Kris' Accessible Space

ICCHP 2010

2010-07-12T17:51:00.003-05:00

I am currently attending the ICCHP 2010 conference in Vienna, Austria. Wednesday after noon I will be presenting a paper on "PUIR: Parallel User Interface Rendering". The pape has been published in the proceedings of the conference, as part of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Thee proceedings to the conference can be ordered from Springer as LNCS 6179 and LNCS 6180.

Our DocArch group at K.U.Leuven is presenting a couple of other papers as well:

Strobbe, C.: Generating DAISY Books from OpenOffice.org
Frees, B.: Generating Braille from OpenOffice.org
Engelen, J.: E-books and audiobooks: what about their accessibility?
Engelen, J.: International AT and DfA standardisation: what is in the pipeline?
Strobbe, C.: Stand4All: Promoting More Accessible Standards Through Training of Stakeholders

And there are of course tons of other interesting presentations that I will be attending. This is promising to be an excellent conference.

Guest lecture

2010-04-23T21:43:00.002-05:00

I was given the opportunity to give a guest lecture at Arcadia University (Glenside, PA, USA) to a group of master's level students for their "ED/PY517 Human Development: The School Years" course. The topic of the guest lecture was "Special Education and Inclusion", and covered the complexities of providing truly inclusive education and the important advantages that assistive technology can offer in this context. The lecture went very well, and was reported to be very informative and thought-provoking.

The guest lecture opportunity came to me through PEAC (Pennsylvania Education for All Coalition), in my capacity as a board member.

Is government going too far?

2009-10-17T11:33:00.003-05:00

Today it was brought to my attention that the legislature of Pennsylvania has been working on a bill that includes a provision for compulsory vaccination if a public health emergency is declared. This is covered in PA House Bill 0492 "Emergency Health Powers and Procedures". Interestingly, I also found out yesterday that Belgium passed a similar law concerning health emergencies [link in Flemish], and that law included a specific amendment against mandatory vaccination. Quite a contrast...

Now, I am all for provisions that ensure that government bodies can fulfil their duty to "the people", but I do take issue with compulsory vaccination, especially when (at least in the US - probably most everywhere now) you are usually asked to sign a consent form that explains that vaccination can have (possibly harmful) side-effects, etc... Our oldest son, Daniel, has shown rather unusual reactions to various things (like a skin T test), yet doctors cannot really say why he reacts different from pretty much much any other patients. Still, no doctor is willing to state that it might perhaps be unsafe for him to receive vaccinations because that is only done for "known" cases. Somehow, that does not make me feel very confident...

There is also the concern that e.g. the H1N1 vaccination has been rushed through the certification process in order to get it ready for use in large quantities. Some doctors advise against it, while others openly criticize patients for questioning it. Either way, it seems prudent that patients should have the right to decide for themselves whether they want to be vaccinated. It also seems reasonable that, in the face of a true health emergency, a request for quarantine could be made to people who are not vaccinated. What is not reasonable to me is that on top of mandatory quarantine (if one refuses to be vaccinated), the government can/will also charge you with a misdemeanor of the 3rd degree. That is going too far...

I sincerely hope that this house bill will be amended with the removal of the compulsory vaccination provision. I do not argue against people who choose to be vaccinated, because that is their personal choice. I respect people's choices, and I hope that my right to choose will remain untouched.

Kindle 2: on the road to accessibility... or not

2009-02-11T13:49:00.002-05:00

With the release of the 2nd version of the Kindle electronic book reading device by Amazon.com, it seems that the road to accessibility is up ahead. The (experimental) text-to-speech feature that is included in Kindle2 definitely is a good step in the right direction.

However, a recent concern that has been raised by the Author's Guild might add some complications for this rather important feature. If the Author's Guild is successful in its objections to a text-to-speech feature in Kindle2 (and possibly similar devices), what looks like a step towards accessibility may not end up where we hope it will.

Hopefully, a solution will be worked out that does not block users with significant visual impairments from ever being able to benefit from the functionality that Kindle provides.

Interesting inconsistency in JAWS

2009-01-09T20:01:00.002-05:00

JAWS for Windows has long been regarded as one of the most commonly used screen readers on MS Windows (along with WindowEyes), especially in the US. Recently, while assisting someone with a JAWS for Windows install I noticed a very strange and illogical issue.

