Last year, I had an opportunity to take a shot at participating in a survey for the general accessibility of certain features of then current cell phone models. If I’m not mistaken, it focused almost entirely on the ability to make payments for certain things via your cell phone, among other things. My name was on the list for that, though for one reason or another I never actually got in to participate fully–too bad, as they were offering to pay me for my time.

Flash forward to yesterday. I get an email while I’m going through finding political morons to mock, inviting me to another focus group with the option of also or instead doing a survey by mail. Like the last one, the focus group will be held in Ottawa by the Neil Squire Society. Like the last one, it’s focus is on the ability for the visually or otherwise disabled to make use of certain aspects of cell phones–in this case, the ability and ease of use when it comes to obtaining emergency services via cell phone.

The only difference between this one and last year’s is I’m not currently actually living in Ottawa–not yet, anyway. So getting to the actual focus group could require some creative effort. Still, much like the last one if it comes up, I fully intend to be there. Blame my interest in most if not all things accessible. And, hey, they offered me money last time. I’m not stupid.

I like to think I’m halfway patient. Kind of. In that way that kind of makes some people consider beating me over the head for being too stubborn for my own good. Still, that having been said, Windows Live Writer just beat the royal hell out of me so far as accessibility goes. Huge.

After fighting to get it to show me the screen to write a blog entry in a manner that doesn’t do hurty things to my head, I discover it wants to create its own standards for entry formatting–including throwing HTML where it really hasn’t got any business throwing it. For right now, it’s imperfect solutions time. Which means I do the majority of my work via Semagic, now that I’ve finally gotten it to play nice with something that isn’t LJ, and what I can’t do with this will get done from the web. In the meantime, the hunt is on for a third party client that is:

• accessible
• flexible
• compatible with WordPress’s newer features
• not necessarily restricted by LiveJournal’s limitations–I’d like to be able to make full use of nested categories, etc.

I don’t particularly think I’m being entirely too demanding in this search. I also don’t think such a beast exists, or exists for free in any event. Meantime, if you’re planning to use Windows Live Writer, reconsider. It, for lack of a better word, is crap. From an accessibility perspective, Microsoft fails. Hardcore. I should probably know that already. Ah well, that’ll learn me.

I’ve been doing this long enough now that I think I’m fairly well justified in wanting to look for something that doesn’t require I pull up the website in order to write a post. Not that I don’t like the WordPress interface, but sometimes, I don’t want to wait for the site to load up when I have the option of doing this locally. So, as I’ve been known to do, I took advantage of the fact I wasn’t doing anything overly constructive right now anyway, and started playing around with Windows Live Writer. I know, it’s a Microsoft program and I’m more than a little anti-Microsoft some days. But, unfortunately–yet again–they’re so far the most promising accessibility solution out there at the moment. It does take a tiny bit of creative work with the keyboard to get things set up in such a way that I won’t have to go into the website directly and clean up after it–at least, I’d better bloody well not, which is in my book of absolute lazy a definite +5. Beyond that, and for right at this very moment, with the slightest of tweeking here and there I suspect this may or may not end up being something I can use without pulling my hair out. Now, provided this thing doesn’t do about a hundred different kinds of breaking on me, I shouldn’t in theory need to try and convince Semagic that it really really really wants to play nice with the WordPress API. I’ve noticed LiveJournal clients/services tend to virtually implode on themselves when asked to do non-LJ things. And at the moment, I don’t particularly feel like tinkering with the internals of those protocols. I’m still recovering from the last time, after all.

Over the few months leading up to the Christmas holidays, the original cordless phone set I had for the apartment–one of those older two-handset jobs–was really starting to let go of, like, everything. I had one who’s battery might last 30 minutes, and another who’s battery might last 30 seconds. My parents, who bought me those phones a few years ago, had the exact same ones–and were having at around the same time the exact same problem. I can’t even remember what model they were, but turns out they were pretty well crap. They were promptly replaced in both households by phones made by Panasonic instead. We got our hands on one of those digital answering systems–the phones, 3 of them for my place this time, come with their own built-in answering machine so you’re not paying someone for voicemail. I didn’t exactly plan to use that, but it’s nice to know they have that option.

We got them set up, and were introduced to a rather neat little surprise. It seems, though we didn’t know this at the time, the handsets in use at my parents’ place come with the option to have call Id information read out to you via text to speech built into the individual handsets. Now, granted, you can’t use the same method for being able to go back through your history of missed calls, but this is perhaps the second model of phone I’ve actually seen it implemented on–the first, a corded model several years ago, quite frankly made me want to pitch it out the window. And the thing wasn’t even mine. Naturally mine didn’t come with that option, but it was still nice to see some of them did.

