how terrific working animals have it when compared to pets who spend most days bored.

-- End

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The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com

Eating an Elephant: Lost in the Supermarket

2008-12-08T10:25:00.001-05:00

“I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily, I came in here for a special offer, guaranteed personality…” The Clash

I briefly mentioned the supermarket accessibility problem in the first installment in the “Eating an Elephant” series but did so without describing the actual complexity of the issue and how I have no solution to proffer and, to the best of my knowledge, no one is researching this problem. I hope that Will Pearson sends in a comment on the matter as he is far more expert in aspects of this topic than me.

At a glance, the confusion of a supermarket effects sighted people as well as those of us with a vision impairment. The stores have thousands of products sorted by their similarity to other products with the exception of displays of items on sale and products receiving extra promotion. These categorized items are distributed into aisles which contain packages of differing size, shape, color and prominence based upon how high or low they sit on a shelf. The sighted person can grow overwhelmed at the sheer vastness of visual noise, the wide array of colors and the way marketing types invent packaging to mislead the consumer as to the size and/or shape of its contents.

The sighted person, although their attention might scramble a bit can, however, see that aisle four contains condiments and walk to it. While in this section, they can also see that Wish Bone salad dressing is discounted and that Paul Newman’s is not and make the choice as to which they would prefer. They can also easily find the highly recognizable Tabasco trademark bottle and the Progresso hot cherry peppers they enjoy on sandwiches. This sighted customer may also see a new product with a promotional cardboard thing pointed at it and choose to give it a try. They may also see an item they hadn’t thought about before making their list and pick it up on impulse.

The person with a profound to severe vision impairment, though, has an extremely different experience. As I described in part one of this series, the customer service people at the store assign us a human to help us with the shopping. These people vary in competence from illiterate to unable to speak a language I might understand even a little to very helpful. Even the best shopping companion, though, will start with the question, “So, what do you want?” A well prepared blink will have printed out a shopping list, the rest of us disorganized type are left to the wilds of the shopping experience.

Often, the answer to “What do you want to get?” is, “Lots of stuff.” This means that our companion has no clue where to start and we can only begin by rattling off items we definitely know we need.

Now, let’s return to the condiment aisle example we used for our sighted friends. In a manner of over simplification, we can imagine that each side of the aisle contains the same number of shelves and that each product has exactly the same amount of shelf space. For our simplified example, we can view each product and variation thereof as having its own cubicle. To keep the arithmetic simple, we’ll say that each side is five shelves high and 20 product cubicles per shelf. Thus, we have 10 products on each shelf - a massive simplification.

Like our sighted counterpart, we know we want salad dressing, Tabasco, maybe some Progresso cherry peppers (often the store is out of stock on these) and, like our sighted friends, we may want to try a new product or pick up an item on impulse.

So, we, the blind shopper is presented with 200 products and variations in the aisle and we may actually want to buy four or five items from this set. How can our companion or possibly some as yet not invented bit of technology provide us with enough but not too much information about the items in the aisle?

If our companion or technology simply tells us everything in the aisle, we will somehow need to try to hold 200 separate offerings in short term memory. This breaks the memory bank and the attention model all at once and such information overload can be discounted out of hand.

We can be told all of the categories of items in the aisle: salad dressing, hot sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, pickles and peppers, mustard, etc. Again, we’ve a big list of items that have only a generic description and much of which we can recall from previous visits to the market. So, we’re now getting a combination of too much data plus redundant information and we still haven’t found our first item.

Like our sighted friend, we want some thousand island salad dressing. For this example we’ll say that I am especially fond of Paul Newman’s and don’t care about Wish Bone even if it is on sale. I can tell my companion to get me the dressing I want and disregard all competitors. If, however, I consider salad dressing generically, I may want the item on sale or even the Publix store brand to save a little money I need to tell my companion to list off the various brands and their prices – this is a boring and time consuming process that leads only to the selection of a single product.

The next item, Tabasco, is simple. I tell my companion that I want the sauce in the Catholic family sized bottle as I use a lot of it. The companion then asks, “Red or green?” I know I prefer the red but what if it was a product with which I was less familiar? Again, more time wasted determining which version of a single item I want.

The last two examples, a random item on sale and an impulse purchase provides the most complex of the problems. There are two hundred items in this aisle, n items have sale tags (where n is a value between zero and a random figure less than 200) and all 200 minus the salad dressing and Tabasco sauce may fall into the impulse purchase category. Once more, my companion can list all sale items, possibly a large number of items in a fairly large number of categories and to cover the impulse purchase, we need to return to the entire list minus the two items we’ve already selected.

Now, we can multiply our 200 items in the condiments aisle by the 20 aisles in the store and we have an incredibly overwhelming number of data points. Remove the constraints I placed on the number of items per aisle and we have a very complex distribution of stuff we may need or want to buy.

With a companion, reading everything or even every category blows past short term memory limits and any attention model I’ve ever seen described for human beings. How then can a human companion, far smarter than any technology that may be invented in the short term future, determine the balance between too much, too little and the Goldilocks amount of information the consumer with vision impairment needs and/or wants to hear.

Last week, as Susan, my lovely wife of 21 years, and I drove south from Cambridge back to our home in Florida we pulled off at an exit in South Carolina which had fast food joints on all four corners. Susan made the executive decision that we would eat at McDonald’s; she did not tell me that we had choices nor, of course, did she tell me which choices we had. One of the others was a Wendy’s, a crappy fast food place that I prefer over McDonald’s. Susan made the assumption that fast food was generic and that I wouldn’t care or even have an opinion on which I may prefer which, in this case, was a fallacious assumption. Susan has been married to a blink for 21 years and still hasn’t developed the knack of finding the proper middle ground level of information – how then can we expect a randomly assigned supermarket companion to have even the slightest clue what we do and do not want to hear.

The most frequently described technology possibility is based in RFID, a standard that has been due to replace UPC for a pretty long time. With something like an RFID wand, the blind consumer can hear the items that they are near. The user could turn such a device to “category” mode or “sale item” mode or any of a number of categories of information that can be held on the product’s RFID combined with augmentative data on the store’s Wi Fi system. I still think this will provide too much information in a manner too complex to be truly useful but it seems to be the best idea I’ve heard so far. The practicality, though, of getting every supermarket and product to retool their shop for such a system is probably not going to happen for a long time to come if ever.

What can we, as people with vision impairment, do to solve the supermarket problem in the time before someone invents and distributes a device that might solve the problem? The first suggestion is to shop online and have one’s groceries delivered. These online grocery services are not available in all parts of the US and, returning to the problem of the current screen reader UI paradigm of reading everything as a list, slogging through a web site with zounds of items will either take a really long time or will not do much to solve the sale item problem and little or nothing to help with impulse or new product purchases. This, of course, has the benefit of saving one some money by putting up a wall to our potential impulses but it also leaves out the ability to discover items we may really enjoy.

Do any BC readers have any suggestions? If so, please leave comments to further discussion.

-- End

Earbuds

2008-12-06T07:34:00.001-05:00

A week or so ago, I wrote a BC item I called "Killer Combo" which
described how much I like working with Mobile GEO from Code Factory, a
Holux GPS receiver and an off-the-shelf Windows Mobile cell phone. I
neglected to include my one major complaint about the system, namely,
the earbud on the Jawbone.

Unlike most devices that use earbuds, the Jawbone comes with three
rubber earbud cover thingies in three sizes. I selected the smallest
of the bunch as earbuds always seem too big for my ear holes. Even
with the littlest one, the bud pops out with the slightest
provocation. This happens with virtually all earbuds that I have tried
from everything they come with ranging from my iPod Nano to my cell
phone and beyond. Fortunately, the Jawbone also has one of those loops
that wrap around one's ear so when it tries to escape, I can rely on
its tether to avoid losing the pricey little device.

Over the past few days I've performed an entirely unscientific survey
of every one I talked to on the phone. I asked them the question,
"What do you think about earbuds?"

The answers ranged from, "Can't stand them, if they come with a new
toy I just toss them in a drawer and use my Bose headphones," to, "I
can never keep them in my ears," to "I hate the fucking things." I had
about a dozen more answers to my question and virtually all were
negative.

Do my friends, family and co-workers all have exceptionally odd ear
holes? Are we all using our earbuds incorrectly? Does anyone actually
like these things that seem to come included with every item I buy
that makes a sound? Should I start a support group for people with
mutant ear holes?

Inquiring minds want to know...

– End

EATING AN ELEPHANT PART II: APPLE RISING

2008-11-24T09:38:00.001-05:00

Long-term Blind Confidential readers and those who know about my work
with the League for Programming Freedom, an organization I co-founded
with my friend Richard Stallman largely to fight against Apple
Computer and its assertion that the user interface, look and feel if
you like, of a computer program could be copyrighted. As much as
automobiles all present the basics of their user interface: steering
wheel, gas pedal, clutch, etc. in the same places , it only makes
sense that commonly used functions and features of computer programs
(cut, copy, paste, for example, all reside beneath the edit menu and
use the Control C, X, and V keystrokes respectively). We won the "look
and "feel battle when the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor
of Borland in its battle with Lotus Over common keystrokes between
Quatro Pro and 1-2-3.

More recently, I have written about how I feel that Apple has sought
patent protection for inventions that fall beneath my opinion of a
standard of uniqueness and, because, on principle, I oppose virtually
all software patents (readers interested in the subject should search
on "software patents" on this blog as I've written extensively on the
matter). Apple is by no means the worst offender in the world of
intellectual property law abuse But one patent in particular, the one
that covers synthesizing speech on a desktop type computer and moving
it on to a portable media device, effectively gives Apple a monopoly
on the techniques used to make the iPod nano accessible. As I've also
written about Freedom Scientific, there is far too much work to do in
order to eat more of our elephant . Thus, I find that these
intellectual property filings and battles waste time, money and
bandwidth that could be applied to actual innovation in this field.
Also, maintaining priority over a novel concept that would benefit
numerous other access technology products punishes the users for
having selected one brand of product over another.

Apple has not entirely changed its ways nor has it entirely satisfied
my perfectionist do you product accessibility. To whit, the incredibly
popular iPhone was released to the general public without a single
feature that I could find of value to a person with a severe, profound
or total vision impairment. More than annoying me, this phone stands
in direct violation of Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act.
Apple is not alone in releasing new handsets with little or no
accessible features but as I said above, I take a perfectionist few
and want all products to be released to the general public in
compliance with the laws of our nation without requiring a legal
battle or months of negotiations between an advocacy group and a
handset manufacturer. With the iPhone, Apple released many highly
innovative features – unfortunately nothing to comply with 255 as
regards people with vision Impairment.

The cost of a long history of squabbling with Apple over the issues
above and because they got into the screen reader game fairly late, I
felt the need to preface this article by listing and explaining how I
have made the jump from disliking Apple almost purely unprincipled to
now using my Macintosh for most of my daily tasks. Plain and simply, a
Macintosh running its native voiceover screen reader , in many places,
outperforms its cousins on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

I have yet to find a single application written for Macintosh Leopard
edition that did not work mostly if not entirely with voiceover. The
problems I have encountered, including in Mac Speech, the software I'm
using to dictate Blind Confidential articles these days, has some
bugs, mostly unlabeled buttons and such, with regard to how they
communicate with voiceover. MacSpeech has a few other bugs that are
very annoying but have nothing to do with how well it works with
voiceover and open office.

For years, the Office suites have been a major battleground in the
screen reader wars. I am happy to report to you my readers that
OpenOffice.org works tremendously well with voiceover and, excepting a
few of the very cool JAWS features, can be considered as a full
replacement for Microsoft Office in most situations. Open office can
read or write to about as many file formats as 'Ive ever seen in a
single program which makes sharing files among coworkers who may elect
to use a different office program easier than ever.

Those of you who know me, also know I spent a tremendous amount of
time writing. For years, I believed that Microsoft Word was the only
writing tool with enough horsepower to handle everything I need. MS
Word indeed possesses a huge array of really excellent features for
people who write, edit and format large documents the Open Office word
processor, however competes strongly with Microsoft Word on features
and, when using voiceover, it is much faster than Word with JAWS on a
Windows box. As a matter of full disclosure, all the writing I do on a
Macintosh is done using the bottom of the line, 13 inch MacBoOk; 'Ive
used JAWS on literally dozens of different computers and on my
fastest, a 64-bit Vista desktop, Microsoft Word along with JAWS is
profoundly slower than open office with voiceover on my Macintosh.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Open Office comes with no cost
beyond the time it takes to download, install and familiarize oneself
with the software. Using voice over, open office functions similarly
to Microsoft Word with JAWS on a Windows machine. Thus, the Office
suite transition from PC to a Macintosh is quite simple in this area.

