News

After a couple of years of telling people they shouldn't use "read more" links on pages, I've finally managed to clean up my own act and fix this page. Why is "read more" a problem? The Web Accessibility Content Guidelines state: "Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context -- either on its own or as part of a sequence of links." Using "Read more" makes scanning a page by a blind user much harder. Generally a blind user will skim the page by bringing up a dialogue window with all the page links. I've included an image of a JAWS list links dialogue box viewing this site with the new descriptions. The last three articles posted now make sense out of context even though they are still proceeded by "read more".

Accessworld has a very thorough review of the new Victor Reader Stream. We have a batch of these arriving very soon which I am very keen to trial. There is a large demand out there for a combined portable voice recorder and daisy player and this player and from the review the stream does these things very well. It is also very reasonably priced for a piece of adaptive technology at $440. Read the Accessworld review.

The biggest improvement in adaptive technology over the past few years has been courtesy of cheap and large LCD monitors. A large LCD with the appropriate graphics settings is one of the best ways to improve the readability of text. Tasmanian Living Technology has been pushing 22' monitors for the past year, and now we are seeing 24" screens becoming mainstream. With this in mind, I decided to take the plunge and purchase the new Dell 24" screen, the E248WFP.

Tasmanian Living Technology has compiled a list of ATMs with Audio capabilities. On most models the audio jack is found just to the right of the screen. This is not a complete list and is taken from the banks websites. ANZ and the smaller banks do not publish if their ATMs are accessible. Audio ATMs require the use of headphones which are commonly standard mini jacks, although the banks are able to supply a headphone kit at the branch. (photo CC by Gemsling on flickr)