Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Salmon Cannon (HBO)

Life around RantWoman is a real laugh riot sometimes. For instance, how about a rousing Saturday night spent making outrageous fun of an important wildlife conservation issue of extreme importance in the Pacific NW.

Research Study on Blind People's Document formatting Skills Seeks Participants

RantWoman probably actually has too much vision to participate in this study but in the interest of not biasing the feedback, RantWoman first presents a clean version of the announcement pasted as selected from her Gmail inbox with no adjustments for paragraphs, etc:

Greetings,
We are researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz. We are
investigating ways in which tools may assist blind people with tasks related
to document formatting. As a first step, we need to gather information about
document formatting practices, errors and barriers of blind persons. To do
this, we need to collect a large number and variety of documents that were
created and formatted by blind persons (with at most some light perception)
without help from sighted persons.
Please help us by providing documents (at least
3 pages long) that you have created with any word processor (Microsoft Word,
Apple Pages, etc.) and formatted without help from a sighted person.
We will run a drawing for two $50 Amazon gift certificates as a token of
appreciation for those who provide at least five documents that follow the
previous criteria.
Note: As this is a National Science Foundation study, we follow a strict
rule of maintaining your and your documents confidentiality and destroying
documents after the study is finished.
If you are interested in helping, please email your documents or any
questions regarding the study to:
lommoral@ucsc.edu
Also, if you know someone who fits the criteria and might be interested in
helping us, please forward this post. We really appreciate your help.
Thank you for your time.
Best regards,
Lourdes M. Morales Villaverde
Computer Science Ph.D. Student
Interactive Systems for Individuals with Special Needs (ISIS) Lab Baskin
School of Engineering University of California, Santa Cruz

Nevertheless, if you or someone you know fit the criteria, sign the heck up!


Readers who have scrolled this far get the following additional comments:
--RantWoman gets plenty of documents created by sighted people that show no command of even modest formatting niceties such as headings, never mind accessibility featurs for forms .

--RantWoman interacts with plenty of PDF's whose creators have no concept of the various accessibility nuances associated with PDF's.

--Just today RantWoman had anotehr of her Death by Powerpoint experiences. The sin: printing on black and white without checking for meaningful contrast. Whine.

--Readers of RantWoman's blogs will note that she herself has not bothered to pay attention to options for bulleted lists and tends to do as this post does on aregular basis.

--RantWoman's blogs are a natural product created with uneven visual attention to formatting. Sometimes all RantWoman does is reread with JAWS. Other times if RantWoman has more visual energy more visual niceties may occur. RantWoman does not really have any frame of reference as far as how other blind bloggers handle visual presentation. Plus the study criteria specify documents created with a word- processing tool, not a blogging tool.

RantWoman has newly discovered that Google docs ALMOST works with her screen reader; RantWoman wonders whether Google Docs count.

Africa For Norway - New charity single out now!

RantWoman notes the invasion of an Arctic air mass deep into the heartland of the US and recommends distracting ourselves. Perhaps the US can get in touch with the heroes of Africa offereing to send radiators to Norway. Perhaps they have some to spare for the US too.

Shameless Reprint of Boston Globe article about Comcast Rollouts

New Comcast service boosts TV for the blind

By Hiawatha Bray

| GLOBE STAFF NOVEMBER 12, 2014

· Share via e-mail

DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF

Comcast’s Josh Chace assisted Perkins student Cullen Gallagher (left) and Kim Charlson, library director.

Kim Charlson is blind, but she loves television. Her favorite show is “NCIS,” the naval crime series. And thanks to new technology from Comcast Corp., it will soon be a lot easier for Charlson and other blind fans to tune in.

The cable television provider’s X1 digital service will soon feature a “talking guide” that will read out channel listings and program descriptions in a lifelike electronic voice. Blind users who “view” TV programs by listening to them will now find it easier to change channels, track down their favorite programs, and program their digital video recorders to copy shows.

On Tuesday, Charlson demonstrated the new talking guide at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, where she works as library director. She said the talking guide lets her channel-surf like any sighted person.

“I always wondered why they would say there’s 200 channels and I can’t find a thing to watch. That’s how I always felt,” Charlson said. “At least now I can identify what’s on all those channels.”

The talking guides will become available to all X1 subscribers nationwide over the next few weeks.

Users won’t have to get new equipment; the system runs automatically over Comcast’s data network.