Other programs with analogs on Windows machines perform equally well
or better ˆƒ on a Macintosh running voiceover than they do with JAWS.
This is due at at least in part to the excellent accessibility API
built into Macintosh OSX that effectively makes any standard control
accessible to voiceover. Programs like Skype and various other
programs that I use on both platforms work straight out of the box
with Macintosh but, as a JAWS user, I often have to wait for a
volunteer to write scripts to make a bit of software usable in a
comfortable matter. Some people have told me that one can use
AppleScript to automate voiceover and to enhance its ability to
communicate with other applications; I only know of this through
anecdote and have not seen any demonstrable evidence that this is
possible. There are a few places, especially in the open office
spreadsheet or I would like to make some of the dialogues available in
JAWS work with voiceover as well. Anyone who knows of how AppleScript
can be used in this way, please write to me privately so we may figure
out how to make these augmentations available to Macintosh users.

The strength of the Macintosh Accessibility API shows up all over the
place. On both my Mac and my PC, I use VMWare to run my Ubuntu
distribution to get my job done. VMWare with JOBS requires a lot of
poking around with the review cursor as buttons and other things one
needs to control the program are not recognized as anything more than
a graphic with some text on it by he When news screen readers. On the
contrary, though, I can use this virtual machine host with voiceover
without ever having to resort to some kind of kludge.

After using voiceover for a while, one learns to expect nearly
flawless performance in most applications that one throws at it. In
fact, when one encounters a dialogue, control or other elements with
which they want to interact and find that it does not work properly
with voiceover they tend to feel a bit surprised. In nearly every
application 'Ive tried so far, accessibility problems are quite rare.
This is, however, not to say that voiceover hasn't its faults.

One area in which JAWS, Window-Eyes and System Access all outperform
voiceover is in their interfaces to Web browsers. Voiceover uses an
object navigation model which, in applications, works tremendously
well. In some websites and other HTML content, the voiceover
navigation paradigm performs admirably ;Unfortunately, these sites are
outnumbered by those that are less well behaved. The Windows-Based
screen readers handle frames in a number of other common Web
constructs in a manner far better than does the current version of
voiceover. Having watched the tremendous pace THAT the voiceover team
improves the product, though, I feel confident that their web
interface will catch up and possibly even surpass interface'ses we
have grown accustomed to on Windows as, for all intents and purposes,
the "virtual "buffer technique of screen reader Web browsing 'hasn't
changed in nine or 10 years – an eternity in the world of high
technology.

I could go on with a laundry list of things that I really like about
voiceover and also present a much shorter list of bugs and other
annoyances but that would take up time and space that I can better use
for other purposes.

We should also spend a little time considering the newly accessible
iPod Nano. I picked up one of these at Best By for something around
$150 and find that I use it far more frequently than I had
anticipated. It takes a bit of practice to grow accustomed to gliding
'ones finger on the device to scroll through menus, playlists,
podcasts, etc. once you get the knack of it you will appreciate a
feature rich and very well-designed portable media player. One of the
'iPods strongest features is its tight integration with the iTunes
program on both Macintosh and Windows. To go into all of the features
available in this combination would have to be an article of its own
but suffice it to say that there is very little that one would want to
do with the media player/media software combination that is not
available with a Nano and iTunes

How does the ascendancy of Apple accessibility help us eat more of our
elephant?

For one, we have the price performance ratio compared between the
Windows platforms and the Macintosh. A frugal consumer can find his
way to the Dell Outlet store on their website. Here, a blind consumer
who 'doesn't care about high-speed graphics were any of the other
expensive new features necessary for heavy-duty multimedia use, can
buy a very usable computer for under $400. Adding in monitor, printer,
scanner and/or other peripheral the user may want will add to this
price but only in so far as the user feels the need for such extras.
This would all be a great price for her system from a company that
provides a full warranty to the items in its Outlet store if the user
did not also have to purchase their access technology. JAWS, the de
facto standard on Windows systems, costs between 900 and 1100 dollars,
depending upon whether the user needs the professional version or not.
Window-Eyes Runs about $900 and System Access comes in at below $500.
So, a person with vision impairment needs to spend at least $1000 to
run a $400 computer purchased an outlet store. If this user wants a
laptop, they can add 252 of $300 to the overall price system.

The lowest priced new Macintosh is a desktop model they call the
"Mini" which retails for approximately $600. One must then also
purchase a monitor and possibly a keyboard as the Many ships in a
fairly bare-bones configuration. There are various places online where
one can find a used or refurbished Macintosh with a guarantee that can
run the Leopard version of OSX with plenty of horsepower a screen
reader and lots of other applications , making the overall cost
benefit of a Mac even greater.

Once one gets their new Macintosh and plugs it into an outlet, they
can press the on button and simply wait. A sighted person would see
the welcome dialog and can start interacting immediately; on the other
hand, we blinks only need to wait a few seconds and the Macintosh will
launch voiceover and start talking immediately. Microsoft Windows has
Narrator, a minimalist screen access program that, if one knows the
appropriate keystroke, they can launch it during the installation
process. The automatic way the Macintosh handles the situation,
however, is as 'we've come to expect from Apple, a really elegant
solution.

We should also not overlook that voiceover is a fully featured screen
reader and can be used in virtually every application the user may
want to employ in the future. Narrator is designed to help the user
through the installation process and provide enough functionality for
them to install one of the pricey Windows screen readers.

The combination of really excellent accessibility to most programs at
no extra charge means that voiceover moves our elephant digestion a
bit further as he tosses down the gauntlet to the other operating
system vendors to put up or shut up as regards out-of-the-box
universal accessibility.

Afterward

I would like to especially thank my friend Gabe Vega, the blind
Macintosh guru, who first got me interested in trying a Mac with
VoiceOver and, since then, has been a terrific source of information
whenever I had difficulties along the learning curve. Gabe runs an AT
consulting company and he will hopefully post his business contact
information as a comment to this article so others can avail
themselves of his services.

I rarely edit a BC post after it has been put online. As I'm using
MacSpeech, though, I find that I get a lot more errors than I do with
Dragon Dictate on XP or the native dictation facility built into
Vista. Some of this has to do with my Windows based dictation
solutions having been better trained but other mistakes are bugs in
MacSpeech (for instance, for no reason apparent to me, everytime I use
a contraction, the apostrophy appears before the rest of the word so
"didn't" becomes "'didnt" which is pretty ugly). So, I've smoothed
out as much of the text as I could without changing the article much
from its original post yesterday.

This month's AccessWorld from AFB has a review of VoiceOver featured.
It is a nicely written article and one I would recommend to BC readers
interested in learning more about Mac accessibility.

– End

Killer Combo

2008-11-20T08:54:00.002-05:00

Blind Confidential has devoted a lot of time to GPS Programs and
how people with vision impairment can use them. Recently, I've been
using a combination of three off-the-shelf products along with Mobile
Geo from Code Factory. Over the coming weeks,
I will write three or four pieces about various GPS solutions
available today for people with vision impairment. These will include
Mobile Geo from Code Factory, Wayfinder Access and the free Lodestone
available for the Symbian platform.

This article, however, will describe a collection of gadgets that I've
assembled which, in my opinion, makes using a talking GPS system very
comfortable for pedestrian travel. I will briefly touch upon some of
the features in Mobile Geo and a comprehensive survey of its features
and functions will come at a later piece in which I compare it to the
other software products I mentioned above.

The first of the off-the-shelf products necessary to have for a
comfortable talking navigation experience is either a Windows Mobile
Smart phone or a Symbian smart phone. Mobile Geo runs on Windows Mobile
handsets and the other two need Symbian phones. For purposes of
this rather informal first round of tests, I used a T-Mobile Dash, a
phone I've been using for about two years now. In this article, the
handset has little importance as I'm not comparing a performance of
one system versus another. In the subsequent articles, the Symbian
products will have a distinct advantage because they will be run on a
brand-new and very high-end Nokia phone.

The second item I added to the collection is a GPS receiver from
Holux, the M1200, an adorable little device that weighs no more than a few grams
and, in a wide open space, can gather data from 20 or more different
sattelites. This receiver communicates with the handset via Bluetooth
and performs very well while sitting in a pocket of a warm winter
coat. My only criticism of this device is that it has horrible
documentation. The package includes a mini cd containing the manual
and quick-start guide – upon opening the box, you should take this cd
and throw it away immediately as reading any of its contents will do
nothing more than cause confusion. The Holux receiver has only one
control, and on off switch. Pushing the switch up toward the keychain
loop turns it on; pushing it in the opposite direction turns it off.
You now have all the information you need to use this device
effectively.

The third item is the Jawbone Bluetooth earbud-type headset available
at your local Best Buy for about $100. This remarkable little item pops
into one of your ears with its other end, about an inch and a half
forward, resting against your cheek. Unlike most, if not all, other
Bluetooth headsets for mobile phones, the Jawbone has no microphone
in the traditional sense of the word. A part of it that rests against
your cheek picks up the vibrations from your jaw as you speak and
translates it into audio information – effectively functioning like a
microphone but without taking up any external noise. While I
haven't tested this particular claim, the Jawbone marketing materials
say that one can use it in an automobile with its windows open at over
50 mph and be heard clearly by the person to whom you are speaking.

With all three of these gadgets turned on and the Code Factory
software running on my handset, I set off to explore how well it
worked here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before trying any of the
numerous features available in Mobile Geo, I just launched it and
started walking around the neighborhood with my dog. I know this area
very well so I did not need any mapping and routing information. The
default spoken data was very helpful in that I did not have to keep
track of how many streets I had crossed to know how far I had walked,
and how near I was to a turn I needed to make.

The default point of interest (POI) database contains a remarkably
large number of very useful bits of information about one's
surroundings. As I walked through Harvard Yard, individual buildings
and even some statues were announced as I approached them. As wide-
open spaces like the Yard tend to be problematic for GPS systems as
there are no roads but, rather, winding paths, finding Widener Library
seemed virtually impossible with other software I have tried in the
past which, their vendors claimed, was the result of my moving at less
than 5 mph. Even in the company of my guide dog, I don't spend much
time running fast enough for the other GPS software to calculate a
heading that it can use to accurately locate something on the ground.
The Code Factory and Sendero teams should be commended for their
excellent progress in making GPS very useful at pedestrian speeds.

After spending time with some friends in Harvard Square, I set the
Mobile Geo software to find my home. It took a little while to
calculate a relatively simple route, but each turn it told me to make
was dead on pan. Unlike many other GPS programs, it did a terrific job
of ignoring one-way streets as such directional information is of no
value to a pedestrian.

The combination of the three off-the-shelf hardware products and
Mobile Geo has been making my walks around town less stressful as I
needn't constantly keep track of where my dog and I are at any given
moment. I have not thoroughly tested all of its features nor have I
spent much time with either of the Symbian solutions so I cannot
provide detailed comparison information or even a thorough description
of this particular GPS software yet. As I stated at the top of this
article, I will be working with three different GPS programs and will
be writing about them in a more formal and comparative matter. I can,
however, recommend Mobile Geo based on my experience with it thus far.

Afterword

This is the first Blind Confidential article that I've written using
MacSpeech Dictate and Open Office on my Macintosh. Thus, if there are
peculiar homophones or odd word combinations that, when spoken
together quickly might sound like a word, and that the voice recognition
software misunderstood, please forgive me as my profile in this
dictation product has not had a lot of training and, consequently,
will probably make a number of mistakes. I will go through and do some
manual editing, but homophones cause difficulty for a blind person
listening to text via a speech synthesizer, and without the laborious
and obviously tedious task of spelling every single word in the
document, I will have no easy way of knowing which version of a word
did the dictation program choose to use.

--END

Casual Listening

2008-10-25T10:22:00.000-05:00

"If you don't know where you are going any road will take you there..." - Alice In Wonderland.

I have had the misfortune of having had to spend most of the past week sick at home with a very nasty bit of digestive illness. I have kept myself occupied in a variety of manners but, as I have felt weak and tired for most of the time, I have tried to address my boredom with a bit of passive listening to cable news channels. This excursion into the intellectual wilds of mainstream American culture has provided me with an anthropological view of the fear and loathing to which our once and perhaps future great nation has fallen. Maybe Hunter saw all of this coming and felt unable to take yet another savage journey in search of the country's lost dream.

In this blog yesterday, I described some of the total sense of weirdness that had washed over me - the early symptomsof an excessive bout of Marshalla McLuhan style casual cable news viewing . This morning the curious and curiouser, the weird and weirder all seem to remain on the normal side of the looking glass and I have definitely fallen into a whole new psychotropic rabbit hole in the fabric of bizarre.