While making some global adjustments to the voice settings, I noticed that while the visual presentation of the global adjustments window shows a numeric value for the speaking rate, the spoken feedback while changing the rate was reflecting a percentage.

When you consider that even a company like Freedom Scientific fails to provide consistency in the auditory rendering of its own screen reader software, it is no surprise that accessibility issues with software are so common. It also shows that a basic rendering of controls is not sufficient in terms of making a user interface accessible. The semantic meaning of the control is important as well.

My experience with JAWS was surprising to say the least.

Still a long way to go...

2008-11-24T11:15:00.002-05:00

Today the TV shopping channel QVC is holding a sweepstakes in honour of their 22nd birthday. Throughout the day, they show a "lucky number" on the screen and you can go to a specific website to enter the lucky number along with your telephone number.

Unfortunately, although QVC generally does a very good job describing products, announcing prices, etc... they choose not to have someone actually "speak" the lucky number as it is shown (or afterwards). As a result, although QVC is generally quite popular with blind customers, those same customers are now unable to participate in the sweepstakes. This makes for a rather unfair sweepstakes. And it would have been so easy to avoid this problem...

Universal access still faces major hurdles if even basic things like this QVC sweepstakes is done in a way that is not accessible to a group of customers. And again, the overall benefit to the entire customer population was overlooked as well. Obviously, even sighted customers would have been able to benefit from having the lucky number announced verbally, e.g. when someone needs to tend to something so that they are not able to see the screen but may still be able to hear the TV.

Sadly, an opportunity lost shows just how far we are from being able to see universal access in a more mainstream manner.

Virtual MacOS X on KVM

2008-10-26T16:43:00.001-05:00

I came across this rather interesting webpage:

http://alex.csgraf.de/self/?part/projects&...s/id=Qemu%20OSX

It is mostly interesting because it results in a pretty speedy MacOS X install (albeit virtual) on pretty much any PC hardware, although it is of course against the EULA to run it on non-Apple hardware. But theoretically, there is no reason why this wouldn't work at all.

The patches that are provided at that site do need a bit of tweaking to get them to apply against the latest KVM release. I'll try to find a place to make them available for download, since I already did the forward-porting work anyway.

There are some things that do not work right, like the 'About my Mac...' application. I also haven't really tested sound just. Networking works perfectly, which is the main thing in my case anyway.

Due to issues with mouse pointer handling between vncviewer, QEMU's VNC server, and mouse acceleration handling between host and guest system, quite annoying discrepancies between mouse pointer positions happen. But... Since MacOS X (at least Leopard) includes a remote desktop feature using VNC anyway, you can just enable that, tell QEMU to redirect a host port to the VNC server in Leopard, and you end up with access to the virtual Leopard without mouse issues :)

Apple accessibility efforts

2008-09-10T14:41:00.003-05:00

For a while, Apple has been criticized from various angles about the somewhat limited accessibility efforts that went into their products. While MacOS X has been accessible to visually impaired users through their (included) voiceover screen reader, other products used to suffer from various limitations (iTunes, the iTunes store, iPods, ...)

However, that is now changing...

Information about the various efforts that Apple has put forth towards true accessibility can now be found at a specific set of webpages found at http://www.apple.com/accessibility. As can be seen there, amongst other important news, a new generation of the iPod nano now offers spoken menus (including text-to-speech rendering of artist names, album names and song titles - created in iTunes and sync'd to the iPod as audio clips that are used in the spoken menus). It also supports a larger font size setting for low vision users. The iTunes software also has been improved to support screen readers on Mac OS X and MS Windows. This is an important improvement because this has been a pain point for many users.

There is a lot more going on, and I expect we'll be seeing more improvements in weeks and months to come. As the user population reviews the offered products, we'll certainly learn more about the capabilities and limitations, and I fully expect Apple to step up to the plate to address user concerns to improve upon the current offerings. There is a commitment behind these recent events that cannot be ignored.

JSAPI implementation for Fonix DECtalk

2008-07-16T09:50:00.004-05:00

For a while I have been spending a little bit of spare time on writing a Java Speech API (JSAPI) implementation for the Fonix DECtalk software speech synthesizer. Since it hasn't been my main focus, it took a while to get it going, but finally I can report that it is mostly working. I will be preparing an alpha source code release in the next week or so. More information will be available at the project page.

For those who are curious, impatient, or both... Feel free to browse the API specification (javadoc).

