[ktvt] Fw: AccessWorld(R) Extra June 2006
- From: "vy pham" <missyguide@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ktvt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 21:37:02 -0500
----- Original Message ----- From: <accessworld@xxxxxxx> To: "AFB
Subscriber" <afbweb@xxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 8:32 AM Subject:
AccessWorld(R) Extra June 2006
AccessWorld(R) Extra A bi-monthly e-mail newsletter of additional
AccessWorld(R) content Volume 6, Number 3 June 2006
"Remove" instructions at bottom
Contents
1. From the Editor
2. Readers' Corner
3. Coming Soon in AccessWorld
4. What's New
5. Contact Us
Note: This material is copyright (C) 2006, American Foundation for the Blind
and may not be reprinted or reproduced electronically without permission.
AccessWorld (R) is a registered trademark of the American Foundation for the
Blind.
=================
1. From the Editor
=================
Dear AccessWorld Reader: Welcome to the June 2006 edition of AccessWorld
Extra, the e-mail newsletter produced by AccessWorld staff members in each
of the six months when AccessWorld is not published.
The first AccessWorld Guide to Assistive Technology Products has hit the
street! The 2006 guide, published by AFB Press, is based on information from
AFB's popular online products database. Detailed profiles of over 200
products are provided to help you determine which ones best meet your needs.
Each profile includes product name, description and category; manufacturer's
name; suggested price; product features; and more. A separate section lists
all manufacturers and their contact information, as well as warranty
information. The guide also includes a comprehensive list of objective
product evaluations previously published in AccessWorld. The guide,
published in print and on ASCII disk, is available for $24.95. To order, go
to <www.afb.org/store>.
This month's Readers' Corner includes your responses to our questions about
MP3 players. This month, we ask about the accessibility of home appliances.
This issue also includes the coming attractions from the July issue of
AccessWorld and the latest news.
AccessWorld Extra is designed to be easy to read for everyone. Items are
numbered, and you can search for the beginning of the next item, since each
item is preceded by a line of equal signs.
Send your comments to <accessworld@xxxxxxx>. This e-mail newsletter is meant
to provide, in each of the six months when the regular AccessWorld is not
published, more of what you have told us you want--more of AccessWorld. We
hope you will love it, but if you decide that you want to be taken off the
distribution list, please e-mail us at <accessworld@xxxxxxx> and let us
know. If your e-mail address changes, please also contact us at that address
and we will add your new address to the distribution list.
We encourage you to forward AccessWorld Extra to a friend, relative,
teacher, or someone else who may benefit from the news and information in
AccessWorld. Please help us spread the news that AccessWorld is free for all
to read. Just be sure to forward the entire issue, including the copyright
notice.
Jay Leventhal Editor in Chief
=================
2. Readers' Corner
=================
Here's your forum for talking to us and to each other. This month, we ask
about the accessibility of home appliances. (Please place an X before the
appropriate choices. To respond, you can copy and paste the list into a new
e-mail message, list the appropriate choices in a separate e-mail, or hit
reply and place your X's next to the choices right in this message.)
This month's questions are:
1. The state of appliance accessibility has reached the point where only
government intervention and regulations mandating accessibility can solve
the problem. __I strongly agree __I agree __I disagree __I strongly disagree
2. Many of today's appliances are only somewhat accessible. I would be
willing to give up accessibility on these appliances if each manufacturer
would produce a few totally accessible appliances, perhaps 10 or 20 percent
of all models offered. __I strongly agree __I agree __I disagree __I
strongly disagree
3. I have had to settle for a housing situation which was not my first
choice because the appliances and/or heating/air conditioning systems were
inaccessible. __Yes __No
4. I have opted to keep old or out of date household equipment, even though
I have the resources to purchase new equipment, because of the
inaccessibility of today's appliances. __Yes __No
5. I would have more confidence in using new, somewhat accessible household
equipment if I had more training or blindness-specific tutorial information
about the model I purchase. __I strongly agree __I agree __I disagree __I
strongly disagree
6. Please share any comments you have about your experiences shopping for or
using home appliances.
_________________
In April, we asked about MP3 players. We received 29 responses.