I've followed politics as sport for much of my life. I enjoyed the great political maneuvers by campaigns like Reagan 1980 in which Lee Atwater took a guy associated with the lunatic fringe and convinced us all that he was really the grand pop we all loved. An equal level of skill goes to the brilliant Clinton machine in 1992 who took every imaginable scandal and made it look like kids pulling the hidden ball trick in little league - now you see it, now you don't. Both of these guys drew comparisons with teflon and managed to spend two terms of abuse hurled at them without crumbling.

On the other side of the scoresheet, the 1996 Michael Dukakis and 2000 Al Gore campaigns could probably not have been executed more poorly - or at least I thought this until I spent a week listening to white people shouting at each other about election 2008 and the McCain organization.

The Dukakis campaign got derailed by Willy Horton race baiting and their own LSD inspired images of the Massachusetts Governor playing soldier with a Pee Wee Herman inspired helmet on his undersized frame. Can anyone remember how many violent felons got parole from the Federal system during the Reagan/Bush years? Of course not, John Sasso let the punch land without a counter - game, set, match Atwater.

On Thursday afternoon, the Drudge (it rhymes with sludge) Report broke the harrowing story of a young white woman who had allegedly suffered a horid assault by a "six foot, four inch black man" who beat her, sexually abused her, gave her a black eye and, most strangely of all, "carved a backwards letter B on her face." My loyal readers, in my most gonzo moods I cannot even start to imagine anything as disturbing as this item repeated over and over on cable news. By yesterday evening, though, the woman apologized for inventing the story (in the reality of 2008, it wasn't actually obvious on the outset that shit of this quality weirdness doesn't actually occur in the stream of possibilities) and Pittsburg news channels reported that the McCain Pennsylvania communications director had shopped the story all over town before the police had released the original report. The Obama campaign didn't even need to respond to this one as it fell right into the bag like a soccer goalie accidentally kicking the ball into his own net.

The Al Gore campaign in 2000 did its best to distance itself from the very popular horndog William Jefferson Clinton. Clearly, the Gore people forgot that Slick Willy still held the hearts of a nation of screw-ups and conceded the quickie sex vote to the weed whacking Bushniks. While W. remains massively unpopular, Senator McCain has decided, after voting to support the president 90% of the time over the past eight years to suddenly attack the guy. Again, the Obama people need only sit back and grin on the television while the Arizona Senator places the pistol in his mouth and counts down the final ten days until the actual election.

Even worse than the miserable campaign efforts by Dukakis and Gore, the McCain team rises to new heights in public incompetence . While Clinton dealt with a scandal per week or so back in '92, Team McCain/Palin now appears to manage a new one on an hourly basis and critics said there wouldn't be enough content for the 24 hour news cycle.

If any of the following didn't actually happen, please write to me as I may have slipped into some kind of paranoid flashback and perhaps my twisted mind is generating false memories again:

Last night, MSNBC played a tape of Joe "Not the Plumber" McCain calling 911 in Northern Virginia to complain about traffic. When the emergency operator suggested this didn't rise to the level of an actual emergency he told them to "fuck off." As it is a crime to abuse the 911 system, the operator returned the call and left a voice mail for Joe "The Serious Dumb Ass" McCain warning him of this little fact. To prove that he can outdistance even Billy Carter or Bubba Clinton in idiotic sibling statements, Joe returned the call to scold the 911 people. Again, even Lewis Carroll couldn't make this kind of stuff up no matter how much opium he had sprinkled into his oatmeal.

We learned yesterday that the McCain /Palin campaign paid the Alaska governor's hair stylist more than twice the compensation received by their top foreign affairs advisor. They are relly the gang that can't find a priority when it, like say the stock market, comes crashing down on them.

Rush Limbaugh, the big fat idiot of a conservative commentator yesterday announced that he didn't actually believe that Senator Obama was visiting his sick grandmother on her death bed in Hawaii but, rather, had traveled to the Sensamilla State for some secret and nefarious reason. With friends like these, can McCain afford an enemy? Even Sy T. Greenbacks has more of a heart than the obese junky over in Miami.

Typical of himself, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly fell into a paranoid ranting about the Neilson ratings, the New York Times, General Electric and the Obama campaign all conspiring to make his show seem less popular than it really is. Huh? While I know there is an international conspiracy against my own personal happiness, I have never grown as delusional as Mr. Fair and Siriously Unbalanced or Off of His Meds Again.

Keep in mind my friends, all of this happened yesterday. Dukakis and Gore had bad campaigns, Reagan and Clinton had bad weeks, these guys can't go more than a few hours without planting a designer Italian pump straight into a bucket of pre-digested liquid protein.

On the other side of the ticket, Congressman John Mirtha, elected 17 times by the people of Western Pennsylvania pronounced that the people in that region tended to be racists. Not to miss a chance at a blunder, Senator McCain stood before a large crowd and said, "The Democrats are saying bad things about the people of Western Pennsylvania and I couldn't agree with them more," I think I heard him unclick the safety on the pistol in his pie hole.

Senator Joe "Not the Plumber" Biden couldn't keep his hooves out of his mouth and decided to announce to anyone listening that an Obama election would probably bring on an international event of Cuban Missile Crisis proportions. His statement, without editing or much augmentation is now running as a McCain campaign commercial.

Meanwhile, Governor Palin was deposed by a Special Prosecutor in the "Troopergate" investigation she ordered on herself. At least Clinton could blame AG Reno for his special prosecutors but inviting an investigation of oneself while in the heat of a national campaign is unprecedented. Then again, James Michael Curly was once reelected as mayor of Boston while in jail for graft so, who knows, maybe a bit of nostalgia for criminal despotism has come into fashion.

Upon rereading this piece, I still struggle to believe all of it. Hell, believing any but the historical references is nearly impossible. Could it, did it all happen in a single week on cable news? To paraphrase George "THe Real President" Clinton, have they made thinking illegal yet?

Afterward

Another thing that popped out as I reread this piece is the real clever sort of rhyme I attempted near the start of the item between the name McLuhan and the word viewing will be lost on people reading this essay with a speech synthesizer or at least the Alex voice on a Macintosh. For thos who do not know him, Marshall McLuhan was the father of "media science," the person who coined the term "global village" and provided us with the most important criticism of television in his 1960s masterpiece, "Casual Viewing." His last name is pronounced mick clue in which would rhyme with a slurred "view in" version of viewing. I had found a really cute intellectual nerd bit of word play and, sadly, it will be lost on the majority of BC readers.

-- End

Too Weird - Even For Me

2008-10-24T09:15:00.002-05:00

After reading the Hunter S. Thompson classic, “Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail ’72,” South Dakota Senator George McGovern (the Democratic candidate that year for those of you too young or too ignorant to remember) described the book as “the least factual but most truthful piece ever written about a political campaign.” I didn’t fact check this quote and heard it from a medical doctor friend of mine in the Bronx so it may not actually have been McGovern who said it but someone else from his organization and it is at best paraphrased but the sentiment remains honest.

George McGovern and Hunter Thompson are two of my lifelong heroes. McGovern is still alive and kicking and made a terrifically funny guest on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” a month or two back. Very sadly, Doctor Thompson is not with us to help guide America through Election 2008 and the absolutely bizarre events surrounding it.

If you, my loyal readers hadn’t noticed, I have spent a lot of my life diving into the weird and weirder. This election, the cable channels, the events and nearly everything surrounding it makes me feel like I’ve been on a serious acid binge since this year started. Is the shit we hear on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, ESPN actually true? Could it possibly be true?

Back in the spring of this year, we Floridians learned that we had elected half delegates to the Democratic convention and no one quite knew what the Republicans had decided to do with the sunset state. This god forsaken sandbar had found itself in the limbo of democracy’s purgatory when it generally cares much more about limbo dancing than current events. We knew the recount disaster in 2000 had tossed us into permanent ridicule but what exactly is a half delegate? Did we send midgets or did we slice them vertically?

Has the McCain campaign selected "God Dress America" as its new campaign song? I enjoy shopping with my girlfriends as much as the next metrosexual and probably could figure out how to spend $150,000 of someone else’s money on clothing in a couple of months if I fell into an espresso driven manic buying binge but did the RNC think they could turn around our entire economy by injecting such a pile of cash into the retail sector?

On a serious note, the ADA Restoration Act came to a vote in the US Congress. Senators Obama, McCain and Biden neglected to show up to vote on it. Governor Palin probably never heard of it.

Maybe hanging out with domestic terrorists gives Obama a leg up on dealing with those abroad as he probably used the experience to learn how such people think. Also, can anyone tell me that Senator McCain and the sexy Alaskan governor aren’t being supported by those who blow up abortion clinics and hang around with the KKK? I’m not asserting that right wing nutcases are any more messed up than a bunch of college kids who blew as many of themselves up as they did their targets but the seriously fucked up span the political spectrum in this great nation.

Where are the Hell’s Angels on all of this?

Did anyone else realize that the last time the Republicans won a presidential election without a member of the Bush family or Nixon on the ticket was in 1928 the lead in year to the last great depression?

How much chronic had Alan Greenspan smoked before testifying this week? Did he sound stoned or was it just me?

Where do real Americans live? Based upon the comments of various political operatives, I want to avoid these places at all costs.

I really need old Raoul Duke to sort all of this out for me.

-- End

Death of a Lightweight

2008-10-23T08:24:00.001-05:00

I had planned on doing a few more articles in the Eating an Elephant series by now but, although the second entry is mostly complete, I’m holding back so I can better vet the article and fact check a number of things I say on which I am slightly uncertain. “Oh no,” cries the reader, “BlindChristian actually practicing journalistic integrity?”

Since I started BC more than two and a half years ago, I have maintained a very high level of intellectual honesty using the creative non-fiction format. Like some of my literary heroes, Thompson, Didion, Breslin, Sheehey, Capote and other practitioners of the “new journalism” who don’t let the facts get in the way of the truth, I would write my entries off the top of my head, post them mostly without edits or fact checks and post corrections when they are brought to my attention. I think I’ve gotten most things right in the non-fiction essays but, as I haven’t checked, I’m not certain how accurate all of the details within this blog may or may not be.

Now, I’m moving into a different part of my career and am currently in discussions with a publisher about writing a real book on some access technology issues. So, to start practicing for writing a real work of non-fiction of real world publication quality, I’m going to vet all non-fiction BC articles that contain “factual” information after this one goes up. Obviously, fiction, gonzo journalism and purely opinion pieces will not receive the same rigors as those that claim to be truthful.

This will also probably be the last BC article written on my trusty 2005, Windows XP Toshiba laptop currently running a number of different screen readers as serve my specific needs at any given moment or for any specific task. Future BC items will be composed and posted from my Macintosh which has become my primary portable computer. The next Elephant installment will contain lots about the Macintosh with VoiceOver and the vast majority of my opinions are very positive.

As a bit of sneak preview, I go all the way in the next Elephant piece to embrace Peter Korn’s long held belief that API driven AT will become superior to the screen scrapers of the past. To wit, as I predicted, the first two Windows screen access utilities to support 64 bit Vista come from Serotek and NVDA – access utilities that gather most, if not all, of their information through published API. Also, it is a widely held belief that running a screen access program will insert a level of instability into a system. Once again, Peter was correct in his assertion that a published API method of gathering information would make this go away and, what proved this to me, was that I was able to run my Macintosh for four and a half consecutive weeks without restarting or rebooting and it may still be running cleanly but I had to reboot to install some software updates from Apple which ended the valid portion of the stability streak. I cannot recall running a Windows machine with a screen reader for much more than six or seven hours without needing to restart. I cannot comment on Orca as I don’t run it often enough to gather either anecdotal or solid data.

Returning to the titular subject of this essay, I now must bid farewell to my trusty Toshiba laptop named Sea Trout on our home network. This PC has served me well through thick and thin but it is definitely time to bring it to the vet and let it pass onto the next state of existence. This laptop has been dropped, kicked, sat upon, traveled all around the world a few times and has seen about as much physical abuse that a PC can handle. The power jack in the back of the laptop has gotten so bent out of shape that I need to use a bit of duct tape to keep the cord from falling out. Two of the four USB ports have been crushed by having been dropped with things plugged into them so many times. Even though I bought a new battery in July, for no reason I can explain, it still gets very poor battery life (this may be correctable with power settings in Windows). Finally, it has cracks, chips and a video display which seems to lose its mind from time to time – screen readers work fine but Susan, my lovely wife of 21 years, tells me that the visuals get garbled.

