Planet a11y

Just as http://blind-planet.org/aggregator aggregates blindness-related blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds into one spot so you can read them all on a single page, Planet a11y is an RSS aggregator which aggregates accessibility-related feeds so you can view them in one place. Be sure to check it out at http://planeta11y.org

CPR/AED for the Professional Rescuer

CPR/AED for the Professional Rescuer

Saturday, December 16.  9am – 5pm 

CPR/AED for the Professional Rescuer is designed to teach professionals with a duty to act the skills needed to respond appropriately to breathing and cardiac emergencies, including the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) to care for a victim of cardiac arrest. Frank McDonnelly of the American Red Cross is the trainer.

To register:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dExaeURqNWV0bG1DMmJ5TUNGdGgtcGc6MQ

Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Web Sites

 From:  VICUG-L, the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.

I thought some of you might find the documents I reference below of interest as you shop online during the holidays.

I don't know about you, but when I go online during the holidays, I just want to find what I'm looking for and check out without needing any help. But sometimes, by the time I'm done, my holiday cheer is beginning to fade. Trying to use an inaccessible site to buy a gift or make a donation on behalf of a loved one can take time I simply don't have during the busy holiday season.

But if I spend a little extra time to report my experiences to the organizations that run the sites I visit, I believe my efforts will make the Web a better place next year.

As I make my shopping list and gather links to the sites I plan to visit, I'm adding a couple of other links to my collection, so they'll be handy. I'm also setting up an email template or two in advance to help me quickly report my shopping experiences -- both the good ones and the ones that are harder than I might wish.

Why not join me and start off your New Year positively by helping to make the Web a more accessible place?

Find tips about giving accessibility feedback to Web sites by visiting these two Web pages, brought to you by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative:

http://bit.ly/inaccessible1

http://bit.ly/inaccessible2

 VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.

Archived on the World Wide Web at

    http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html

CDESK for NLS BARD

WOULD YOU LIKE AN EASIER WAY TO USE YOUR COMPUTER EVERYDAY?

CDESK by AdaptiveVoice Makes Using Your Computer SIMPLE, with FOURTEEN Easy-To-Use Applications!

- WORD PROCESSING
- EMAIL
- INTERNET BROWSING with SCREEN READER
- DOCUMENT SCANNING with OCR PAGE READING
- ADDRESS BOOK/CONTACT MANAGEMENT
- CALENDAR/APPOINTMENTS
- NLS/BARD/MP3 PLAYER/GAMES
- INTERNET RADIO
- SKYPE AUDIO/VIDEO CALLS
- SPREADSHEETS/CALCULATOR
- NEWS READER

http://www.adaptivevoice.com

TCS Associates

TCS Associates demoing at STTS this weekend, Braille Pen and Orabis CCTV: www.tcsassociates.com

A list of products: http://www.tcsmarketplace.com/store/pc/home.asp

Maker Mondays

Building off of the November 12^th Accessibility Hackathon, “Maker Mondays” will be held on the first and third Monday evenings of December, December 5^th and 9^th, from 6pm to 8pm in room 215, Adaptive Services at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.  These events will be an opportunity for developers and users of adaptive technologies and web accessibility to get together to discuss and build solutions to accessibility issues.  The events will be open to remote participation via conference call and web audio-video.  Topics for discussion will include reports back on some of the ideas that were generated at the Accessibility Hackaton, including the Mobile Accessible Book Generator, a 508 Repository, a Mobility/Security working group, a Metro Access vehicle locator app, and various other accessibility fixes.  We also plan to experiment with generating an accessible book by scanning and then converting into a number of different accessible formats.  During the discussion we will also be experimenting with the AV and remote participation capability of the Learning Lab in room 215 - using Ustream, Talking Communities and Google Hangouts.