“It’s cloud-based, so we didn’t have to worry about installing additional hardware or software in a box,” said Tom Wlodkowski, Comcast’s vice president of accessibility. He is also a veteran of the National Center for Accessible Media at the public television station WGBH in Boston.

Cullen Gallagher, a 16-year-old from Quincy who’s an 11th-grader at Perkins, isn’t a big TV fan. But the new talking guide could change that, he said.

“I want to see what’s out there on the TV networks,” Gallagher said. “I’m just going to play around and look at the menus. I’m a geek. I like to play with technology.”

Comcast said the talking guide is the first offered by any cable company in the United States. It was developed in response to the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, a federal law enacted in 2010. The legislation requires cable companies to start offering audible menus to make onscreen commands usable by people who have vision problems.

The talking menu system works in conjunction with another federally mandated service, descriptive video. This is a service in which a voice describes on-screen action during a TV show, saying things like, “Jack Bauer draws his gun.” The nation’s nine most popular broadcast and cable channels must offer these descriptive services on at least four hours of programming every week.

The combination of descriptive video and spoken channel guides will make TV a more immersive experience for about 8 million Americans with vision disabilities.

“TV is more than just a box with a picture in it,” Charlson said. “It’s our culture and our society, and people spend a lot of time talking to each other about what they watched on TV last night. It’s important to be a part of that conversation.”

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeTechLab.

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Oh Happy Day!

Happy 125th Anniversary of statehood: MT



Happy 125th Anniversary of statehood: WA



HAPPY BIRTHDAY RantMom



Happy Birthday Naomi Klein



Happy spacecraft landing on the comet.

VOTE and the do this Survey of Blind and Visually Impaired Voters

Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote!

And then, if you are blind or visually impaired, PLEASE consider taking this survey:

Online Surveys of Blind and Visually Impaired Voters Now Available

Calling all blind or visually impaired voters who participated in the 2014 United States mid-term election--the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) needs your feedback! Whether you voted using an accessible voting system, online ballot delivery and marking system, or a hand-marked paper ballot, we want to hear about your experience.

If you voted on an accessible voting system, or with assistance, during early voting, at your local polling place, or by a paper ballot that you received by regular mail, please complete the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XTY79KS.

If you used an online ballot delivery and marking tool to access and mark your ballot, please complete the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XCLZPP5.

The results of these surveys will be provided to state election officials, state protection and advocacy agencies, and voting rights advocates to help improve the accessibility of future elections. Funding for both surveys was provided through a Help America Vote Act (HAVA) grant from the Administration for Community Living, United States Department of Health and Human Services.

 

Questions about the surveys or accessible voting should be directed to Lou Ann Blake, National Federation of the Blind HAVA project manager, at lblake@nfb.org or 410-659-9314, extension 2221. Thank you for your participation!

ACCESS Board Guidelines for Accessible Playground Surfaces

U.S. Access Board Releases Guidance on Playground Surfaces

New guidance on selecting and installing playground surfaces is now available from the Access Board. Developed by National Center on Accessibility (NCA) at Indiana University with funding from the Board, the guide, "Seven Things Every Playground Owner Should Know About the Accessibility of Their Playground Surfaces," (also available in PDF) outlines key considerations and steps in selecting, installing, and maintaining playground surface to ensure accessibility and compliance with accessibility standards, including those issued under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA ) and the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA).

The ADA Standards, which apply to many types of facilities in the public and private sectors, and the ABA Standards, which cover federally funded facilities, include provisions for play areas and play surfaces. These requirements address running and cross slopes, changes in level, openings and apply industry standards for accessibility and impact attenuation issued by the American Society for Testing and Materials.

The guide describes the most popular types of playground surfacing materials, such as poured-in-place rubber, rubber tiles, engineered wood fiber, and hybrid surface systems. It compares information on each of these material types, including installation methods, accessibility issues and considerations, maintenance, repair methods, and cost. This guidance is intended to help playground owners and operators make an informed choice in selecting surface materials and ensuring that they are properly installed and maintained for accessibility. It is based on findings from a Board-sponsored study by NCA completed last year that assessed the performance of different surfacing materials at 35 playgrounds over a 3-year period.

For further information, contact Jennifer Skulski, CPSI, Principal Investigator, at jskulski@indiana.edu or (812) 856-4422, or Peggy Greenwell of the Access Board at greenwell@access-board.gov, (202) 272-0017 (v), or (202) 272-0075 (TTY).