AFB Blog

If you haven't heard about Peter Butkus, you might want to take the time to read more. Peter is a senior at Mendham High School in New Jersey, where he plays center for the school's varsity basketball team. Why is this so significant? Peter was born with an eye condition called Stargardt's disease, which is a juvenile form of macular degeneration. Stargardt's impairs his central vision, making it almost impossible to see faces, numbers on a basketball jersey, or the score board. Peter is…

On Saturday March 29, NPR’s Scott Simon read an excerpt from a letter that Helen Keller wrote describing her joy at “listening” to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony over the radio. The source of this feature is AFB’s Facebook post on Helen Keller: The Official Fan Page. We are thrilled that this post has been viewed by almost 2 million people so far. This letter is just one of the over 80,000 items in Helen Keller’s archival collection that AFB seeks funding to digitize. Digitization means…

I often discover new and useful apps for my iPhone or iPad by just randomly poking around in the app store. I really found an awesome gem this week. It needs some accessibility improvement, but I think you'll find it useful, even in its current version. It's called Canine Translator 2020, and it claims to be the first interspecies automatic translator for home use. It's still in beta, and the makers caution that everything doesn't translate smoothly between humans and canines. Of course, dog…

Marcus Roberts was on 60 Minutes last night! Take a look, if you didn't get a chance to see it. He plays piano, he talks about music, and, my favorite part, they talked a little bit (too little to suit me) about the fact that he uses technology. No question, Marcus Roberts' most important piece of technology is the piano. He is first and foremost a talented musician, composer, and entertainer (this is my blog, I'm allowed to have three foremosts). But like any successful blind person, he uses…

iOS 7.1 is experiencing an issue that affects all VoiceOver users who are using a Bluetooth QWERTY keyboard. Apple is aware of the issue, and is presumably working on a bug fix. The problem stems from using the control key. After pressing the control key, it acts as if the control key is “sticking,” and all subsequent keyboard actions act as if the control key is being held down. This has a significantly detrimental effect on all iOS apps, but particularly impacts AccessNote users. If you are…

Stopping at booths in the CSUN exhibit hall last week, I saw a lot of innovative problem-solving. One of the problems I saw companies trying to solve was, simply put, how to make smart phones more usable for people who are not really users of technology, and who are blind or visually impaired. These solutions, in the exhibit hall this year at least, mainly centered around the use of the Android, with suites of applications "on top" of the usual operating system. Some of these solutions…

On March 20, 2014, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) took an important step to make web content and applications more accessible to people with disabilities by publishing Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. WAI-ARIA defines ways that developers of browsers, media players, mobile devices and assistive technologies, as well as content developers, can achieve greater cross-platform accessibility. Learn more about WAI-…

Most years, there's a trend in the exhibit hall. A few years ago it was iOS — apps, hardware accessories, our old product now works with the iPhone, and so on. Last year it was STEM—science, technology, engineering, math (I know you knew that already) and every other booth had a solution — product, website, program, or new feature. This year — tablets, tablets, it's raining tablets. There's a different tablet for every attendee. I would exaggerate if I said every booth showed tablets, but…

You may have recently read the Wall Street Journal article by Lauren Weber about bosses asking employees to disclose whether they have a disability. Ms. Weber frames the issue pretty accurately, and I loved the comments included overall. Starting next week, all federal contractors (i.e., companies that do contract work for or with the U.S. federal government) will have to 1) ask whether their employees are disabled and 2) employ a minimum of 7% disabled workers or demonstrate that they are…