Maker Mondays

Monday, Dec 5th

Monday, Dec 19th

6pm to 8pm

Room 215 Adaptive Services

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library

901 G Street NW

Washington DC, 20001

December Events for the Adaptive Services Division

December 3^rd , Saturday Technology Training Session, 1pm to 3pm, room 215 – Richard Krafsig of TCS Associates demos the Orabis Read-Aloud text reader CCTV, a read-aloud text reader and a magnifier in one device, and the Braille Pen, a Braille display and Braille keyboard that works with iOs devices, as well as JAWS, System Access, Talks, Mobile Speak, has Bluetooth, connects to phone, netbook, PC or PDA, write SMS, does 6 key entry.  After the Saturday Session guests are welcome to visit the Open Data Hackathon in the  LibraryLab space on the first floor.  The Open Data Hackathon is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments.

December 3^rd, Braille Book Club for Kids, 11am to 12pm, room 215

December 3^rd, American Sign Language Story Hour, 11am to 12pm, Children’s Division,  

December 3^rd, Deaf Education and American Sign Language, 1pm to 3pm, Great Hall

December 5^th – Maker Mondays, 6pm to 8pm, room 215  – experiment with Talking Communities and other technologies for remote participation, Kevin Johnson, Red Cross

December 6^th – Tech Talk Tuesdays, 6pm to 8pm – Introduction to iPhone, iPad, iTouch and other mobile, gestural accessibility, open to all levels

December  20^th – AccessibilityDC meetup 6:30pm to 8:30pm, room 215

Accessibility hackathon ideas

Accessibility hackathon

The following is a list of products that have been proposed to be built colaboratively at the Accessibility Hackathon at DC Public Library on Saturday, Nov 12, 2011, 10am to 5:30pm, in the Library Lab space and Room 215. Please send any comments or aditional ideas to patrick.timony@dc.gov . Register at: http://accessibilityhackathon.eventbrite.com/

1. Light weight version of Bookshare for BrailleNote users using the Bookshare API (http://developer.bookshare.org)

2. TTS Twitter client either using Chrome TTS APIs (http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tts.html). See example code at http://github.com/gcapiel/ChromeWebAppBookshareReader

3. Searchable Repository of 508 Technology Guides. Jamal would contribute zip of content. Could be done in Drupal or Wordpress.

4. Mobile Accesible Book Generator - Scan a book with your phone, type in, speech recognize or OCR the text, keep the images and output an RTF, DAISY 3 text (http://daisy.org), or EPUB version, which can be submitted to Bookshare and other repositories of accessible ebooks for people with print disabilities. Particularly useful for children's books which have few pages and words.

5. Mobile App that detects when the person in line in front of you has moved. One idea is to check when the iPhone camera comes out of focus.

6. Mobile color identifier that speaks a smaller set of colors (8 or 16?).

7. Accessible version of Tor

8. Accessible fork of privacy tools at http://guardianproject.info using Android's Accessibility APIs

9. Alphabetic keyboard for beginning level VoiceOver users. The QWERTY keyboard arrangement is a barrier for some users.

10. Facetime Audio description network.

11. Face-Name or Voice-Name recognition Quiz for social networks - a system that would train the user to associate either images of a face or recordings of a voice with the name of the person they belong to

12. VoiceOver Math Equations, Audio Description for Video Programming, instead of audio track, have metadata - pause the screen and get an audio description, searchable

13. App for movie description via iPhone, a collection of inaccessible material made accessible using a mobile accessible format conversion station

14. Something that makes Twitter easier to read - automattically read a stream of information to you, using live regions ARIA Web App, a New Tweet comes in announces it automatically

15. Are there any apps that desperately need to be made accessible?

16. non visual mind mapping app -- structure information present non-visual trees, branching tree nodes, windows explorer - folders, nested folders, tree control http://www.informationtamers.com/WikIT/index.php?title=Mind_mapping_for_people_who_are_blind

17. An application that integrates with TheMashupApp, a powerful personal database that could work together with #4, #10, #18 and possibly others.