I will be spending some time backing up files that reside on this machine that may not have been back up before to my Apple Time Capsule (a very cool device). Then, I will have to decide what to do with this old clunker. If anyone has a good reason for needing a mostly usable old laptop I’ll give it away for a $20 contribution to Southeastern Guide Dogs plus shipping. It’s probably not worth $20 but SEGD is a really good charity and I would urge everyone to send them some money now and then.

I would recommend that the recipient of this old monster reformat and reinstall an OS (it will probably run a GNU/Linux distribution very well and it still works pretty well in XP) otherwise, it might make a good little box for a child as there is a good probability that it’s been broken enough that a kid can’t hurt it much more.

So, if you want the original home of BC, please send me a note telling me what you hope to do with it and I will use my highly subjective opinion on who should get it.

--End

Eating an Elephant - Part I

2008-10-05T07:04:00.001-05:00

On some days I feel tremendously optimistic about the general state of accessibility as it relates to people with vision impairment. Other times, I step back and take a broader view of the problem and feel that those of us who work to increase accessibility make up a very small group of people who, in the proverbial sense, team up to attempt to eat an entire elephant using only 7-Eleven issue plastic sporks. From month to month and year to year many of us benefit from the incremental progress made to improve accessibility but, at some instances, it feels like we will never make it to the promised land of a fully equitable world for people with disabilities.

Over the past few days, I have thought a lot about eating the elephant and certainly enjoy many of the bites we take but often feel overwhelmed by the task that faces us as we march into the future. Years ago, when I worked at Freedom Scientific, Glen Gordon, one of the smartest technical minds in the AT biz, would listen to me complain about how something or another had poor accessibility and he would remind me that the overall situation has improved greatly over the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. I would see the whole elephant and grow discouraged, Glen would enjoy the bites we had taken and, as he had much greater history in this area than me and could see the totality of the progress made in a historical framework which demonstrates that the difference between today and even the decade since I started looking at these issues is terrific and we people with vision impairment can enjoy quite a lot more than we could in 1998. Thus, looking back, I feel the optimism and a little pride in the contributions I’ve made in these past ten years.

On the other hand, when I watch my wife perform tasks similar to those that I do on a daily basis, when I realize just how much faster and with a much higher degree of certainty she can do things, I find myself looking at the entire elephant and only see that we’ve finished eating a few toes and a little bit of the tail.

The elephant includes but is not restricted to technology and the accessibility thereto. The entire problem certainly includes technology and that is the milieu in which I contribute but we need also include transportation, access to print materials, travel, dining, non-technical aspects of our homes and workplaces, general conveniences and many, many more subgroups where the notion of accessibility plays a role.

In today’s essay, I will discuss some areas where I feel tremendously optimistic, others where I feel encouraged by progress and still others that represent the enormous part of the elephant we haven’t even started cooking let alone eating.

In the twenty or so years in which I have used various talking book services, both those dedicated to people with print impairments and commercial ventures like Audible.com, I have enjoyed watching availability to such materials increase dramatically and I also like the speed of which accessible books become available much more now than ever.

I find Bookshare.org to represent one of the most exciting developments of this period. Hundreds, maybe thousands of volunteers scan books, fix up the quality and place them into the BSO library while the terrific staff under the leadership of the frenetic genius of Jim Fruchterman adds more and more titles in an industrial manner. Less popular books make it to the BSO library as it only takes one or two people with a scanner, OCR program and PCs to care to add it to the library to make it so. Thus, dilettante members of the literati like me can enjoy volumes of literary criticism while others, for example, might prefer real hard core science fiction which rarely makes the popularity cut used by groups who use a more formal process to determine which items should be added to their library. This combined staff and volunteer approach creates a tremendous balance between the nearly anarchistic tastes of the target audience while ensuring access to important instructional materials for students who need them.

Meanwhile, the digital download portion of NLS provides an an ever growing and excellent collection of titles with professional readers. RFB&D continues to expand its already impressive library and other projects like Web Braille and Project Guttenberg continue to provide very cool materials in a consistently valuable manner.

It also should be mentioned that many public libraries around the US and the rest of the world have computers available for their visitors and some systems have access technology on these machines and those that do not can be accessed with System Access to go by a person with vision impairment. Thus, people who cannot afford their own PC or other bit of machinery to use to access accessible materials can do so in many of these libraries. Most of the accessible library, Internet café and computing lounges around the world emerged in the past decade and, excepting fallout from the current economic crisis, I do not see this trend slowing at all.

Accessibility to computing machinery continues to improve each year but, sadly, does not always keep up with the pace of mainstream consumer electronics products. For instance, our friend Jamal Mazrui recently posted to the blind programmer mailing list that he had trouble buying a new desktop at Best Buy. Jamal, unquestionably one of the most advanced users in our community went to the big box store with a list of requirements that would work for a person with vision impairment. If I remember correctly, he wanted a reasonably fast processor, a ton of RAM, a quick hard disk, a good audio system, wireless networking and a few other odds and ends. Jamal didn’t care about a real kicking video adapter or other components that make gaming and more advanced multi-media functionality possible. Jamal also chose to use the Best Buy Geek Squad service to bring his new machine to his home and install it and the wireless network.

When Jamal’s new computer arrived, the kid from Geek Squad set it up, got the wireless network working and waited as Mr. Mazrui tried to install a Windows screen reader. To his shock and dismay, Jamal learned that none of the major commercial Windows screen readers worked with his new box because it came with a 64 bit version of Vista preinstalled on it. Trying to solve the problem, the Geek Squad guy called the store and found that the very middle of the road big box store no longer sold anything with a 32 bit OS included.

Over the past few months, we’ve heard a lot of pretty cool stuff from GW Micro, including its scripting facility, first to market with iTunes support and some other doo dads that impressed those of us who follow this stuff pretty closely. FS has done some nifty things with its 10.0 release, including knocking off the System Access feature that provides the user with the ability to control a remote computer if it has JAWS installed on it and what I have heard but haven’t had time to try is a really excellent set of improvements to its support of Firefox, Aria, iAccessible2 and Web 2.0 content. Meanwhile, the Serotek guys continue to make highly innovative improvements to System Access without charging their installed base for upgrades. Unfortunately, none of these Windows screen readers work in the 64 bit version of Vista which seem like the only one sold off-the-shelf at the mainstream consumer electronics stores.

An excellent bit of news, however, comes from the guys who make NVDA as they have grown into the only Windows screen reader that runs under the 64 bit operating system. So, while I’m encouraged by improved accessibility to Windows, I get grumpy over the lag between mainstream progress and that which we PWVI can access.

I am very optimistic about the progress I’ve seen in VoiceOver and Orca on Macintosh and GNU/Linux respectively. VoiceOver worked immediately when Apple moved to the 64 bit version of OSX and continues to impress me on a daily basis with how well most OSX applications work with the newcomer to the screen reader market. The same can be said for Orca which moves forward at a pace far more rapid than that of the more established screen readers on the Windows platforms.

I’ve also been happy to see companies like Apple with its latest iPod and Olympus with some of its digital recorders/media players start adding accessibility features to mainstream devices. I expect to see much more of this from a much broader range of manufacturers in the recent future. These developments are certainly very tasty bites of our elephant dinner.

Looking at the entire elephant, however, means we must explore accessibility outside of the pure technology arena. As independent people with vision impairment, we need to deal with lots of low tech situations that cannot always be remedied with high tech solutions. I’m writing this essay on an old Toshiba laptop plugged into the AC outlet on the dashboard on the Toyota Matrix we own. I have JAWS 9.xx.xxx running at the moment but, if I need or want to , I can switch to Window-Eyes or SA as I’ve both of them installed on this clunky old PC. Thus, I can use Microsoft Word to compose an essay in the car but I cannot navigate the menus on our XM satellite radio or do terribly much to adjust the climate in the vehicle or, without launching one of the accessible GPS programs I have, get a good idea of where we are and how much further it will be until we reach Savannah where we will stay the night.

Traveling in general represents a whole bunch of accessibility challenges. Few airports provide relief areas for service animals that do not require leaving the security area and being rescanned on the way back in. If one is traveling far and has relatively short times to switch planes, one’s animal can grow very uncomfortable and, in some rare cases poop right in the terminal. . [Note: X-Celerator has only crapped in one airport and I think he may have been making a statement on the overall experience of Atlanta/Hartsfield as it is, for man and beast alike, one of the least pleasant buildings on this continent.]

Most hotels provide rooms that they claim provide universal accessibility. Unfortunately, lowering the bar on which one can hang clothing, putting in a roll in shower and roll under sink, adding flashing light fire alarms and a few other alterations that intend to accommodate people with mobility impairments and do a little for people who cannot hear provide nothing useful for blind people and, even more so, sometimes make the room less comfortable as it contains a lot of variation from the standard hotel room to which many of us have pretty well memorized.

There are a number of things that a hotel can add at relatively low cost that will actually make a guest with vision impairment considerably more comfortable. These include such simple things as a large print and Braille channel guide for the television. A tactile map of the remote control would be nice too. Maybe a tactile way to tell between the real and decaf coffee in the room. There are lots of talking thermostats available and none cost too much. A tactile/large print guide to the telephone would be nice too. None of these items need be placed in a room in advance of of a blind person’s arrival, they can simply be handed to the blink when she checks in and it can be returned at check out time (I suppose this isn’t true for the thermostat but maybe that can be made in a modular enough manner that it can easily be swapped in or out as needed).

Hotel housekeeping personnel should learn that, if a guest self identifies as having a vision impairment, they should do their best to return objects to the place where they had been when the guest put them down. At a Ritz Carlton in DC once, I had to call the front desk to send someone up to my room to find almost everything whose location I cared to know every time I came back to my suite. After a couple of days and my repeated requests to the Ritz concierge they finally caught on that I didn’t want to go on a scavenger hunt to find my shampoo every time I wanted to take a shower. The Ritz Carlton chain, with its $850 per night charges, can become very accommodating very quickly but standard Red Roof Inns or other low cost roadside attractions have far less careful employees who never seem to have a clue.

Some hotels have rooms that have windows that face into a courtyard or atrium. When I enter such a room I pull the curtains shut as I can’t see out and I’d usually prefer that no one can see in and, even more so, I presume that few people on the outside want to look at me. Inevitably, a hotel housekeeping person will reopen the curtains and I will forget to check their status when I take a shower. Thus, I will reenter the main part of the room naked and cause people on the outside to see a nude dude when they didn’t care to. I’d be most afraid of this if I stayed in a hotel like the one in Toronto that faces into the baseball stadium. I can’t imagine that 60,000 Canadians want to see me in the raw.

Public transportation in the US is, in most places, too poor to even warrant discussing. I am, however, on my way back from Boston to our home in Florida. Hence, I’m leaving a public transit Mecca to return to a god forsaken sandbar which boasts a mediocre bus system that doesn’t really seem to go anywhere I want to be.

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA called the T by locals) provides a tremendous level of accessibility to nearly every place in the immediate Boston metropolitan area. X-Celerator and I traveled independently on three different subway lines, a handful of busses and enjoyed the pedestrian friendly environment at our destinations. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland and a few other forward thinking locales have systems that range from very good to excellent but the vast majority of our nation looks at pedestrians as freaks and feels that reducing greenhouse gasses by using mass transit is akin to converting their entire population into atheistic communists.

Even in pedestrian very friendly places like Cambridge, MA (across the river from Boston) much can be done to improve the accessibility of the sidewalks. People who use wheeled mobility for transportation got blended sidewalks to provide better access for their use well before anyone realized that highly blended sidewalks are a hazard for blind people and also cause really bad puddles to form on rainy days. So, to mitigate these problems, the city has started to install “foot Braille” but seemingly in random locations and blinks cannot count on their being everywhere. Cambridge has also put in beeping traffic lights at some intersections but as this is also inconsistent one cannot count on their being present.

Brookline, Massachusetts has talking traffic lights which are just different enough to those that beep to cause confusion. I would have hoped that the region could have gotten together to roll out a consistent set of these aids in the entire area covered by the MBTA.

It seems that an increasingly large number of restaurants, especially major chains like Ruby Tuesday’s, Hard Rock Café, Applebee’s, TGI Fridays and their equally mediocre analogues that line the roadsides of generica have started offering Braille menus. A personal pet peeve is triggered when a server asks a sighted companion, “would he like a Braille menu?” which often causes me to blurt out, “I’m not fucking deaf!” which usually makes me feel bad for losing control but this trigger really hits a raw nerve in me.

Unfortunately for me and more than 80% of other blind Americans, Braille literacy is too poor to use an embossed menu with any efficiency. I can figure out what it says but so slowly that it is always better to have the menu read by a companion or a server if I am alone.