We asked:
1. Do you use an MP3 player? Yes: 22 Yes, but mine is not accessible enough:
4 No: 2 No, but I would like to use one: 1
2. If yes, which MP3 player do you currently use? MuVo: 9 Book Port: 7 iPod
Shuffle: 4 Otis: 4 BookCourier: 3 iPod: 3 iRiver: 1 Rio: 1 Sandisk Silver
1GB: 1 Archos 20 GB Recorder: 1 Sony: 1 Milestone 311: 1 Creative Zen Nano 1
GB flash: 1 BrailleNote mPower media player: 1
3. How accessible is your MP3 player? Very accessible: 16 Somewhat
accessible: 7 Somewhat inaccessible: 4
4. Does your current MP3 player allow you to: Skip forward and back between
tracks: 21 Bookmark a spot and come back to it: 16 Select the order in which
tracks are played: 10
5. What do you listen to on your MP3 player? Books: 21 Music: 19 podcasts:
10 Radio shows: 7 Text documents: 2 Electronic braille: 1 Audible.com books:
2 Theatrical performances: 1 DAISY books: 1 Magazines: 1
Becky "I use a MuVo TX FM 256 MB MPE player. The player is not as accessible
due to its crystal display, but I am able to use the up and down volume
buttons, select songs using the scroll wheel. I cannot access the FM radio
or recording functions. However, I like the ability to plug the player into
my USB port and view files through Windows Explorer. Since there are no
particular button commands, I cannot skip individual tracks, select songs,
or jump forward. I listen to many types of music on my player and hope to
listen to Audible.com books soon. Thank you for the opportunity to post my
thoughts on AccessWorld."
Jo Stombaugh "I have had 2 other MP3 players previously, a Rio Cali 256 and
a MuVo, and neither was very accessible."
Carl Martin "My BookCourier is really poor. I understand that Book Port is
the same. I wish more attention was paid to recording quality in MP3
players."
Steve Cutway "As you know, the Milestone 311 is new from Switzerland and is
marketed in North America by Independent Living Aids. I like its small size
although its feature set is limited compared to the Book Port and to all
commercial MP3 players. The manufacturer, Bones, claims they consulted the
Swiss Association for the Blind and one wonders if European priorities
differ from North America.
"The Milestone 311 is very easy to use with its few and very tactile
buttons. Interestingly though, my department head commented that it looks
"like a child's toy" until he touched it. We decided that it's the large and
tactile buttons that give it the child's toy appearance but it was an
interesting comment.
"Its audio is what one would expect, and the fact that it has an internal
speaker (unlike the Book Port) is helpful. However, given that the price of
the two products is similar ($369 US for the Milestone and $395 US for the
Book Port), I recommend the Book Port. But that said, the Milestone 311 is a
new product and probably needs some time to mature. So time will tell."
Jerry Weichbrodt "[On my Rio,] Play, Pause, Stop, and jumping
forward/backward in the same manner as a CD player are all very accessible
using a sort of navigation ring. It's also easy to turn the unit on and
off, lock the keyboard, and adjust the volume. Other things like
bookmarking, adjusting the equalizer, etc. are things I just haven't fooled
much with trying to use since they rely on a totally inaccessible display.
There are no audio beeps, so I haven't even taken the time to try and
memorize menu sequences and the like.
"I understand that it's possible to bookmark a place, and someone once sent
me instructions for how to do it without seeing the display. My player has a
small enough memory, however, that I haven't made much of an effort with the
bookmarking. I honestly don't know whether tracks can be reordered or not.
If they can be reordered, it's probably buried in the inaccessible visual
memory system. My player has only 32 megabytes of memory, I believe, and
it's limited to playing up to two hours of audio, so it really is pretty
dated technology at this point.
"Generally I've loaded songs from my own CD collection and sometimes
podcasts or downloads of radio programs. Some high- quality audio files that
only run an hour or so have proven to be too large for the player's memory,
so that has proven to be a real limitation. I now have a portable CD player
that will play MP3 files, so I sometimes use CD-RW disks to hold MP3 files
for listening to on my CD player, especially if the files are large."
Your comments on other topics:
Steve Griffiths "I enjoyed the article about screen readers which appeared
in the January 2006 edition of AccessWorld and was reprinted in the April
edition of AccessIT. I noticed that under the "Additional Resources" heading
at the end, you state "There is currently no discussion list for Hal users."
I am a member of such a list which is for users of all of Dolphin's
products. To join, you send a blank message to
<dolphinusers-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>."
Anna Dresner "I really enjoyed Lynn Zelvin's article on accessing commercial
e- Books ['How Shall I Read Thee? Accessing Commercial e-Books']. I have
some additional information.
"Another major source of accessible eBooks is Audible, at <www.audible.com>.
"Palm documents that are not secure can be converted to text via a free
program called Mini-reader, available at
<www.panix.com/~kestrell/minireader.exe>. Many books sold at Fictionwise are
in this format.
"Bookshare.org offers all its books in DAISY format as well as BRF.
"Finally, there is more information about accessing eBooks in my book,
Finding eBooks on the Internet, at <www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/EBOOK.html> and on
the Blind Bookworm page at <www.panix.com/~kestrell/ebooks.html>."
