We would also like to thank Steve Lee and OSS Watch for all their support with this our first open source project.  We have learnt so much about this community along the way and are now involved in two other open source projects – one for Computer Aid – building a magnifier for a pen drive and another very exciting application that will help those who have communication difficulties.

Garry Paxton has set up a Charitable Trust that is not only developing open source content in the form of the Mulberry symbol set to support those who have communication difficulties, but is now making it possible for Seb to develop an open source application for sharing it on the web – the project is called Picboard .

We will be revamping our Access technologies web pages next week to keep everyone updated on all the projects and LexDis is still open for more student strategies.  There is a quick screen cast of how you can add a lite version of the toobar to Internet Explorer.  Apologies for the poor sound quality… I need to replace my headset!

We have also created a button for the Toolbar that you can embed on your page to start the toolbar:

PNG format

GIF format

ATMac talks about making the iPhone your own personal library with Wattpad and Papers.

Sometime ago AssistiveWare announced the iphone can become an augmented communication device  – Proloquo2Go: AAC  in Your Pocket

Alan Lawrence has made a version of Dasher, the text prediction software, for the  iPhone.  It is now available for free from the iTunes Store.

Applestoreapps.com have a useful list of the  ‘Top 50 Free Education Apps‘  and when you search for spelling apps you may come across Brain Blaze Spelling which is a useful way to test whether you still have the ability to pick the correct word from a list of spelling corrections as if you were using a spell checker!

By the way we have been working with JISC TechDis on their new toolbar which can be seen in action on the front page of LexDis and with luck you may have noticed that it automatically loaded when you loaded this blog!

It allows you to have text to speech, spell checking, font resizing, colour changes and a dictionary and to reference a web page for your notes as you surf the internet.  It works with most browsers as a download or there is the lite version which is easiest to use as a bookmark as can be seen in the image below.

All the best for 2010!

During this testing period we have fixed many bugs, and improved a lot of the core features of StudyBar. I would like to thank everyone that has participated in the Beta testing, and encourage them to continue submitting bugs!

Today I would like to announce a new feature that will be available in StudyBar – the ability for website owners to launch StudyBar for their webpages. Without the user having to have StudyBar installed.

How it works

If you operate a website and wish to integrate the features that StudyBar provides without having to re-invent the wheel, or requiring users to install software, you can now include a piece of HTML code in your webpage which will produce a launch button. Once the user clicks this link, StudyBar will be launched for your website. Including a piece of JavaScript on each of your pages that you want StudyBar to work with will allow it to launch for these pages.

Also of note, this functionality is useful as well to users. By dragging the link below into your bookmarks, you can launch StudyBar on whatever web page you are currently on. We’re calling this StudyBar Lite, as it does not require you to have anything installed.

There are some drawbacks – StudyBar will not launch when you open or refresh a page, only when you click on the button. In FireFox, it will be marginally slower than using the installed version, and it may not work on some installations of Internet Explorer on locked down machines. However, no installation!

Why not give it a go? Either click the link, or drag it to your favourites for use later – StudyBar.

As the press release says, Mike is “going to present the latest developments in his award-winning web-based Synote at a symposium at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, New York on Monday 9 November.

It will be the first time Synote will be shown with its additional ability to “synchronise live notes taken using Twitter with synchronised lecture recordings and transcripts created using IBM’s speech recognition software.”

E.A. is off to the 12th Annual Accessing Higher Ground – Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference in Colorado on Thursday 12 November to show how Seb Skuse, Russell Newman and Chris Phethean have developed a suite of accessibility tools that can help to make access to the web easier. This work has come about as a result of the findings of the JISC funded LexDis project which, as someone said “refuses to die!” Students are still coming forward with new strategies for the way they cope with their “Technology Enhanced Learning” (to include e-learning and mobile learning) environments and E.A. is keen to continue with this work so that the database can be kept up to date with the latest ideas.

The press release ends by saying: “In her presentation, E.A. will highlight the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of ‘informal experts’ and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many web-based tools which are currently emerging. This would allow disabled students to further develop their skills and perhaps in time also become informal experts who would be willing to share the strategies they have developed with others as can be seen on the LexDis website.”