As an increasingly large number of restaurants have web sites and have started, in some cases, to offer Wi Fi to their customers, I have the wild idea of having said restaurants put their menu onto their local system and people with all sorts of disabilities can employ the user agent of their choice to access the information. I could fire up IE on my mobile phone and the default page that comes up for customers can provide the menu which I can read using Mobile Speak Smartphone. This is easy, low cost and will make a tremendous difference for all kinds of consumers at these eateries.

Shopping, in the traditional “brick and mortar” sense of the word remains a tremendously challenging activity for people with vision impairment. While these places of public accommodation do little to prevent blind customers from entering, they also do very little to make the shopping experience convenient. If I go to a super market on my own, I ask X-Celerator to find the customer service counter and, assuming it’s in a relatively standard place, we get there and ask the assistant manager to please assign us a person to help us shop. Then we wait for said peon to arrive and start on our way. I will then ask our companion if he knows what items are on sale which either evokes a shameful reply implying that due to his illiteracy we cannot go over the circular together or a response that suggests that this person can hardly speak English or Spanish or any other language that I might be able to stumble through food talk well enough to communicate. Oddly, I’ve gone shopping in New Delhi and have always had better English speakers assigned to helping me than can be found in Florida or Boston. I agree with Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in his debate with John Adams as they campaigned for the presidential election of 1800 that the US should not have an official language but I also believe that people in customer service jobs should not be selected from the lot of the least useful people at the shop but, rather, should be literate and speak the languages of the majority of their customers with reasonable fluency.

Once assigned a helper, we set off to purchase our groceries. I always make a list so I do not forget anything but there seems no way for a shopper with a vision impairment to browse or do any impulse buying. To wit: when I’m buying my staple fresh fruits (bananas and vine ripened tomatoes) I have no way to know that some seasonal fruits and vegetables are present, hence, I miss out on blueberries, peaches, red plums and other delights that aren’t always present. If my companion had to recite every bit of fresh produce in the department, I’d have no time to get to the meat or peanut butter. Other entirely impulse purchases, Marshmallow Fluff, Scooter Pies, pre-made kidney stew, etc. also seem out of reach as said companion would need to recite every product in the store as we pushed the cart past them which would make for a very long amount of time spent hearing mostly things I don’t want.

I do not have a good solution for the grocery shopping problem nor shopping for clothing or other items about which one might enjoy browsing. I know some blind people who buy the exact same kinds of clothing all of the time. They know precisely what to ask for and when they get home they know their white shirts will go with their khaki slacks, black socks and regular pair of shoes. Frankly, I like to be a bit more expressive with my wardrobe and find that I must bring either a woman or gay friend to help me pick out nice outfits.

I could go on and on providing examples of the rest of the elephant that we still need to digest but I am feeling tired now but will write a part two and maybe three in this vein during the coming weeks as there is just so much I would like to cover.

-- End

A Birth in the Family

2008-10-02T11:57:00.001-05:00

On Monday, Dena Shumilla-Wainright, my dear friend and occasional contributing author to BlindConfidential gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Elise Jaden Wainright entered the world weighing in at seven pounds and 13 ounces and stretches a solid 19 inches long. Both Dena and Elise are very healthy and happily back in their home near Minneapolis.

This is the first time since we started BC that we get to announce anything as joyful as the addition of a beautiful new baby to our extensive family. Please join us in sending your best wishes, prayers and anything else you would like to add to celebrate this grand occasion to Dena and her husband Jason.

-- End

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3490 (20081002) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com

Crisis, What Crisis?

2008-09-30T08:47:00.001-05:00

“If we don’t act now this sucker might go down…” – President George W. Bush.

While I find it a bit alarming that the President of the United States refers to the world’s largest economy as “this sucker,” I must admit that I feel some real anxiety after listening to the news on the radio and hearing about the near daily financial domino falling without any actual plan in place to recover from this meltdown. I can’t say that I entirely understand or support the Paulson proposal that went down in the House yesterday but, at the same time, I can’t tell whether its supporters, the more left leaning Democrats or right leaning Republicans have the right answer to this enormous problem.

I do know that the partison grandstanding helps the situation not at all. Yesterday, at noon when it seemed like the package would pass, John McCain spoke and took credit for driving the bill through demonstrating his superior leadership. By three in the afternoon, though, he blamed the Speaker of the House for making a partison speech that hurt the feelings of a number of Republicans so badly that they would put aside their concern for our national economy to cry foul and change their vote. Do our elected officials really find trivial statements so alarming that they will change their vote just to get some measure of revenge.

Meanwhile the Speaker and the Minority Leader obviously didn’t count their votes before bringing the bill to a floor vote and, instead of holding back until they could guarantee passage of some sort of legislation, they lost and scared the poop out of Wall Street causing the largest point drop in the history of the Dow. What were they thinking?

On Sunday, both McCain and Obama endorsed the bill but neither seems to have the so-called “juice” to get their respective parties to rally behind them and their positions on such an important issue. I did find Senator Obama’s calming statements yesterday, without partison venom, to sound very much like a leader as he explained that, although congress didn’t succeed yesterday, that they will get something done soon. Obama didn’t blame either party but, rather, explained how complex legislation can take time and isn’t pretty to watch being made.

On the presidential race, on Friday night at the debate, John accused Obama of being reckless for “saying out loud” that he would support strikes across the border into Pakistan if our intelligence said that the bad guys were their. On Saturday, Sarah said the same thing as Obama, on Sunday, the McCain campaign tried to explain away her statement as, although quite explicit, being somehow different from Obama’s position. Meanwhile, Joe Biden made a claim the FDR went “on the television in 1929” for one of his fireside chats to help calm the markets and the population – this has the two problems: FDR didn’t take office until 1933 (Hoover was president in 1929) and the only televisions around were prototypes.

Why is it that nothing seems to make sense anymore? Have I fallen through the looking glass or were all of those Lyndon Larouche conspiracy nutcases actually right?

-- End

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3481 (20080929) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com

Boris Goes Paranoid

2008-09-26T10:39:00.001-05:00

By Gonz Blinko

“Now I'm hiding in Honduras

I'm a desperate man

Send lawyers, guns and money

The shit has hit the fan…” – Warren Zevon

“You should have on your body at all times or at least nearby your passport or passports if you can get more than one, an open ticket to a neutral nation, any visas you might have, a weapon, enough cash and credit cards to get anywhere in the continent and the keen sense required to staying one step ahead of the bastards,” rambled Boris.

“Huh?” I asked.

“You never know when you need to leave a country in a hurry and the US is included in the list. The NSA keeps very close watch on guys like you and me and Echelon reads all of our emails, tracks all of our mobile phone calls, that’s why I keep changing numbers, they are watching and will have us in Guantanamo if we aren’t constantly aware and keeping ahead of them.”

We had just reached Boston via the Outlaw Biker Race from Miami Beach to Beantown and we disputed the results. One of the Angels said he saw the winning bike from Sy T. Greenbacks’ team with Leland Burr driving and Gore Glendon holding on for dear life board a helicopter in South Carolina and fly, bike and all to Boston. The rest of the competitors started calling them the Rosey Ruiz of the outlaw motorcycle set.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, “You are starting to worry me,” I added.

“Shit, I’ve been all over the world, been to a lot of countries, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba…. A lot of places that King George the W. doesn’t like… They watch me like a hawk to make sure I’m not too far out of their line of fire. If I go missing for a little while, I usually find myself climbing out a hotel window and jiggying the hell out of town.”

“You’re just paranoid,” I said.

“Really, why is there so much static on my phone calls, what about the helicopter?”

“Boris? What the fuck are you talking about? What helicopters?”

“Every city I go to, helicopters.”

“Maybe they are traffic helicopters?”

“That’s one cover, hospitals is another. Really, they are out to observe us in the dissident class. Those of who oppose globalization but support internationalization.”

“The difference?”

“If you don’t know, we can’t take the time, I got to get out of Boston, got to keep moving. Your Everglades spot is good cover but who knows if the Seminoles won’t turn us in?”

“Dude, take a pill, take two or three, they’re small, maybe four or five,” I said offering my old friend a jar of valium.

“Negative,” he barked, “I can’t lose my edge.”

“Why do you need to get out of Boston?”

“Mick Traynor.”

“The retired General?”

“One in the same.”

“What about him?”

“He spotted me in Charlie’s Kitchen while I was eating my double cheeseburger this morning.”

“Do you know General Traynor?”

“No, but he knows me and he’s certainly sent the fort my coordinates.”

“He’s a Harvard professor now, he’s not doing military stuff anymore.”

“Sure, the perfect cover.”

“Why would he care about you or your hamburger?”

“Double fucking cheeseburger and he’s the lead guy on Boston surveillance.”

“You sure you don’t want a pill? How about a Phenobarbital?”

“Are you working with them? You want to knock me out so they can cart me off and I’ll wake up with a cattle prod up my ass in some nation that allows such things” yelled Boris as he stormed out the door.

“Poor bastard,” I thought, “he’s really gone around the bend.” I picked up the phone and called Sam.

“What?” she answered.

“Boris. He thinks he’s about to be extraordinarily rendered because Mick Traynor came into Charlie’s while he was eating a double cheeseburger.”

“He could have a point,” said Samhara.

“What?”

“Only kidding. Did you try to sedate him?”

“He refused both valium and Phenobarbital.”

“Where is he now?”

“He stomped off,” I said, “I would guess he’s heading to an airport or some other transit center. He said he has a handful of passports, some visas, an open ticket to…”

“A neutral nation, cash, a weapon,” finished Sam with a sigh.

“You knew about this?”

“He’s been repeating that same line over and over like it was some kind of mantra since he came back to the states.”

“Has he really gone nutty?”

“No,” stated Samhara with some authority, “He probably got laid last night and he still runs from any potential commitment.”

“Still?”

“You know Boris, she was probably some rich little snatch whose daddy works with his daddy and he doesn’t want to deal with any fallout from the family.”

“Isn’t he almost fifty?”

“He’s 48 going on 17, he’ll never change.”

“Where do you think he’ll go?”

“Doesn’t really matter, let’s just enjoy the quiet until he comes back.” Added my lovely lawyer.

“Want to get cheeseburgers?”

“Sure, I’ll see you at Charlie’s in an hour.”

-- End

Window-Eyes 7, Macintosh, Heading South

2008-09-23T09:31:00.001-05:00

If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend that you go to Darrell Shandro’s Blind Access Journal blog and read the article he posted yesterday about the Window-Eyes 7.0 release. Darrell raises the journalistic standards for blogs in the blinkosphere while providing a well written and highly informative article about the latest from GW Micro. For more on my opinion of Darrell’s piece, read the comment I left on BAJ about it as soon as DS gets to letting it through the moderation process.

-*-*-*-

I have continued learning more and more about my new Macintosh, VoiceOver and the user experience for people with vision impairment on the Apple platform. I have not yet checked out the new accessible interface on the iPod Nano but have heard some fairly positive things about it from various people who send me bits of information, their opinion on matters and other random ideas.

As I delve further into VoiceOver (VO), I find that some of its behaviors which I had complained about in some of my earlier posts on the topic actually have advantages over the more traditional screen reader user interfaces and, once one grows accustomed to the VO way of doing things, these improvements become more obvious. Although I often rant and rave about the lack of innovation in UI concepts in access technology, I am also an old fart stuck in his ways who is a bit lazy when it comes to learning new ways of doing things – even when they provide improvements to the status quo.

Specifically, I wrote that the need to hit a keystroke to interact with HTML content was a dumb idea. As I’ve used VO more, though, I have learned that their web content interaction mode with its sense of object navigation actually provides a greater sense of context than the linear, “virtual buffer” interfaces that the Windows screen readers expose.

In general, the object navigation interface that VO provides offers a sense of context about all sorts of items one may encounter in all sorts of different applications. This manner of navigation takes some practice to appreciate but, when one makes the transition, it really shows its worth.

Because VO is a purely API based screen access utility, applications with which it works, work very well. Some programs can certainly see accessibility improvements but those that comply with the newer, Cocoa Macintosh API tend to work with VO right out of the box and perform very, very well in situations that long time Windows screen reader users might think would be problematic.

I suppose I should spend this paragraph tipping my hat to Peter Korn of Sun Microsystems. He and I have debated the relative merits of OS hooking and/or COM methods of gathering application information versus a purely API driven solution. I conceded to Peter that an API system would cause fewer stability problems than seem to be inherent in OSM solutions but I also argued that no API based system could provide a good enough level of context (either through brute force “review cursor” methods or by hand coded COM solutions for each different application); it seems that Apple, with VO, has found a middle ground and can provide a decent level of contextual information without either requiring custom aspects for each application or by inserting instabilities into the entire system. Customized communication with specific applications will, using today’s technology (I can already hear Will jumping in with a comment about a future with a synthesized vision approach being superior), definitely provides the greatest ability for an access technology to communicate very specific contextual information to its users but, excepting very complex interfaces, such extra work needn’t be done to provide a very usable interface with an above average level of information the user can enjoy about the items that surround the point of focus.