As far as implementation details, it is important to note that the speech synthesizer itself is to be controlled by a little server (written in C) rather than by means of JNI. The reason for this design is that the DECtalk uses threading that is incompatible with the threading provided by the JVM. That makes it impossible to use the DECtalk shared library from JNI.

Appeals court rules in favour of the blind on US currency

2008-05-20T12:42:00.004-05:00

A federal appeals court has ruled that the US Treasury Department is violating law by refusing to issue currency that is readily distinguishable by blind and visually impaired people. This upholds a ruling from 2006 in US District Court. At issue was the claim that the failure by the US Treasury Department to ensure that US currency is readily distinguishable to the visually impaired constitutes a violation of the Rehabilitation Act, in as suit filed in 2002 by the American Council of the Blind. As stated by judge Rogers: "A large majority of other currency systems have accomodated the visually impaired, and the Secretary does not explain why U.S. currency should be any different."

Press coverage of this ruling can be found in various places, including CNN and Comcast.net.

More fun with combo boxes...

2008-05-15T22:28:00.003-05:00

During the implementation of combo boxes in PUIR, I ran into another very interesting situation while playing with a Java Swing combo box. After clicking on the arrow button to open the pull-down list, I navigated through the list of options a bit by means of the mouse pointer. Then I decided to see how keyboard navigation works, and proceeded to use the up and down arrow keys...

Amazingly, the highlight (showing the selected item) jumped from the one the mouse pointer was on to a totally different item. It turns out that keyboard navigation and pointer navigation initially start from that same item, but mouse pointer navigation doesn't affect that starting point as far as keyboard navigation is concerned... In terms of consistency between the two forms of user interaction, this is a pretty big issue.

I was happy to find out that GTK+ doesn't seem to have this issue. Hopefully, the same can be said about various other toolkits.

Rest assured, PUIR doesn't have that problem :)

When accessibility isn't...

2008-05-06T20:10:00.002-05:00

Nothing is more frustrating than encountering some user interface element that doesn't quite work the way you expect it to. Of course, that simply be a reflection of wrong expectations. A review of existing accessibility technologies leads me to believe that the notion of 'wrong expectations' is more often than not used as an excuse for poor decisions made at the design stage of accessibility support.

And why not... Most (if not all) GUIs now support keyboard shortcuts and various other forms of keyboard manipulation, because people tend to use that. And when you already have keyboard based UI interaction, you're mostly done with providing accessibility.

The problem with this logic is the assumption that accessibility is somehow equivalent with keyboard interaction. And that the ability to interact with a UI element is equivalent to that UI element being accessible.

Enter centre stage: "combo box"

You know, the space-savings widget that allows you to either enter arbitrary text or select from a list of options (presented as a pull-down list that opens and closes by 'clicking' on a convenient little button.) And ever GUI implementation I have looked at makes it completely accessible by means of keyboard interactions. You can enter arbitrary text, and you can pull open the list and select from that list. Nifty!

Time for an experiment: Use your favourite GUI environment, locate a nice combo box, and hide your mouse/touchpad/whatever for a little while. Now, type some text in the combo box. All is well. And it is time to use the real power of the combo box: open up the list of options, and go down the list in search for an entry that is acceptable to you. Let's happily assume that none of them are, so simply close the list again and we'll just settle for the arbitrary text that you typed... Uhoh, where did it go??? Did it get replaced by the last option you arrowed down to before closing the list? There is a very high probability that you will in fact experience exactly that behaviour.

Time for another experiment: Now do all of the above, but use your mouse/touchpad/whatever. I highly doubt that you will find your carefully typed text wiped out by something else.

Isn't it amazing? Two forms of interaction on the same widget have different interaction semantics, yet they are consider equivalent. The widget is considered accessible. Yet, it isn't. It is usable. It can be "accessed". But that's not the same as saying that it is accessible.

jTTS source code uploaded

2007-07-15T23:08:00.001-05:00

Well, there isn't really that much exciting news to report, other than that things are one step closer to getting a jTTS release. Yesterday marked the import of the jTTS source code tree into the CVS repository at SourceForge. The code is currently in a quite usable state, though there is still some cleanup and fixing to be done before a release can really take place. There is also quite a lot of work left in the realm of a testsuite for jTTS.

The most notable contributions in jTTS right now is the support for a British English voice ("roger") along with the OALD lexicon. Part-of-speech tagging also has been improved dramatically by using the same mechanisms as Festival, using a Part-of-speech lexicon along with an n-grammar. Expect to see more use of the n-grammar support in the future.