=================
3. Coming Soon in AccessWorld
=================
We hope you are enjoying the May 2006 AccessWorld, featuring evaluations of
the PC Mate and the ClearNote CCTVs, the FreedomBox, the Brailliant braille
display and medium sized office copiers; two articles on the accessibility
of home appliances; an interview with FreedomBox users; an article on
accessing commercial e-books; a recap of the 2006 CSUN conference, and more.
You can read the issue for free or download printer-ready or
braille-embosser-ready files at <www.afb.org/accessworld>.
Don't miss the July 2006 issue, coming soon. This issue will bring you:
Diabetes and Visual Impairment: Are Insulin Pens Accessible? Darren Burton
and Mark Uslan
We evaluate the accessibility of insulin pens, devices that offer diabetics
a delivery method that is easier, less painful and more discreet than
drawing doses from a vial using a needle and syringe. They are small,
lightweight plastic hand-held devices with pre- filled insulin cartridges
inside, and they use small micro fine needles that have been shown to cause
significantly less pain than conventional syringe needles. Find out how
accessible these devices are for people who are blind or have low vision.
"Is This for Here or to Go?" A Series on Portable, Laptop Compatible Video
Magnifiers, Part 2 Lee Huffman
We evaluate the MagniLink Student Addition from Low Vision International, a
laptop-compatible CCTV. This is the second article in a series evaluating
CCTVs which are laptop compatible, weigh less than 5 pounds, have a rotating
camera that allows for near and distance viewing, and have the ability to
take a "picture" of an image and save it to the computer. Learn what this
product has to offer.
More Than One Way to Read: A Review of Kurzweil 1000 and OpenBook Brad
Hodges
We evaluate Kurzweil 1000 and OpenBook, the two leading optical character
recognition (OCR) systems for people who are blind. Each product was tested
to determine how well it recognizes the text on a variety of printed pages,
its ability to follow the formatting of printed material and how well it
handles file conversion--reading untagged PDF documents, for example. Read
about how these products compare.
Figure It Out: A Review of Virtual Pencil Arithmetic and Virtual Pencil
Algebra from Henter Math Janet Ingber
We evaluate Henter Math's Virtual Pencil, a program that allows people who
are blind to solve math problems independently. Virtual Pencil offers two
math programs: VP Arithmetic and VP Algebra. VP Arithmetic covers such
operations as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and fractions.
VP Algebra allows you to solve both simple and complicated problems and
equations. Check out this handy software.
Can You Get the Music? A Review of Music Download Sites Janet Ingber
We review music download sites, the places to go to if you want to purchase
and download all types of music legally. The sites include: eMusic,
RealPlayer, Rhapsody, Napster, Wal-Mart, and iTunes. None of these sites is
a model of accessibility, but with some persistence, you can buy and play
the music of your choice.
Accessing the Machine: Two Solutions for Using Large, Multi- Function Copy
Machines Darren Burton and Lee Huffman
We present the third in a three-part series investigating the accessibility
of today's multi-function copy machines. This article focuses on
accessibility solutions from Canon and Xerox that have been specifically
designed to make their large copy machines more accessible and usable for
people who are blind or have low vision. Find out how well these
accessibility solutions work.
Play All Day with Playaway Deborah Kendrick
We describe Playaway, a combination audio book and player in one. It
includes simple controls, and costs about the same as an audio book on CD or
cassette. Find out how accessible this interesting new product is.
Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology, Part 1 Anthony
Candela
We bring you the first in a series of articles chronicling the history of
assistive technology. The entire history project includes interviews of more
than 20 major players--including inventors, company executives, and
trainers. Read about how these people's innovations led to the assistive
technology we use today.
=================
4. What's New
=================
New Talking Blood Glucose Meter The Prodigy, a new talking blood glucose
meter, is now available. Prodigy uses only 0.6 microliters of blood and
provides results in seven seconds. The meter measures 3.7/8 inches by 1.3/4
inches by
15/16 inch. The price is $29 and a box of 50 test strips costs $18. Order
five boxes of test strips, and the meter is free. For more information,
contact: Diabetic Support Program, 3381 Fairlane Farms Road, Wellington, FL
33414; phone: 800-799-1477; web site: <www.prescriptionsplus.com>.
A Week Without Web-Braille For those who don't know, Web-Braille is a
service of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped (NLS) that allows NLS patrons who are blind or have low vision
to download translated braille files of books and magazines. Beginning on
May
10th, anyone logging onto Web-Braille on the NLS web site received the
following message: "Because of technical and security difficulties,
Web-Braille will be unavailable in the near future. NLS regrets the
inconvenience and will provide further information as soon as possible."