The problem is if you use a normal spell checker that underlines all the errors you make it tends to disrupt your thought processes.  Neil discovered that if he used Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrect this speeded up his writing, however this did not work with every application.  This meant Neil was doing a lot of copy and pasting into Facebook and online emails to make sure they were correct.

The idea of making a program was borne out of frustration and Neil felt his spelling was not improving.  So Global AutoCorrect slowly developed from his ideas thanks to a series of IT tutorials and a considerable amount of time in front of his computer.  The results can now be seen on Neil’s website where there is a video explaining it all – tutorials can also be viewed via YouTube.

Neil is planning to release the first version of his program during Dyslexia Awareness Week November 1st – 7th 2009.   To find out more information or to contact Neil please go to the LexAble website.

An important factor in determining whether this should be undertaken is what portable applications are available for the Mac. Freesmug provides a selection of common applications in portable form, although there are not really any portable accessibility tools available. This is not a huge problem, as Mac OS X has accessibility features built in, so these would be available on any Mac without the need for a portable version. The range of portable applications is also much smaller than for Windows.  This would limit the added benefit that a pendrive could provide.

A small test was undertaken to investigate what kind of menu systems could be used on the Mac. Three portable Mac applications (Portable VLC, Portable Firefox and Portable Sunbird) were downloaded and placed onto a blank USB drive. It was immediately clear that  the applications were a lot simpler than their Windows alternatives, with only a couple of extra files in each folder, along with the application itself. Using the Cover Flow view in Finder, there is a visual way to scroll through the folders (which are decorated with the application’s icon), open the folder, and then easily locate the application. The other views in Finder all provide a similar organisation, although Cover Flow was visually the most pleasing.

To simplify this further, a Smart Folder can be used. A Smart Folder can be used to organise common files, without worrying about their location. This means that a Smart Folder could be created that would contain just the application files for all portable applications available. By creating a new Smart Folder using Finder, the word “Portable” was used as the search term. This located everything on the machine (and connected devices) with “Portable” in its name, which found the applications on the pendrive, but also a considerable number of other files. For this reason, the search was then limited by ‘Kind’ to search for particular types of files. Selecting the ‘Kind’ as Applications meant it would now only show Applications that had “Portable” in the name. This limited the results to just our portable applications.

Creating the Smart Folder to search for all Applications with "Portable" in their name

By selecting ‘Save’, it was now possible to place this Smart Folder onto the pendrive, and take it from machine to machine, where it would always show shortcuts to the portable applications, without the rest of their associated files. The folder was named ‘Menu’, as it provides similar functionality. The user can open this folder, and scroll through the available applications just as a user would scroll through the application list on the Windows pen drive version. Cover Flow and the other view modes are still available for this, which provides an attractive visual interface.

The contents of the pendrive - the Menu smart folder, and the three application folders

The Mac pendrive Menu folder displaying as icons. Only the applications themselves are shown.

Because these features are built into Mac OS X, along with the lack of portable accessibility tools and small selection of portable applications in general, it has been agreed that producing a Mac version of the Access Tools menu would not be worthwhile.

Check out our presentation for all the details. Here is a PDF, 3MB:
Access Group 2009 Summer Showcase

Questions after each section highlighted some interesting possibilities for future development. Specifically:

• Web2Access Validation Toolkit: Can part of the work of checking a site be performed by our server automatically, thus removing the need for a human to do it?
• StudyBar Text-to-Speech: Could the server cache common sentences and/or websites? e.g. the BBC News site is likely to be a common request, so can we render it once then cache it?
• Access Menu: Development of a package download service would allow users to add new programs to their pen drives and keep existing ones up to date.

Additional features have been added such as the ability to change the titles of applications and documents with the use of the right hand mouse button once the pointer is over the individual item and also to resize dialog boxes and increase text sizes, change colours etc  with keyboard commands.  The help file has the short cut key commands and software applications can be added to the menu via the folders found on the pen drive.

