Aira Event Alert: Visual Interpreting at the Kentucky Derby!
🎉Join us for the 150th Kentucky Derby with visual interpreting by Aira! Following our successful streaming of the 2024 solar eclipse, which engaged over 500 listeners, we’re thrilled to continue expanding access for the blind and low vision community.
When: Saturday, May 4th, with Aira coverage from 2:30 pm - 4:15 pm PST
Where: Live on the Aira Explorer app (more/events) and via Zoom (access link to come). The event recording will be posted on our YouTube channel for post-event viewing.
Our visual interpreters will be describing everything from race details to jockey silks, symbolism to event history, and horse breeds to competitor profiles. We know the importance of experiencing events to their fullest and our team can’t wait to continue bringing visual interpreting to your event day festivities.
Hope for visually impaired photographers: I love photography. But I have a small problem. I am legally blind in one eye, and suffer from Fuch’s dystrophy, which means my eyesight will keep deteriorating, and probably faster now that I am old. The only cure for Fuch’s is a corneal transplant, which comes with a bunch of problems of its own. The symptoms, for me, have been difficulties focusing on the subjects of my shots. Since the LCDs on cameras are small, and the viewer is essentially useless to me, my solution has been eyeglasses and a BIG smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, because I have used Samsung for years). And a lot of tossed images! And some unhappiness with how my good shots turn out.
Of course, I am not the only person in the world suffering from impaired or increasingly impaired eyesight! And not the only photographer watching their love of the art of light receding into the twilight. There must be something available for folks like us! I did a lot of research online before I decided on the smartphone. However, I bought it before this came out:
Sony Develops Affordable Camera for the Visually Impaired
The current owner of #VoiceDreamReader is the Applause group, who offer #accessibility auditing and testing services to many high-profile clients. When Applause are paid to evaluate the accessibility of a product, they are expected to point out some of the exact issues that have been raised in relation to their work on #VoiceDream, such as controls that have no labels or accessible role information, images without alt text, etc.
This hints at a wider problem in the industry, where companies are "cashing in" on the market for accessibility-related services without actually being that invested or incentivised to do good work. Do Applause work with #disabled testers? Was anybody there tasked with testing the application with a #screenReader and other #assistiveTechnology? If not, it raises questions about whether their accessibility services are a force for good, or are actually causing harm.
Are you coming to the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in Anaheim, California next week?
We're looking forward to catching up with everyone there! Don't forget to swing by Orange County 1-2 at 2:20 PM on Thursday 21st March for our session. Learn what is new and coming up in NVDA, meet our new CTO, Gerald Hartig, and have the chance to ask questions of the team!
It seems there is a fail-safe way to show how much the GPT behind Be My AI can hallucinate - the slips of paper inside fortune cookies. Both a friend and I have had false results with these in two different languages, none of them being English, over a different period of time. Any experiences? And that's my random post for the morning. #Accessibility#Blind#AssistiveTechnology
Think, those things that let you feel #morsecode tactilely, I'm not sure what they're called. Also things that blink CW, radios that talk or are easy to attach #braille labels too, etc? You get the idea.
As the final gift of this year’s iA Winterfest, we want to let you in on a secret. We have been working on iA Presenter for iPad and iPhone for some time, and it is now robust enough for beta testing.
"Live regions provide a solution for announcing dynamically added content that would otherwise be missed by screen readers, but their behaviour is not consistent across different browser/screen reader combinations."
Another deep-dive article on #HTMHell, this time about #ARIA live regions by Andrea de Souza. Bookmark this one, this will be a great resource once you need it! 💪
Here’s a head scratcher for all you smart, techy blind people. I have a Word document where a caption is written in all caps and visually, it appears in all caps. JAWS is reading some of the characters as lowercase. The characters in question also appear as lowercase on my Braille display. My sighted co-worker assures me they are all capitalized. Thoughts? What’s up with that? Specialized formatting is very critical to what I do and I need to be able to trust my screen reader. #Blind#ScreenReader#JAWS#AssistiveTechnology
Time to re-up my intro post. Hi there Fedifolk, I'm Kerri. I mostly post about #books, #SFF, #AssistiveTechnology, my adventures learning the #Ukulele and whatever else strikes my fancy. (with 2024 on the horizon, expect some #USPol too.) Also love #Baseball, #Hockey, #Dogs, #MusicalTheatre, and #Advocacy among many other things. Oh, and I wrangle calendars and medical records for a living, but you won't hear much about that. Proudly #Blind and #Aroace. Nice to meet you.
We need to remove #Chosen from our sites since it has #accessibility issues (#screenreader users just hear "blank blank blank" when navigating options) and the project has been abandoned by Harvest.
I've prototyped a very lightweight multiple-select that just uses a fieldset and checkboxes with a tiny bit of css and js to visually collapse things when the focus is elsewhere.
Testing and feedback would be helpful, especially from users with #AssistiveTechnology
Happy #Rimiversary!
One year ago saw the latest iteration of an application that truly broke the mold in the #assistiveTechnology space: the world's first all-inclusive, fully accessible #RemoteSupport solution. That software is our much loved #RemoteIncidentManager, and it's had quite a year already! Time flies when you’re breaking barriers, and the milestones RIM has seen are nothing short of historic. What exactly has RIM been up to, you might ask? Let’s pull back the curtain on this ground-breaking year for our product. https://pneumasolutions.com/happy-rimiversary/ #accessibility#inclusiveDesign
“Accessibility shouldn’t just be a box you check. It should be cool.”- Steve Decker, Target’s Senior Manager of Accessibility 🎯
On Episode 5 of Access Matters 🎙, our host Jenine Stanley will sit down with Steve to discuss how his team has built inclusion through accessibility into the Fortune 50 retailer’s offerings.
What would make a programming language more #accessible to you?
I'm particularly interested in the experience of people who have tried to code but gave up, #Neurodivegent people, people who use their computer via #AssistiveTechnology, people who code in a language other than English and people who tried #FunctionalProgramming but found it too weird or limited.
Also, what kind of program would you like to write?
I think I did my homework already, but #mastodon is very accessibility conscious, and I'm sure there's a lot more for me to learn.
Based on feedback, we've made some exciting changes to the 'Design For Everyone' short course (formerly titled 'Designing Desirable Assistive Technologies)...
The full course now runs in a compressed format (4 weeks of content + exhibition) and we're proud to be a Recognised Design Entity with the Design Institute of Australia, meaning the course is eligible for DIA Accredited Designer points.