While I have not tried to use Apple Script and Apple Events with VO, people more familiar with the software and with Macintosh OSX Leopard tell me that these components built into the OS can be used to gather information from applications with more complex interfaces, much in the manner of the COM methods of doing things in Windows, and can, therefore, provide detailed contextual information where necessary. As these technologies are built into the Macintosh operating system, they are likely to be far less kludgerous than proprietary scripting techniques seen in other access technology products.

I still have a number of items I think Apple can do to improve VO substantially:

First, the five finger keystrokes that a user needs to hit if using a laptop really must go and be replaced by a set of key bindings designed specifically for the less comprehensive keyboards. Next, allow the user to select the Caps Lock and perhaps some other mostly useless keys as the VO key modifier. I hate the Caps Lock key and feel strongly that one should be able to use it for something other than typing in all capital letters like we did back in the PDP-8 days. Continuing in the same set of ideas, something equivalent to the key binding editors available in most other popular screen readers is a must for VO in the future.

Second, Apple should jump on the iAccessible2 bandwagon and get Firefox working really well. In its current incarnation, VO doesn’t work with Firefox without the FireVox plug-in and, in Safari, the native browser shipped with Macintosh, it works poorly with more complex web pages often described under the sweeping name, “Web 2.0” that may use AJAX to provide a more interactive experience for users.

Lastly (I may have more applause and complaints in the future but this is the final one I can think of today), VO should be released under a GPL or other libertyware license with its source code as soon as possible. There are a lot of hackers with vision impairment who have a ton of great ideas for the future of screen readers and can make them possible with something like VO as a starting point.

-*-*-*-

My annual sadness caused by the looming date in which we must return to Florida has kicked in. We will point the Toyota south next Wednesday or Thursday and, a few days later, arrive in St. Petersburg and the intellectual barrenness of the god forsaken sandbar on which we live for most of the year.

Since coming to the Boston area in July, I have had the opportunity to enjoy a lot of really great performances, readings and conversations that are not likely to occur in the land of the weird. On Sunday, we went to the American Repertory Theater to attend Anna Deavere Smith’s latest one woman plays that absolutely captivated the audience and evoked lots of different emotions, ideas and concepts in a way that she can do far better than most. Next Tuesday, I will go with Susan and some friends to hear Shamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winning poet read some of his works. Both of these events happen within a short walk from the front door of our Harvard Square condo. The only short walks from our house in St. Petersburg are a few not bad restaurants, a lot of places to get work done on a car and a barber shop and, to be quite frank, I don’t need all that many haircuts.

Of course, I will enjoy the Florida weather, the fresh fruit from the trees in our yard and the lack of the miserable elements that fall upon the Boston area from late November until May. I’ll enjoy my fishing and X-Celerator will have fun seeing his friends in the park.

-- End

Moron the Vic and New GPS Thoughts

2008-09-18T10:39:00.001-05:00

By BlindChristian, the Vic Moron

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” an axiom to which I cannot find an individual to whom I can attribute it.

I have now purchased four Humanware Victor Reader Stream devices. I like having two, one at home and one at the office so, if I forget to bring one with me in either direction, I’ll have one when I arrive. I avoid listening to anything on the Boston subway line as I fear missing a stop and kind of prefer avoiding laughing out loud at something I hear as that will possibly cause the other passengers to assume I am a lunatic in addition to being blind which, while somewhat true, doesn’t need to be reinforced in the minds of my fellow passengers.

So, if I like having two Vics, why have I purchased four?

I also own a relatively old Blue Tooth GPS receiver that has an AC adapter nearly identical to that which comes with the Vic. The word “nearly” being the operative term in that sentence means that it feels exactly the same to my touch at least but, to meet the requirements of each device, they have different voltages. If you haven’t guessed it yet, I have now managed to use the GPS adapter on a Vic twice, completely blowing out its motherboard and, in less than a second, rendering the device useless.

Fool Me Once

I believe everything I have written about the Vic in BlindConfidential since I got one has ranged from praise to a downright ecstatic description of the device, its form factor, price, feature set and almost everything else I have encountered regarding the product. While I commend Apple for making an accessible iPod, for me, I will stick by my Vic.

So, for the first time in these pages, I have a serious bone to pick with Humanware and the people responsible for making the Vic ship kit. Specifically, why is there no Braille or otherwise distinguishing label on the AC adapter which might obviate the mix up that I have encountered with my old GPS unit?

Fool Me Twice

While I think Humanware should have put some kind of obvious distinguishing tactile ornament on the AC adapter, but, having made this mistake once already, I could and should have put a ribbon, a twist tie, my own Braille label or some other distinguishing feature on the AC adapter so I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Indeed, I acted like a moron and blew out a second Vic. Thus, I have now acquired four of the devices so I can actually use two.

I do recommend that Humanware put some tactile indicator on its power supply but, in the interim, people like me who own a whole lot of gadgets, some of which have nearly identical AC adapters should heed my advice and put on your own distinguishing feature and avoid blowing up your toys by mistakenly using the wrong power supply.

-*-*-*-

I received the notice that Code Factory, in partnership with Mike May’s Sendero Group, has released the long awaited Mobile GEO GPS navigation system. I’ve been using various betas of this software for the past few months and can say that it works better than any GPS program I have ever tried at pedestrian speeds. Of course, most of the others which I have tried were off-the-shelf programs designed primarily for motorists and implemented their tracking algorithms assuming motion at five miles per hour or faster, quite a pace for someone on foot.

The only other GPS navigation program designed for people with vision impairment that I have tried is StreetTalk from Freedom Scientific which, as of my last trial, didn’t perform especially well. Also, the FS product requires one purchase a PAC Mate (roughly $2000 or more last time I checked) and Mobile GEO, while priced at something on the order of $895 can run on any Windows Mobile 6.x device along with Mobile Speak SmartPhone or Mobile Speak Pocket – if one buys the handheld and the screen reader from AT&T, adding a super cool Holux Blue Tooth GPS receiver (not the one I blew out my Vic with) and Mobile GEO comes to about $1150, a major savings compared to software that requires blind guy ghetto hardware.

Today, I plan on installing Wayfinder Access on a Symbian phone with a built in GPS receiver. I will test with the on board receiver as well as with the Holux which seems to be just about the best very portable (it has a loop for your key chain) receiver I’ve ever seen. I will compare the two programs but, Wayfinder Access has two features that do not exist in Mobile GEO that I like purely on face value. Specifically, Wayfinder Access uses one’s mobile Internet connection to continuously download maps as you travel so you don’t need to take the extra step of downloading and installing maps by state as you do with Mgeo (some people think this is an advantage of Mgeo as it does not require a mobile Internet connection or the cost associated with such). The second bit advantage to the Wayfinder product is its $325 price tag which, at more than $500 less than Mobile GEO really makes one think hard about which to purchase.

As I haven’t tried Wayfinder Access yet, I cannot proffer an opinion as to whether the $575 price delta is or is not worth paying.

-*-*-*-

As I state above, I am really impressed with the Holux Blue Tooth GPS receiver. I believe I have the model 1200 which does not have a user changeable battery but holds a charge for a pretty long time and weighs less than one ounce. I believe their model 1000 has a battery you can change on your own but is a big bigger and, therefore, less sexy.

The Holux product comes with one of those miniature CDs that contains only documentation. I recommend that as soon as you open the box, throw away all documentation as it will cause nothing but confusion and present you with information that only the nerdiest of people might care in the slightest about. So, throw away the little CD and the booklet lest you get exposed to their brain damaging manuals.

To wit: one of the chapters that comes before “Getting Started” describes the algorithm in the Holux firmware used to triangulate your location with up to 30 satellites (I haven’t seen it pick up more than 18 which, in and of itself, is pretty damn impressive). You do not need to know anything about such algorithms. This information is only useful if you plan on building your own GPS hardware which I think is of little of no probability among BC readers. “Getting Started,” by the way, is something like chapter five. Also, the documentation reads as though it was written by an engineer for whom English is a third or maybe fourth language – ultra-geek with broken sentences that are almost laughable.

To use your new Holux BT GPS receiver, first charge it up, then, following the instructions on your Windows Mobile device, go through the BT pairing process (password 1 2 3 4) and everything will work properly. The Holux has two or three little lights on it that tell a sighted person by color and whether or not it flashes on and off a few bits of useful information (does it have a solid connection to satellites, is the Blue Tooth connected and is the battery running low) all of these details can be found in Mobile GEO and I would guess, other navigation software as well. Otherwise, the outside has only one item of interest to a user with vision impairment, namely the on/off switch.

The Holux devices are cheap at around $50 (a little extra if you want an AC adapter – by default it comes with a car cigarette lighter adapter) and, in my opinion, will probably make any portable GPS navigation software work better.

-- End

Moron Apple

2008-09-10T08:11:00.001-05:00

By BlindChristian, The Apple Moron

They fired up the new super collider earlier today and I don’t believe we all got sucked into a newly generated black hole and ripped into zillions of nano bits; meanwhile, Apple announced that the new version of the iPod nano comes with a speech synthesizer and that we blinks can now use it. As I’ve criticized Apple very heavily for accessibility problems in the past, I now want to celebrate the three accessibility announcements they made yesterday.

When I turned on my laptop and retrieved my email this morning, my Inbox lit up with google news alerts regarding Window-Eyes and Apple accessibility. Most of the articles and blog entries that fit through my information filters talked about Window-Eyes 7.0 beta 3 and its support for Apple’s iTunes on Windows based computers. Other alerts told me of the newly accessible nano and I received a very nice email from an Apple employee telling me about improvements to Apple’s accessibility web pages and, specifically, some new content regarding applications that now work with VoiceOver.

I continue to learn more and more about the Macintosh and using it with VoiceOver but I still consider myself an Apple moron, hence the title of today’s article. I want to send out thanks to the Macintosh using friends who have helped me through some problems and provided me with pointers that make the experience as pleasant as possible. I do seem to have an odd problem with iTunes caused when I try to add a large number (over 3000) songs to my library from an external hard disk all at once. At first, iTunes seemed to hang while adding a song, yesterday, after a telephone consultation with a Macintosh/VoiceOver expert friend of mine the program got hung up (its menu in the Dock said “not responding” and, just to make sure, I let it run for a couple more hours without any notable progress) while trying to find the album artwork for an Angelic Upstarts record I forgot I owned. Nonetheless, I still have yet to create an iTunes library from my MP3 collection without allowing the files to be copied from the external disk to the one installed on the laptop. Today, I’ll install and try again with iTunes 8 and turn off the feature that downloads album artwork as I have no imaginable use for it and don’t want to clog up anything with a pile of pictures I can’t see. Of course, one man’s iTunes problems don’t add up to a hill of beans in this world so if I don’t get back on the laptop I might not regret it today but will certainly regret it someday.

For a long time, iTunes has sort of worked with JAWS with a set of scripts written by a volunteer user but, based on the comments of others, it didn’t work well. I do not have iTunes 8 or Window-Eyes 7 beta 3 installed on any computer to which I have access so I can’t speak to its performance but if it works anywhere nearly as well as it does with VoiceOver, the most widely discussed multimedia program will have really excellent support on Windows.

In the past, I’ve been fairly critical of what I believed was time wasted by screen reader publishers trying to get media players, chat programs and other software supported that do not have a direct effect on employment or education as these, in my mind, represent the most important problems people with vision impairment encounter. I especially find that Freedom Scientific’s decision to permit some previously supported applications (Microsoft Project, OmniPage, etc.) to stop working, which are important to professionals and students alike while pronouncing with excitement support for yet another chat program especially egregious.

Serotek’s approach to the “digital lifestyle” that approaches the screen reading problem with far greater emphasis on home and educational use than on supporting professionals has a lot of merits and does an excellent job of doing what they advertise. GW Micro seems to be looking for a middle ground and, with the addition of its scripting facility, will possibly become the most comprehensive screen reader for Windows relatively soon. These are certainly interesting times.

I’ve drifted way off from the titular subject of this post, specifically things to do with Apple and accessibility. In a few minutes I will install iTunes 8 onto my Macintosh and give it a whirl with VO, later, I will go to the newly updated Macintosh accessibility web pages and peruse the list of supported applications but I will not buy nor try the iPod nano as I’m very happy with my Humanware Vic and really do not need yet another gadget bouncing around in my gear bag.