Avoiding X session duplication - remote working

2007-03-01T16:07:00.000-05:00

One problem I have been trying to tackle for a long time now is this:

How can I work on my X-Windows desktop most of the time, and occasionally work from my laptop, without having to close and restart applications whenever I switch from one to the other?

Well, now there is an answer! I found the quite handy x11vnc package. It runs as process on the host whose display you want to make available, and it can do that without needing any changes to the X server. In fact, I installed it on a machine that has been running an X session for days before, and it worked fine. Once it is running, you connect to it from a remote machine using pretty much any VNC viewer (I am partial to TightVNC.

This is really a useful utility. At least, in my work environment, this will make a lot of difference because I will be able to move around the house (and even elsewhere) without needing to worry about applications that are running on my desktop. I can keep XChat and GAIM running, and continue conversations from a different computer.

FreeTTS on steroids

2007-02-13T19:15:00.000-05:00

I have been playing with FreeTTS and Festival for a while now, and it always bothered me a bit that I could not use a British English voice in FreeTTS. While looking into how difficult it would be to add support for that, I found out just how different the speech engine in FreeTTS differs from Festival. That's not a real surprise, since FreeTTS is based on Flite rather than Festival. But in all, I didn't really see much reason why adding in a lot of the features of Festival would pose a problem (or a performance degradation).

So, what started as a project to add a different dialect to FreeTTS turned into a fairly extensive rewrite of FreeTTS, to the point of no longer really being the same speech engine. That's why I decided to do a spin-off named jTTS. It's aim is to be a free speech synthesizer written entirely in Java, implementing a speech engine that is based on Festival. It supports both American and British English, both for voices and lexicons, and adds features such as a probabilistic Part-Of-Speech processor and better post-lexicon phoneme processing. It also features a more optimized lexicon format (making it unnecessary to split works into syllables at runtime for words in the lexicon).

As part of my doctoral work (albeit a side-project), I am working on some web pages about it as the jTTS project. The code will be downloadable from SourceForge.net as soon as a project is created there with the same name.

Beta meets Release Candidate: Relationship does not last

2007-02-13T00:22:00.000-05:00

On Jan 30th, 2007 GWMicro released a public beta of Window-Eyes 6.1 for Microsoft Vista. As a proud owner of a copy of Microsoft Vista Ultimate Release Candidate 2, I decided to give Windows-Eyes a try.

The download from the GWMicro website was a mere 8.4 MB - hardly an issue with today's high-speed Internet connectivity. The install fired up with the well-known double-click on the downloaded file and off it went. The dialogs throughout the easy install are clear and to the point, and before I could get myself a drink (typically an indispensable tool during an install - kind of like a Phillips screwdriver for changing batteries in children's toys) the install was on its way without needing further assistance from me.

Unfortunately, after a while it seem to require assistance from "elsewhere" with a dreaded pop-up informing me (in rather pleasant terms, actually) that the application had encountered an error and needed to close down. And would I like to send a report?

OK - so the install didn't complete as nicely as it could have. Time to uninstall and try again. Find 'Control Panel', figure out where they hid the old 'Add & Remove Programs', and... um... Well, it wasn't there. No Window-Eyes to uninstall. But the icon was on the desktop, so playing the typical user I took the approach that this was probably one of those typical Windows quirks and I therefore proceeded to try launch Window-Eyes. No luck.

A reboot later I got a blue screen. Nice to see they kept that feature from Windows XP and before...

A reboot later I tried again. No blue screen. Well, not at first. Once Window-Eyes was running for real, it quickly presented the BSOD yet again.

All further reboots left me with Window-Eyes starting, only to end with a spontaneous reboot initiated after presenting me with some nice blue screen with debugging info.

So, now I am left with an instance of Microsoft Vista Ultimate Release Candidate 2 with a Window-Eyes 6.1 Beta installed that I apparently cannot get rid of (largely due to a lack of being able to do anything useful prior to the auto-reboot). Clearly, this is not a match made in heaven or elsewhere for that matter. Better keep these two separated. Perhaps things fare better with the official release of Microsoft Vista. But I am not ready to buy Microsoft Vista Ultimate just yet.

Accessibility: what's in a name?

2007-02-08T00:13:00.000-05:00

Can you imagine a future where products will bear a seal with the words "Accessibility independently verified by Accessibility Assurance, Inc." or something similar? I can. Will it be worth the ink it is printed with? Maybe. Will it be fashionable (like "low carb")? Probably.