18. an application that makes audio description non-linear, with text to speech, from educational point of view, tagged, with layers of information

19. QR codes could be used to put in an app or provide info to the iPhone, add contacts to your iphone, a QR code on movie ticket, push description to iPhone, embeded in clothing, various object, specialized information, walking directions, signs specialized info pushed to iphone, tactile identification so you know where it is.

20. Any of various tasks that would help out the Adaptive Technology Program like making an accessible interface for Ustream where all the STTS audio and video is stored, captioning those videos, dragon-recognize Victor-Streamed interviews from the beginning of Accessibility Camp

21. an accessible conferencing solution

22. create accessibility templates, wizards

23. an iphone app for Metro Access that shows the location of all vehicles

24. basic, accessible installation profiles for Drupal, JoomLa!, or WordPress. Initial configuration settings, modules, and themes would be selected so as to maximize accessibility. Documentation would be included that explains why each installation profile was built in the ways chosen. Results of testing on WCAG or ARIA guidelines would be included if possible.

Accessibility Clearninghouse

As required by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act
of 2010 (CVAA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has launched a
clearinghouse of information about accessible communication technologies.
The official URL of the Accessibility Clearinghouse is

http://apps.fcc.gov/accessibilityclearinghouse/

Note that the path portion of the URL (after fcc.gov/) must be in all
lower case. An unofficial, possibly friendlier URL that is
a bit shorter and not case sensitive is

http://AccessibilityClearinghouse.info

That URL redirects browsers to the official home page of the Accessibility
Clearinghouse.

Library Tech Project during DCWEEK

http://digitalcapitalweek.org/projects/library-tech/
DC WEEK is a week-long festival in the US capital focused on bringing together designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators of all kinds.

Library Tech is a project that includes a series of events at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library that will bring together developers and users from the accessibility community to produce tools that meet community needs.

Please bring ideas for tools to the Nov 5^th Problem Identification Workshop.

Examples of tools that have been built at similar projects or have been suggested for this one:

·      An e-reading software for Bookshare books

·      A social network for using the FaceTime videophone app for remote audio description

·      A captioning tool that uses Dragon Naturally Speaking

·      A system that helps broaden the networks of Twitter users in the accessibility community

Saturday Nov 5th, 1pm to 3pm — Accessible App Demo

Saturday Nov 5th, 3pm to 5pm — Problem Identification Workshop

Monday Nov 7th, 6pm to 9pm — Accessibility Hackathon Preparation Session

Saturday Nov 12th, 10am to 5:30pm — Accessibility Hackathon

Details follow:

Saturday Nov 5th, 1pm to 5pm, Room 215, Adaptive Services, MLK Library

Accessible App Demo and Problem Identification Workshop

Presentors: Mark Reumann – Patent Office, Zuhair Mahmoud – Library of Congress, Don Barrett – Dept of Education

Agenda:

1pm to 3pm: demos and discussion of accessible apps, like MoneyReader or Color Identifier

3pm to 5pm: developers host a Problem Identification Workshop, to come up with tools can be built at a Hackathon the next Saturday.

Monday, November 7th, 2011 – 6:00pm to 9:00pm, Room 215, Adaptive Services, MLK Library

Accessibility Hackathon Preparation Session

Speaker: Gerardo Capiel, Bookshare

Agenda:

Gerardo will advise on choosing projects and how to set up the development environment.

He will speak about some related technologies like the Bookshare API:

http://developer.bookshare.org

and the new Google Chrome TTS APIs:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-text-to-speech-api-for-chrome.html?showComment=1319148125417#c3671817693482193507

Saturday, November 12, 2011 – 10:00am to 5:30pm, LibraryLab space, 1st Floor, MLK Library

Accessibility Hackathon

Agenda:

With the preparation of the Problem Identification Workshop on Saturday Nov 5th, the Hackathon Preparation Session on November 7th, and the help of organizations like Bookshare, Random Hacks of Kindness, LibraryLab, and the Wikimedia Foundation, we hope to be able to come up with a simple and completable ICT solution to needs that are defined by the user community.