JaunsCorner.com Blog

Update: Added English translation and pictures on November 23rd, 2007!
When I decided to write this post, I was standing in front of our small post office here at the University of the Nations in Kona, holding a letter in my hands, which the postal service had returned to me. “Requires postage” was written on an acompanying note. And they had added an excerpt of their conditions of delivery, too. It was the result of my first try to send out a letter as “Free Matter For The Blind” here in the United States. I must have missed to follow one of the rules (here you get them as a pdf), but nobody (including the assistant of the postal service, whom I called for clarification) could exactly point out, which one it was.

This was the moment in which once more I started wondering: Somehow, accessibility and services for the blind did not seem to work the same way here in the USA as in Switzerland. I always seemed to have these strange things happening to me, whenever there was an accessibility issue involved. Do other blind people around here feel the same about this? Or am I doing something wrong?
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May I invite you to check out the naturbild.ch page real quick? It is my friend Martin Mägli’s web site and he does seem to be a really talented photographer.

These days, he is performing a slide show, presenting some of his greatest shots.

I do hear a lot of good talking about his works, which is why I thought I would support him promoting this project on here. He has, on a page which is totally inaccessible for my screen reader by the way, listed his tour dates, so why don’t you give it a try and see if there is a chance for you to go see it?

I just wanted to confirm This article by Mike Little. The post states that the new WYSIWYG Post Editor in Wordpress - the greatest blogging software in the world, is “no longer accessible”, at least for those not using a mouse. As I am blind, I indeed belong to the non-mouse-users on this planet; on the other hand, I read the article after upgrading to the new Wordpress 2.0 version and thought to still give it a try before, as suggested in the post, downgrading to the older 1.5.2 version again

Now what I discovered was that indeed the WYSIWYG Editor is hardly usable or accessible for the blind (users of popular screen reading software). Switching off the editor, which means kind of switching to ‘classic view’, solves the issue - at least for me, as you all can see now (or was I unable to post this article after all?) So I am glad I still can use the 2.0 edition of Wordpress and enjoy the fixed bugs and the groving number of plugins available for it!

Now as for uploading pictures or other files, I have not tried anything yet, but according to the article, it might be difficult, too.
I spent the last minutes trying to find a quick way to upload a recent picture of Leo, my most inteligent dog. But to make it short: I couldn’t find one within yet, since the auto-thumbnail-creation seems to be gone in this version.
So I guess Leo has to stay with me for now and will be released as soon as I find the time to install another Image Plugin

happy new year everyone anyway!!!

Scandinavian Airlines is doing another promotional campaign, this time under the name “christmas Calendar - It’s a small world”.
Every day, they send out an email presenting a city to the reader and asking to Click To Open The Calendar, to get a great deal on a trip to that city and so on and so on.

Unfortunately, when you visit this web page with a Screen Reader, the only thing you get is the subscription form as well as a “Macromedia Movie Window”, which contains only the word “tag” - everything else is not readable to the screen reader or its user.

I will - maybe - try to contact SAS on this again. But after not having gotten any feedback on my last emails to them about similar issues, I hardly have any hope - especially not for this year’s Christmas.

I just had my first online tutorial tonight. My University is using one of these Voice Conferencing tools to do distant courses.

It was quite fun discovering that systems like that really do work. There would be some accessibility features to be added if one wanted to see me even more excited, but it is a beginning. And itis definitely better to use than some false prophets claimed it to be…