Using Videos to Influence and Change Perceptions
I’ve just come back from speaking to a lady who works in the same company that pays my wages and who has rapidly diminishing eyesight - a rare eye condition has left her with something similar to cataracts, and a feeling of seeing everything through a heavy white curtain. The reason for my visit was to interview her and capture it on video, and ultimately the edited clip will be used in presentations that I’ll be doing within the company. Because it’s all well and good to talk about accessibility affecting people ‘out there’ but for many people these kinds of people are ‘mythical beasts’, so what better way than to show that "these people are here, working under the same roof as you - and they won’t thank you for not making your web pages or web apps accessible".
So it’s fantastic that as I sit here, with freshly videotaped evidence in hand, that I discover this set of videos on the web. Admittedly, these are promotional videos for AssistiveWare’s technology rather than a general collection of videos of people using other assistive tech, but it’s still darned useful for the likes of us who sometimes need to demonstrate to people the various ways that disabled users interact with web pages. I’d be more than happy for the likes of Freedom Scientific or GW Micro to take the same approach. More video resources are very welcome indeed!
[Note - I know that this is not a new resource, just new to me, as it was new to Roger. That’s the beauty of using del.icio.us - I found it in the popular page for the accessibility tag]
Boagworld - Ask The Expert - Screen Reader Screencast
It’s taken me a while to get around to posting this here, but only because I wanted to make sure that I had everything in place. If you are already a subscriber to the Boagworld podcast, you’ll probably already have heard this, but a couple of shows ago they included a 14-minute audio clip of me using a screen reader demonstrating some common problems. But it wasn’t just audio, there was also a video to go with it (the audio was simply lifted off the screencast).
I didn’t post anything here just yet as I was missing one essential ingredient – a transcript. Finally I’ve got around to typing that out, so if you’re interested, here are all the links you’ll need:
A Glimmer of Hope with AJAX for JAWS users?
I may be reading too much into this, and admittedly the source is one who’s quoting rumours, so it’s hardly a basis of a solid claim, but it still piqued my interest:
Rumors are starting to form about the upcoming JAWS 9.0 release. So far, Blind Confidential has only heard that it will do “revolutionary things on the Internet" … FS [Freedom Scientific] had included language about support for AJAX in JAWS in some of its 8.0.xxxx release notes but this was later removed so, perhaps, they have found a way to provide really cool access to some of the new dynamic web pages in a manner that would be meaningful to a screen reader user.
Like I said, only a snippet, taken from an after word of a post on Blind Confidential about how screen readers perform on Vista, but it’s the first time I’ve read something halfway encouraging on that front.