Both the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the
Blind reacted strongly to Web- Braille's suspension, as did some individual
consumers. On May
17th, Web-Braille was reinstated. Users must now accept an agreement in
order to use the service. The agreement states that "Any further
reproduction or distribution of the braille or recorded materials may
constitute infringement of copyright. . . . Web-Braille files or any files
generated from them may not be distributed or sold under any circumstances.
Transferring original or modified Web-Braille files to anyone is prohibited.
User IDs and passwords may not be shared with anyone. The Library of
Congress actively monitors the NLS system to protect against this, which
includes maintaining records of the identity of persons downloading
materials from this web site. Readers engaging in or facilitating further
reproduction or distribution of Web-Braille materials may have their
privileges under the National Library Service program suspended or revoked,
may be required to surrender the federal property in their possession, and
may be subject to other penalties, including criminal penalties, afforded
under federal law." For more information about Web-Braille, visit:
<www.loc.gov/nls/braille/>.
Google Makes Services More Accessible Thanks to the efforts of bloggers who
are blind and others, Google has begun to make its Gmail service and other
services accessible to users who are blind. The main problem was word
verification tests, or captchas. These graphical images are supposed to
prevent spammers from signing up for e-mail and other accounts. Google has
followed the lead of other companies and implemented audio captchas--a
series of numbers, announced against a background of noise, which a person
who is blind then types into the proper box to access the service. Google is
also looking to hire software engineers to address additional accessibility
concerns.
New CCTV Enhanced Vision has introduced the Merlin LCD CCTV. Features
include a three-button control panel, an integrated 17-inch or 19- inch
monitor, easy-to-use sliding brightness lever, five digital color select
options, and 2.7x - 58x magnification. For more information, contact:
Enhanced Vision: Phone: 888-811-3161 or
714-374-1829; web site: <www.enhancedvision.com>.
Optacon Repairs It is still possible to get Optacons repaired. If your unit
needs repair, send an e-mail to <oehmelec@xxxxxxx>. Be sure to describe your
situation, including your location, so that you will be referred to the
most appropriate person.
Correction The April AccessWorld Extra listed the wrong telephone number for
Optelec USA. The correct phone number is 800-826-4200.
Got News? If you have a news item for AccessWorld and AccessWorld Extra, e-
mail it to <accessworld@xxxxxxx>.
=================
5. Contact Us
=================
Editor in Chief Jay Leventhal: <jaylev@xxxxxxx>
Contributing Editors Founding Editor: Paul Schroeder: <pws@xxxxxxx> Senior
Features Editor: Deborah Kendrick: <dkk@xxxxxxx> Crista L. Earl:
<crista@xxxxxxx> Mark M. Uslan: <muslan@xxxxxxx>
Managing Editor Ellen Bilofsky: <ebb@xxxxxxx>
Associate Editor Rebecca Burrichter: <rebeccab@xxxxxxx>
Marketing Manager Sharon Baker-Harris: <sharonb@xxxxxxx>
Web site: <www.afb.org/accessworld>
General e-mail: <accessworld@xxxxxxx>
AccessWorld(R), AFB's premier technology publication is a free, web-based
magazine. It offers multiple options for reading and sharing content,
including a braille embosser-ready file, a printer-friendly version, and an
"e-mail this article to a friend" option.
To advertise, contact the AFB Press Advertising Department; phone:
212-502-7652; e-mail: <sharonb@xxxxxxx>.
To submit an article, question for the Questions and Answers column, or
Letter to the Editor, contact: Jay Leventhal; phone:212-502-7639; e-mail:
<jaylev@xxxxxxx>.
AccessWorld Extra is published bi-monthly by AFB Press, American Foundation
for the Blind, 11 Penn Plaza, Suite 300, New York, NY
10001. Products included in AccessWorld Extra are not necessarily endorsed
by AccessWorld(R) or AFB staff. All rights reserved. Copyright (C) 2006,
American Foundation for the Blind.
AccessWorld(R) is a registered trademark of the American Foundation for the
Blind.
=================
"Remove" instructions You are receiving this message because you are an
AccessWorld reader. To be taken off the distribution list, please reply to
this message with the word "remove" in the subject line, and we will remove
you at once. (If you do not wish to read AccessWorld, you have received this
e-mail in error, and we sincerely apologize).
You can unsubscribe at any time. To remove your name from this mailing list,
or to find out what other newsletters are available from AFB, visit
http://www.afb.org/myAFBNewsletter.asp.
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm
Other related posts:
- » [ktvt] Fw: AccessWorld(R) Extra June 2006