The problem behind it all is simple: what does it mean for a product to be accessible? The academic world has looked into this for a long time already, and works with concepts like 'Universal Access' and 'Design for All'. It is a very active field, and I have high hopes for it in the future.

But let's look at a more limited view... Accessibility in the context of blind individuals. It seems all too straightforward, and yet, sadly it is not. For one, usability and accessibility are not necessarily the same thing. I've seen applications on MS Windows systems be quite accessible with a screen reader, with the caveat that the use of the screen reader often required the user to reboot their system a few times a day due to stability issues. And then there is the very large collection of products that are accessible, with the caveat that "not all features are accessible". A good example is the typical talking gadget (pedometer, blood pressure monitor, ...) that indeed uses speech to give you information, but the setup of the device is not accessible. And of course, the majority of products that claim to be accessible to the blind (some even claim to be "fully accessible") rarely come with an accessible manual.

So, obviously people have a very different view of what it means to be accessible. And that applies to the community as much as it does to the vendors. If one thought that companies seem to have very differing views on what accessibility means, try polling the community of users. One only has to look at a few example issues to determine what a minefield we're in:

Street lights at crossing become more and more sophisticated in order to provide near-optimal traffic flows. Unfortunately, that often means that the pedestrian walk sign will not allow crossing until somewhere in the middle of the cycle, after turning traffic has passed. Unless there are no cars waiting to turn, in which case pedestrians can start crossing immediately. The obvious solution to some: audible signs that alert the blind pedestrian when the walk sign indicates one is allowed to cross. However, at least one advocacy group of the blind in the US is strictly opposed to audible signs at crossings. There are known cases of blind pedestrians requesting an audible sign at a crossing that is (in their view) complex, arguing their case at a hearing, only to be faced with an opposition from a blind advocacy group!
Money... Oh dear, the dreaded topic of accessible money. It probably doesn't seem controversial at all to most non-US readers of this blog because the vast majority of countries around the world actually have accessible currency. People around the world like how their bills and coins are different sizes because it is quite convenient. In the US, all bills are the same size. Oh, and they are overall about the same colour as well (until recently, they really were the same colour). So, in all US bills are not very accessible to anyone. But people cope, since you don't really have a choice not to use money in this day and age. A blind advocacy group made a push towards making money accessible a few years ago, and never got very far. A different advocacy group did the same last year, and got a first victory in court on the subject. Then, almost beyond believe, the first advocacy group put out a press release literally slamming the strive for accessible bills because it would have a negative impact on public opinion in terms of whether blind individuals can handle money. Huh, what - change of heart? I have news for them though: the average foreigner would love US currency to be less confusing.
Law suits have been filed against various companies (past and present) in terms of accessibility of their products, especially in the information technology field. And again, advocacy groups have not agreed much on what stand to take. Some are very aggressive in their position, others simply ignore the situation.

One thing is certain: everyone has an opinion and often those opinions do not agree on everything. That's how the world works. It only becomes quite amazing (to me) when disagreements turn into direct opposition. Spending so much of my time on working on accessibility solutions in information technology, I sometimes really have to wonder why I bother. After all... some group might decide that my work has an negative impact on public opinion, implying that blind users have trouble using computer systems.

Welcome to my blog

2007-02-06T23:31:00.000-05:00

After many months of pondering whether I would embark on the journey of entering the blog space, I decided to give in and share my thoughts and ideas on both my doctoral work and anything else on my mind. And quite a journey it has been, trying to figure out how everything works (or fails to). In terms of my research, I have to report that blogger.com and blogspot.com manage to be pretty accessible to blind users. The only really annoying thing turned out to be setting permissions because blogger.com brings up a fancy pop-up when you restrict the blog to "read by authors" only. And JAWS for Windows simply refused to read that pop-up.

The frequency of posting on this blog will vary wildly, based on how much time I have on a given day to write down my thoughts. Events around me (or in the news) may affect the posting rate quite a bit as well, since I plan to offer my own commentary on various events (especially as they relate to accessibility issues).

I hope that anyone that drops by to read these postings will find something to satisfy their curiosity. Be it to find out the latest about my doctoral research, to find out my thoughts on various issues (even politics), or simply for the enjoyment factor of reading someone else's thoughts...

All I can say is...

Welcome!