I commend Apple for taking these steps to improve accessibility to their programs and look forward to whatever they do next in this market niche. I continue to think it is in the best interest of both Apple and the community of people with vision impairment to release VO under a libertyware license so the world of hacking blinks can take a whack at adding new features and fixing the odd bug. For now, though, I will admit that the version of VO that comes with the Leopard operating system releases provides access to virtually all of the application categories that I use with any great frequency and that the development tools that ship with the OS are very cool.

-- End

Dane Brammage

2008-09-05T10:50:00.001-05:00

I’ve spent the past few weeks learning to use Macintosh Leopard Edition with its built in VoiceOver (VO) screen reader. I struggle badly from a disease I will call JAWS and Windows on the brain (also known as dane brammage). Although I’m learning the Macintosh and VO keystrokes a bit at a time when I want to accomplish something quickly, the fingers try the JAWS/Windows commands and the Macintosh simply beeps in confusion.

I have started writing a long piece about my adventures with Macintosh and VO and, after a couple of weeks of pretty heavy use, I give it very high marks. One area (relating to my dane brammage) of which I have a low opinion is the superfluous incompatibility of VO and JAWS/System Access keystrokes. To a pretty large extent, Window-Eyes and NVDA stick pretty close to this unofficial “standard” set of key bindings as well. If the Apple people want to attract converts, they should try to flatten the learning curve by giving we Windows folks a bit more welcoming look and feel.

I have other criticisms and also a ton of applause for the Macintosh laptop, the Leopard OS and VO which I will post in the longer article that I’m actually writing in “real time” on the Mac.

One thing I can say here is that, except for rebooting when Apple sent me an OS update, I have not turned the Macintosh off or done a restart in close to three weeks. I have VO (a screen reader, a class of products known to insert instability in operating environments) and, as a real novice Macintosh user, I hit lots of strange keyboard combinations that would work with JAWS or SA but not with VO and all I ever get is a little ping from the laptop telling me I have done something useless.

Next, I will say that some of the VO keystrokes, especially the four key (CTRL+OPTION+SHIFT+DOWN) to be able to read html content is just plain stupid. First, if I opened a web page, I probably did so because I wanted to read it and I should have landed in something like the virtual buffer as presented by the rest of the screen reader world – this goes beyond superfluous incompatibility into just plain weird. Second, it requires four fingers – I play a little blues piano but never have to stretch that far.

On a positive note, the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” television commercials have a lot of truth in them. My Vista desktop with the same CPU, same amount of memory and a larger cache runs far more slowly than my Macintosh laptop. The same tasks can take up to triple the amount of time on Vista and double on XP but my XP laptop is a single core 2005 relic I keep using because it refuses to die and motivate me to replace it. Of course, with the VMWare XP on my Mac, I may not need this old work horse any longer.

The last thing I’ll say about the Macintosh here is that the battery life and temperature regulation is nothing short of amazing. Running a dual core, 64 bit processor with 4 gb of RAM, I have used the Mac without recharging for six hours (not idle time but, rather, doing a fair amount of work) and still haven’t received a warning that the battery had drained to an unsafe level. As far as heat is concerned, I can run the Macintosh for all six hours right on my lap without cooking my testicles for dinner. I don’t know how but these units remain far less hot than a similar PC running for one hour.

Lastly, I did want to point out a new blog out there written by Aaron Leventhal, a friend, colleague and one of the finest minds I’ve ever encountered in the AT biz. You can get to it at http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/. He has a very well considered article about how VO works with Firefox and some other goodies up there. Also, if you haven’t already, you should definitely subscribe to Marco Zehe’s accessibility blog as it’s one of the best access technology blogs I’ve read to date.

-- End

Orange, An Interview (Fiction)

2008-08-20T08:46:00.001-05:00

By: Boris Throbaum

“It must have been 1953, right after my sophomore year at Fairleigh Dickenson,” said the retired Exxon executive. “I got an internship with General Foods in their food coloring division. I majored in chemistry and it was a good fit.”

“What did you work on?” I asked.

“The first summer, our objective was to find the color for the shit that would later be called Tang. I thought the stuff tasted horrible but GF thought they could sell it and I worked on the color.”

“In lay terms, our readers probably don’t understand a lot about chemistry, can you describe what you did?”

“Well,” he continued, “ in the laboratory, we developed different compounds that would likely not make people sick that ranged in hue from a sort of a sandy very pale yellow to a natural juice color all the way to a shockingly bright orange that we all kind of laughed at.”

“And…” I prompted.

“We got sent up to Harlem, right across the street from the AT&T building on the west side to see which colors the customers preferred.”

“Why Harlem?”

“Because, as our boss explained it, if any of our colors make anyone sick, no one really cares if its only negroes (the word he used at the time) so we were minimizing risk.”

“What followed?”

“We spread out the drinks in different colors all the way from least colorful to most. Most of the pitchers contained some color of the Tang mix, one contained actual orange juice and a couple had the juice but watered down a bit.

“Except for those with real juice, all tasted identical, that was sort of our control in the experiment.”

“What did you learn?”

“We had to go back to Jersey and work on some more colors.”

“Why?”

Nearly 100% of the tasters chose the brightest colored drinks. It didn’t make sense, real fresh squeezed juice versus the crap we built in the lab in Jersey, where people do believe in better living through chemistry but this made no sense. Tang tastes like shit but people overwhelmingly chose the brightest color.

“So, we went back to the lab and came up with even brighter colors and back to Harlem with an array that contained really delicious fresh squeezed juice in its natural color and a variety of brighter shades that ran all the way to LSD 25 orange, a color that looked as though it came from the Manhattan Project.”

“And what happened?”

“Are you just stupid or have you never seen Tang?” Asked the retired oil man. “The blacks picked the nuclear orange and the taste tests went the same around the rest of the country. People, it seems, don’t give a shit about taste when they can get their drinks in a brighter color.

“We were so proud when NASA picked Tang as the beverage to send to the moon.”

“What happened after your electric tang tests?”

“I went back for my junior year and the following summer we worked on making Lipton Noodle Soup as orange as we could.”

-- End

Blogs and Press Releases

2008-08-15T07:47:00.001-05:00

Recently, I have read a lot of blogs that focus on blindness and technology simply repost press releases with no commentary or criticism. Thus, having google news alerts on “Freedom Scientific,” “Window-Eyes,” and others in the biz, I find that I get hits on posts that, for all intents and purposes contain identical material.

Most recently, I must have seen at least a half dozen reposts of Dan Weirich’s statement on the FS v. GW patent lawsuit. Weirich says some interesting things in his short statement but one only need read it once, perhaps directly on the GW blog or in the press release directly if you receive such. I think this shows a general laziness and lack of courage on the part of the blindness blogosphere as receiving a statement and simply copying, pasting it and posting it with no analysis, commentary or criticism, positive or negative, provides those of us who read a variety of these blogs with a lot of duplicated information and absolutely nothing that the bloggers we respect enough to read regularly think about the issue. I have spoken to some of these people on the phone since FS filed the suit and there is no shortage of opinion or analysis going on but the public statements from independent parties are few and far between.

One blogger did title his repost of the GW statement as “GW Responds to the Idiotic FS Suit,” which at least said that he thinks the lawsuit is idiotic. While I oppose all software patents on principle, I can say that “idiotic” is probably not the right adjective as a US Federal District Court felt it had enough merit to warrant a hearing and judges at that level don’t take many whimsical cases onto their docket. The blogger spent no time explaining why he felt the suit was “idiotic” but, rather, just pasted Dan’s statement in and let it ride.

Patent and other IP law can be very complex, seemingly ambiguous and even appear contradictory at times. There are many very nuanced bits of language in the FS patent and possible ways for GW to respond both in the court of public opinion and in the District courts. I would think that instead of simply reprinting posts by Weirich and Lee Hamilton, the bloggers should provide commentary, opinion, and something else to turn their posts from simply repeating the various corporate propaganda and proffering editorial information that can better express their stance on the suit and why they think one or the other side is correct.

It might be an interesting exercise for the blind blogosphere to try to organize an amicus brief on behalf of one of the parties in the suit or one that takes neither side but provides an explanation of the technology, its user community and the potential effects that a decision favoring either company would have on us. Providing those who follow the blogs as their primary form of information would benefit from we so-called experts dissecting the corporate statements and delivering the information in a manner more friendly to our readers.

I suppose I’ve ranted enough.

-- End

CNN Spam

2008-08-11T08:16:00.000-05:00

For the past few years I have used the spam filter (called “junk mail”) feature in Outlook 2003 and 2007. Consistently, it has done a terrific job of filtering out virtually all spam sent to the handful of email addresses I use. Recently, though, emails claiming to be from CNN containing my daily news alerts have been passing right through the Outlook filter and into my Inbox.

My first clue that these emails were junk came with my not having any recollection of signing up for CNN news alerts (I use google news for such). So, without even opening the first of these notes I found in my Inbox, I went directly to the Outlook Actions menu, selected “Junk Mail” and then “Add to Blocked Senders.” Since then, Outlook hasn’t caught a single of these phony CNN posts and, for each one, I have gone through the Outlook junk mail procedure in hopes that it might start to catch on. Sadly, I find four or five of these CNN mailings sneaking in every day.

Does anyone out there have a strategy for stopping these? Does anyone know what it is that these spammers did to break the Outlook filter for their messages that 99% of the other spammers haven’t figured out?

I can’t say this is the worst issue I’ve ever encountered but it is quite annoying and I would like for it to go away.

-- End

Libertyware

2008-08-09T09:48:00.001-05:00

I love words. In another life, I could imagine myself as a philologist, linguist or lexicographer. In this life, for better or worse, I became a software engineer and manager thereof.

Software has always had its own jargon and vocabulary used by people in and around the biz and universities. Many of these have even leaked into the mainstream. With the explosive growth of the Internet, people who ten years ago had no computing skills frequently use words like “spam,” “bug,” “blue screen,” “crash,” “interface,” “CPU” and so on.

Recently, I have dedicated nearly all of my time to working on access technology programs that fall into the category known as “free software” by some, “open source” by others and a few other terms used by different groups of people to try to describe the licensing schemes applied to different software.

Richard Stallman, the individual who most credit with coining the term, “free software,” and the somewhat more descriptive, “free as in freedom” and I have discussed finding a term that can distinguish between these different licensing schemes and declare accurately which are “free as in freedom.” The word I suggested, libertyware, seems to contain the concept very well.

The word “free” can mean a number of different things when applied to software. One may think it means without monetary cost or gratis which is clearly a legitimate definition. Free might also mean “without restriction” which would include all of the software that is covered by GPL and some other libertyware licenses. In the access technology field, we have an additional monkey wrench tossed into the vocabulary gears as, in the world of technology for people with vision impairment, the largest company, the one that sells JAWS, the most widely used software in this particular market niche is called Freedom and is spelled with a capital “F” as it is a proper noun

Deconstructing the vocabulary of how the words “free” and “freedom” apply to software in our field led me to inventing the term libertyware as all of the possible combinations and, therefore, definitions can get very confusing and result in highly ambiguous statements which the author thought held a level of precision far greater than readers who come from different backgrounds might think.

To wit: “free software” as in software that carries GPL affords the right to sell the software as long as the same liberty is passed to everyone else who can decide to sell it or give it away for free. The many GNU/Linux distributions that are sold for a price remain free software as one who pays for it can give it away without cost, has the source code and can take the liberty to make changes (as long as they provide their altered source code under the same license). Stallman referred to this as “free as in freedom” which causes a problem for screen reader users as, by default, no screen reader will announce whether a word is capitalized or not so a layer of ambiguity is added to the word “freedom” as one can be left wondering whether the author meant freedom in the liberty sense of the word or if they mean Freedom as in Freedom Scientific, which led me to start describing such software as “free as in freedom with a lower case f” which is cumbersome and meaningless to anyone who is unaware of FS, JAWS and access technology in general. Hence, libertyware.

The rats nest of definitions and terminology that surrounds the different licensing schemes outside of access technology and our added issue of distinguishing between software from FS and “free” software whether gratis or with the liberties afforded by the GPL and other similar licenses is difficult for all but the serious students of such who study the rather dry prose in these agreements and learn the details, nuanced as they may be, that distinguish one license from another.

For instance, the term “freeware” is often applied to software given away without cost but also without source code thus restricting the user’s ability to enhance, fix bugs or learn from the techniques used by the programmer who wrote it. This is often referred to as “free as in free beer.”

