Windows 7 has an Ease of Access Center, which was originally introduced in Windows Vista. It’s a single place where all of the accessibility features and settings can be found. Windows 7 includes some new accessibility tools, and improvements to existing ones.
Magnifyer
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Google Wave is the latest innovation in online communication. It's caused a great deal of interest across the industry, and may well herald a new era in online social interaction. It's new, it's cutting edge and it's exciting. It's also a catastrophic accessibility failure f...
Imagine getting home from work, collecting the post from the mat and sitting at the kitchen table to go through it, while you wait for the kettle to boil. For most people that's domestic normality. For many blind people, it's a process that involves a computer, scanner and O...
Accessibility 2.0 is a one day conference hosted by AbilityNet. With six presentations and two panel discussions, topics ranged from mobile interface design and accessibility beyond the desktop, through to HTML 5, WAI ARIA and Silverlight accessibility.
Considerations for Ac...
Standards.Next is an informal meetup hosted by Opera, and attended by anyone with an interest in web standards and beyond. On Saturday 19th September focus turned to one of the most unchartered areas of user experience: Cognition and Accessibility.
Cognition covers an incred...
Jaws 11 public beta introduces support for drag and drop with WAI ARIA. Although Jaws has included desktop drag and drop capability for some while, the same functionality on a web page has always been more difficult. Jaws 11 now indicates which elements on the page can be dr...
Vinux is a Linux distribution optimised for blind and partially sighted people. Originally based on Ubuntu, Vinux 2.0 beta was released earlier this month based on the Debian distribution. Vinux boots with screen reader and Braille support fully loaded, and with screen magni...
Sunday lunch is a time to indulge yourself. Gather up your friends and family, catch up on all the news, and enjoy a sumptuous roast. For years I wondered how to roast pork so that the crackling came out just right. The secret is slow cooking, proving that all good things in...
Like most good recipes, this one has evolved over the years. It's one of those dishes that you can play fast and loose with, without worrying about it at all. Two of my favourite foods are chorizo and cheese, so this recipe comes perilously close to heaven as far as I'm conc...
Rich Internet Application (RIA) websites encourage people to generate content, collaborate online and make choices about the information they receive. Unsurprisingly, RIA websites can represent a considerable challenge for screen reader users. The WAI's Accessible Rich Inter...
There's simply no denying it. Twitter is one of the web's killer applications of the moment. It's not uncommon to hear of people buying a computer and getting online, just so they can start tweeting.
Twitter is also proving popular with blind and partially sighted people. Th...
Bruce Lawson recently asked whether adding rel=accessibility to the HTMl 5 specification was a good idea. Among the initial comments, Jared Smith noted that getting assistive technologies to support the idea might be a problem. For the major screen readers at least, I though...
Emoticons are short strings of punctuation intended to express emotions in type written text. Text can be a very antiseptic way of communicating and without the ability to see the facial expressions of the person you are talking to, it can sometimes be difficult to correctly...
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The WAI is a branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation that provides guidelines and specifications for many web technologies.
The mission statement for the...