The underlying code has remained relatively constant, and has so far been able to create the application list in the menu with very few problems. This stability has allowed a longer period of time to be spent on refining the interface and improving the accessibility features of the application, which initial tests have shown to work well.

The possibility of a Mac alternative will be investigated in the next few days, along with an in depth look at what portable accessibility tools are available for the Mac.

In the meantime, development will continue on the Windows version in response to any issues that are raised during the beta period, to ensure that the final version provides the best possible experience to all users.

Access Tools Menu showing the list of Accessibility Tools and Applications that are on this USB drive.

StudyBar allows users to perform tasks on content displayed in the current webpage, such as inline editing of page styles, spellchecking of text input, dictionary search, text to speech, and much more without need for popups.

At this stage of development the base loading functionality is working in all browsers, as well as a few of the more basic functions. The Spellchecker framework now works in all browsers, so simply needs tuning so that it works more effectively. Efforts are now concentrated on getting Text to Speech linked up and working in FireFox as well as some of the other browsers, referencing and dictionary working and tuning the text and colour manipulation controls.

Development Log

An issue that has been discovered during development is that the implementations of the supporting technology for StudyBar – Greasemonkey, or UserScripts – are different on almost every browser. FireFox was the original browser to support this technology, and provides a useful API for performing functions which would otherwise be very difficult to implement (for example cross-domain AJAX, data storage in the browser). These API functions are not available in Chrome, Opera, Safari, or Internet Explorer.

Due to this, individual toolbar items are still being developed as implementation must take into account differences between browsers. On top of this, custom implementations of some of the FireFox Greasemonkey API libraries have had to been developed to support the Text to Speech system being developed especially for StudyBar, Spellchecking and persistent storage of preferences.

Another issue for development of StudyBar is support for Internet Explorer 6. Due to the differences between Internet Explorer and most other modern browsers, a large proportion of StudyBar’s codebase has to be implemented differently for it to support even some of the most basic and fundamental functions.

The toolkit for evaluation is progressing well and we needed to make sure we had a fair cross section of evaluation checks for all disabilities.  Those who are deaf or have hearing impairments may have the most problems with media content online, but not being able to hear videos is very different from the issue of not being able to see the animation or scenes and yet we had both under the title of Multimedia.   A decision was made to divide this check into two separate tests: -

• Do all pages with audio or audio/video features relevant to the content offer alternatives?    0=No chance to add alternatives.    1=Possible to add text summary (number of characters may be restricted)    2=Possible to add full text transcript    3=Possible to add captioning and a text transcript. Sign language seen as an option that will be commented on.
• Do all pages with video /animation features without audio or complex scenes with verbal descriptions offer alternatives?    0=No chance to add alternatives.    1=Possible to add text summary (number of characters may be restricted)    2=Audio description or extended text description.    3=Extended audio description with text description

Mary Jane made a further comment about how we reach the final results and we had to admit that any ranking really was not very relevant with the percentages in place.  So this part of the evaluation will be removed.  The icons represent the four criteria for each test and are set out in line with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and our own experience and those of colleagues on web accessibility.

Each service is evaluated against the test criteria and how they impact on a range of disabilities.  Sadly there is no way of accounting for individual skills and use of assistive technology.  This is why we choose to evaluate using freely available screen readers that do not require the skills of more complex screen readers and we admit we are rather harsh with our marking .

Mary Jane Barnett is on the Advisory Committee for the Expanding Accessibility Project of the North Texas Regional Library System as an Independent Librarian/Consultant and has been amazingly helpful with all her comments.  Her final point was about making sure everyone knew what products, services or applications we were evaluating for accessibility.  Off the cuff I said: “We sometimes find different wikis or blogs are actually developed using the same service such as Word Press or Mediawiki so we tend to skip that sort of repetition.  We choose those applications that have a free version and avoid those that require downloading onto a personal computer.  Finally all the sites need to be truly interactive to qualify as Web 2.0 rather than Web 1.0.

Thank you Mary Jane for being such a wonderful critical friend!  See you at Accessing the Higher Ground Conference in November, when I shall be presenting on all our projects!   Please add comments folks!