Some software, typically found in third party libraries that developers use to perform some tasks where they have learned that it will be cheaper to buy than build include source code which, in a narrow definition of the term, can be called “open source.” The people who buy the library do not, however, have the liberty to share the source code with others so a program can be open source without being free (in the sense of beer, in the sense of liberty or from Freedom Scientific).

Other programs can include source code, hence be open source, but not be libertyware as their license will include restrictions on how the software can be distributed and, in some cases, will permit the developers using the code to leave their changes out of future distributions and not, therefore, contribute to the community that built the source code upon which some of their program is based. I’m not sure if such licensing schemes has a term to describe it.

So, for the purposes of this paragraph all uses of “free” is in the sense of as in freedom with a lower case f, we can have free software that is not open source, open source programs that are not free and software that is partially free.

I’m confident that if Stallman was here with me, we could think up a whole lot more complications that surround the terms “free” and “open source” so, today, (after bouncing the idea off of rms and receiving his blessing) I offer the word libertyware to mean software without restrictions, software covered by GPL and similar licenses like Mozilla and Apache.

Now, I guess I should go over to wikipedia and add the word there and hope it catches on as I’ve always wanted to be credited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the inventor of a word.

-- End

Patent Law

2008-07-28T12:32:00.001-05:00

Over the past few days I’ve read a bunch of misinformed blog posts regarding software patents and how they apply to the Freedom Scientific v. GW Micro case. I hope, with this post to talk about the law and why it applies to this situation.

Note to readers: I am not an attorney nor have I attended law school. I have attended a number of seminars on software patents, user interface copyright and other IP law that surrounds the high technology industry. Thus, I’m speaking from the view point of a well educated dilettante. Also, way back in the eighties, I co-founded the League for Programming Freedom with my friend Richard Stallman. Our purpose was to oppose user interface copyright (a case we won in a Supreme Court ruling in Lotus v. Borland) and software patents which a pair of Supreme Court decisions ended up with us losing that battle.

Judicial History on Software Patents

A long time ago, IBM filed a suit against the US Patent and Trademark Office. They asserted that the work by Benoit Mandelbrot on fractal geometry and chaos theory should be granted a patent. The court took the position offered by the PTO and ruled that all mathematics exist in nature and, therefore, can only be discovered and not invented. Discoveries cannot be covered by patents.

Years later, AT&T filed a similar suit but, as evidence, brought the design for a bit of hardware that, while probably too complex to actually build, did describe a machine. They claimed that software was merely an implementation of the machine and, therefore, covered by patent. Our side (we filed an amicus brief signed by most of the most important contributors to computer science from Marvin Minsky to Rodney Brooks) used the IBM decision and added that all algorithms, all of software for that matter, could be expressed as a function of the lambda calculus, hence, it was an expression of mathematics and discovered rather than invented. We didn’t believe this was an especially great argument but it was the best we had.

Thus, since the At&T case, software patents have been granted in abundance.

Freedom Scientific v. GW Micro

FS had a patent on placemarkers as a screen reading feature while using an Internet browser. This patent was granted years before GW Micro decided to add the feature to Window-Eyes.

The GW Micro placemarker functionality contains a number of new and innovative features but, at its base, it starts by providing the same action as does the JAWS placemarker feature which, as one can find in a search of the USPTO web site is pretty clearly described in the patent granted to Freedom Scientific that makes placemarkers in screen readers on the web their soul property for 17 years since the patent was issued.

Improvements to an invention covered by a patent held by FS or anyone else for that matter are called “derivative works” as they derive their basis from another invention. So, in this case, it appears as though GW Micro (I say “appears” because I have not heard all of the evidence nor am I member of the jury) based its invention on the one in JAWS which probably means it is a derivative work and, therefore, is in violation of the FS patent.

In most industries, GW would file for a patent on its improvements and then try to negotiate a cross licensing agreement with FS so GW could use the base feature and FS could use the GW enhancements. Unfortunately for GW, they published their beta before filing for a patent of any kind and, thus, created the published prior art for their own invention.

There are a number of arguments that GW can make in a court to defend themselves against FS but I cannot think of one that does not require removal of their placemarker feature from Window-Eyes.

Innovate, Don’t Litigate

By stating the above as clearly as I can, I must also say that I do not endorse Freedom Scientific’s behavior in this matter. I agree with many of the other bloggers that the new Window-Eyes with its very cool scripting facility is a major step forward in screen reading technology.

FS doesn’t advertise the patents it holds in JAWS anywhere in the product or package so GW could have unknowingly added the feature entirely without notice that FS had a patent on it. In my opinion, FS should have sent a warning before filing a suit but I have not been on their executive staff for nearly four years so my opinions are meaningless regarding their strategy on all matters, including prosecution of patents.

But, as far as I can read it, FS has a very solid case and are well within their rights to protect their intellectual property. Do I think this is ethical? Well, as I helped organize the fight in the Supreme Court against AT&T, you can probably guess where my emotional side stands but emotions are worth caca in a patent dispute.

I hope this piece helps the community understand how this tricky bit of law works and why FS has a very legitimate claim – whether you and I like it or not.

-- End

Placemats

2008-07-27T11:21:00.001-05:00

By Gonz Blinko

Samhara and I started packing up the house boat more than a month after we would usually leave the Glades. We had some unfinished business in the area and managed to withstand the heat, humidity and the mosquitoes the size of Volkswagens. Boris had left after a couple days (I’m not sure we could have taken him much longer anyway) and was camping out with El Negro up in South Beach. All of us were preparing for the Outlaw Biker Race from Miami to Boston and BC was sponsoring our team.

“Hey Sam,” I called, “You gotta read this article in Diner Access Journal.”

“What’s it about?”

“A patent lawsuit, more your department than mine.”

“What’s it about?”

“Waffle House has filed suit against Denny’s over the ingredients in a newly designed and quite novel omelet recipe.”

“Huh?” asked Sam who I heard walking toward me. “A patent over an omelet recipe?”

“Well, it also says something about improved placemats but as I haven’t eaten in either joint in about four years, I can’t really comment on either invention.”

Sam started reading aloud, “Waffle House got a patent on a five egg banana omelet served on an oversized plate with a special placemat.”

And?” I asked.

“I remember that filing, I think the patent looks pretty solid except in cases where the user prefers their eggs runny,” she continued. “Here’s a link to Denny’s response written by Douglas Giraffe himself.”

“What’s it say?”

“Giraffe claims that the new Denny’s five egg banana omelet also contains Philadelphia Cream Cheese, jalapeno peppers and a secret sauce only previously known to exist in Indiana.”

“Neither sounds too appetizing,” I added.

“Douglas also asserts that his five egg omelet is served on a square plate with an oval placemat which means it is entirely a new invention.”

“I haven’t looked at patent law since the old LPF days but this one looks kind of sticky.”

“I think the only sticky part comes in if you order either omelet with the optional maple syrup,” answered Samhara.

“Has anyone else chimed in?” I asked.

“All of the usual folks in the diner blogosphere.”

“what are they saying?”

Sam paused for a moment to read a couple of other posts from members of the NFD (National Federation of Diners), ACD (American Counsel of Diners) and the official Diner’s Club blog.

“The response is mixed,” she said ponderously. “The types who know patent law pretty well seem to go with Waffle House, the more emotional ones go with Denny’s and, the political types are saying things like innovate, don’t litigate.”

“But this case actually seems to cover a pair of innovations,” I said, “the original five egg banana omelet on the over sized plate and the special placemat sounds pretty unique to me. I can’t think of any published prior art.”

“I’m not sure,” stated Sam, “Us law is based in first to invent but international patents go to the first to file. I’m certain that Waffle House was first to file and I can’t think of a diner anywhere that served their special combination of eggs, bananas on an oversized plate.”

“But what of all of the extras Denny’s added?” I asked.

“They might count for something, maybe they have enough novelty to be considered a different invention altogether.”

“What is Waffle House saying about all of this?”

“Their CEO asserts that they spend a lot of money on research and development and need to protect their costly inventions.”

“Typical,” I said.

“Omelet House made a statement claiming that they had the first five egg omelet but said that Waffle House pays them royalties on them and they admit they do not use bananas,” explained my African lawyer.

“What does BC say?”

“He’s been preparing for the race, I don’t think he’s paying attention to any of this.”

“Smart man,” I said, “enormous egg dishes with bananas fly in the face of sanity and BC has always been a bit on the edges of permanently crossing over into weirdsville.”

“Let’s get back to work and get our sweaty asses out of this jungle,” insisted Sam.

I had no way to argue so I continued our packing for our voyage north to the place where we store the house boat until next summer.

-- End

Time For Cooperation

2008-07-17T07:46:00.001-05:00

Over the past week or so, I’ve seen two announcements proclaiming new technologies for community driven projects to label non-compliant web sites that work poorly with screen readers. Adding these to C-Saw from Serotek which has been around for years makes three systems that total to superfluous and counterproductive sectarian standards that should be harmonized as quickly as possible to provide the entire community with a unified database standard so, no matter the AT they choose, all will enjoy similar results.

As I mentioned the other day, Mike Calvo, CEO of Serotek, has offered C-Saw as an open standard to any team that wants to incorporate it gratis. Similar facilities by IBM and WebVisum only came to my attention over the past few days. I understand entirely why user agents to access the database of label information will differ as each needs to fit with the paradigm of the specific screen reader.

WebVisum is a Firefox plug-in and needs to conform to Firefox plug-in standards; System Access is a Windows screen reader that works best with Internet Explorer and, consequently, needs to be compliant with the rules that govern such. All I know about the IBM analogue is that it works with JAWS and, therefore, needs to (at some level) fit into that model. Knowing the IBM accessibility people pretty well, though, I would guess that it is designed for portability and will be offered to other projects as well. I would also assume that Orca and VoiceOver on GNU/Linux and Macintosh could, if they chose, add functionality to access the same database as well.

Putting the obviously platform and technology specific user agents, in this case, any screen reader or web accessibility tool, which necessarily will have variations ranging from OS to browser to user interface paradigm, aside, we can now explore a harmonized database off in the cloud that shares all of the label information. This will give everyone the head start of the more than 4000 web sites already labeled by the users of the screen reader formerly known as Freedom Box coupled with the new systems provided by IBM and WebVisum. If the new systems don’t drop easily into other screen access utilities (Window-Eyes, HAL, NVDA, Thunder, etc.) I doubt it will be too great a technological challenge to add the user agent side.

If the people from WebVisum, IBM and Serotek can get together to discuss and ultimately create a common database standard, the data can sit off in the cloud not caring whether it’s a Mac running VoiceOver, a Windows box running NVDA or a Symbian handheld running Mobile Speak and all of the users will be able to contribute labels to pages that have none and enjoy the labels others have put in before them.

As, at the very least, the current WebVisum and probably the IBM systems are at least somewhat user agent agnostic, building a universal database and populating it with five years of Serotek data as a starting point can really start a fire. Having four thousand pre-labeled sites will provide volunteers with immediate positive feedback that a community based system has been at least partially proven to work. This added layer of usability will, in my opinion, provide added motivation and tear down some artificial boundaries between users of different screen reading technologies.

As, for all intents and purposes, the WebVisum Firefox plug-in works with the other AT out there, if it could harmonize its database with the one Serotek uses, the history of community involvement in labeling pages will be preserved and five (or more) years of Serotek users and volunteers won’t be lost. I will assume the IBM system is similar and encourage them to join trilateral talks on bringing all three projects together.

A long time ago, I published an article to this blog about cooperation being the key to innovation, you can search for it in the box above, which proposed the hypothesis that, as regards underlying technology, AT vendors waste a ton of cycles reinventing the core technologies that occur in all such programs. One reason JAWS has an enormous worldwide market share is not because it has a better off screen model or virtual buffer than the others but because it exposes a user interface to far more mainstream and obscure proprietary applications than do the others.

If all screen readers and web access utilities start using a web labeling technology that shares a common database, those who provide the most comfortable user experience or invent a special way of delivering this content in a manner I cannot imagine at the moment, will win but all screen reader users, from those who cannot afford anything besides the no-cost and free solutions all the way up to the Ferrari programs can, as a single community, share a unified database.

BC, as small a voice as we are, encourages Serotek, WebVisum and IBM to put their collective heads together (they all have some really smart people), perhaps invite people from NVDA, Apple and Sun and bang out a common database format for a set of labeling facilities, work together and take at least one step toward ending some of the counter-productive sectarianism that often causes people in this biz to reinvent the wheel. I also want to emphasize that all parties to this discussion come with an open mind and be willing to make changes to their technology rather than letting their egos get the best of them – all of us are very proud of the work we do but, to build a community, we will occasionally need to put our pride aside and work toward the greater good.

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