I have no idea if Panasonic is actually starting to consciously make their equipment just that much more accessible, or if it’s another example of a measure of convenience just so happening to double as something you can use without requiring the ability to actually see your phone. The naive part of me would like to think the former, but here in the real world, it’s more than likely the latter. Still, it’s a nice touch for a phone system. I wouldn’t mind seeing this end up becoming a trend for other manufacturers. For the curious, here’s one of the models with talking call ID on Amazon. I wonder if it’s too late for an exchange…

As anyone who follows my twitter feed will probably already know, last weekend went actually quite well with myself and Jessica (samari76). She arived safely on Friday, and we spent the majority of that day just hanging around the apartment, talking. she ended up being a little more tired than she thought she’d be, so she caught a couple hours’ sleep while I came out here to finish up with checking email and the like. We ended up just relaxing and enjoying ourselves for the rest of that evening. I threw together a little something for supper, and we just sort of talked and did a little listening to music. Saturday we slept in a little, and took our time getting to that point most people would call awake. Again, there was more just hanging out, and talking. We ended up ordering out for supper, after which we got into a bottle of lemmon rum I’d picked up a couple days before leaving Pembroke.

It was actually before we started drinking, though, when we got a call that my grandpa had been taken to the Ottawa hospital; he was having issues with his apendix and they weren’t sure if it would require surgery or not. We stayed up most of the night waiting for news, but after being told my parents were enroute to Ottawa just behind him to make sure he was being looked after, we hadn’t heard anything. Trish IMed me at that point to say she hadn’t heard anything new, really, either. We ended up aranging to get together for breakfast the next day, since we’d not hung out in a while anyway and Jess was looking forward to seeing her again. Well, that, plus since we were waiting for information it made more sense to all be in one place when it came in. We ended up going to bed about 4:00 that morning, getting up again at an impressive 9:00. Cabbing it over there, we hung out with Trish, her husband and both her brothers for much of the morning. She made an awesome breakfast, which kind of reminded me a little of something you’d be able to order from any decent restaurant on Jessica’s side of the border. Family started to trickle in shortly after, and we learned he wasn’t actually going to get the surgery right yet; they wanted to see if they couldn’t treat it with antibiotics first, which kind of makes sense to me. I mean, the guy *is* in his 80′s. No sense in putting him through a surgery that may or may not be required. We got to see a goodly portion of my family, though. And Jess got to meet a few people we couldn’t get around to visiting the last time we were both in that neighbourhood. We all sat around and talked, the older guys watching nascar on TV and everyone with something better to do just generally conversating/trying not to hear it. They ordered pizza and wings, some of which we both helped ourselves to (Hey, breakfast was good, but it’s pizza and wings. Come on.). We spent the rest of the day just sort of hanging out. After everyone left, Trish, her husband, both brothers, plus myself and Jessica decided to go and check out one of the local carnivals in town that weekend. We got there just in time for it to start packing up, of course, but at least Jess got to get a brief look at some of what goes on around here this time of year. We didn’t get home until about 9:00 or so, and stayed up for a bit longer just generally talking and the like.

Monday was a very low key day; we didn’t even get dressed until that evening. we just enjoyed our last day together for a while, and recovered sort of from the day before. I took Jess to the bus station that night, and she made it across the border all in one piece, luggage and all. As for me, I went back home and did that thing where I fall into bed until 6 or 7 the next morning. I spent the rest of the week going through my usual routine; looking for work, not finding much, talking to Jess, and occasionally cursing technology. I did eventually finally hear that my grandpa was back home and doing well, the antibiotics seeming to be working thus far, so that was one less thing on my list of things to be paying attention to.

One thing I did finally get around to this week, that I’d been threatening to do before, is installing Gentoo linux on the formerly retired laptop. It actually didn’t take too long when you break it down to time spent actually working on the system; the longest part of it all was the waiting for things to compile. I had it installed and running by yesterday morning, and talking by yesterday afternoon after I learned I missed a step in building the kernel so had to do that all over again. Lovely. I got that fixed up though, and it behaves beautifully now. I ended up playing around with Speakup, one of the screenreading packages available for linux, a bit yesterday and again this morning. Now, I’m waiting for the various Gnome packages to install, including its screenreader, so I can have a little bit of a look at that. Judging by the sheer number of packages that are needing instalation, and the fact they all need to be compiled, this could take a while. In the meantime, I have free time on my hands that I’m sure I’ll put to good use ordering groceries. Or sleeping. Or something. I may or may not have missed something in my update. If I did, I’m sure Jess will remind me… she’s good like that. As for now, though, I’m so gone it’s not funny.

From a thread regarding a speech-friendly installer for another Linux distro:

There’s definitely interest. I’d even learn the process for doing that for the sole purpose of contributing. Thanks for looking into it, William.

—–Original Message—–
From: speakup-bounces@braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces@braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of William Hubbs
Sent: March 14, 2009 10:29 PM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: Speakup-enabled ArchLinux install CD, version 2!

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1

Hi all,

I would like to get this done on gentoo, I just haven’t attempted to coordinate it with release engineering yet. My plan is for our latest version of speakup and espeakup to go stable, then I will work with release engineering to get it put onto our official cds.

I’m not sure how to build a minimal cd myself, but if there is interest, I can ask release engineering about how that would be done for testing.

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 10:10:59PM -0400, James Homuth wrote:
Careful. Yall are making me consider playing with Arch Linux if only because of its Gentoo-like qualities, minus compiling. This is, IMHO, exactly the kind of CD that particular distro needs. Would anyone mind > if I forward this thread to gentoo’s accessibility project?

I loves me some open source community talk, yo. Try doing *that* with Windows, or Mac.

PS: William = team lead for gentoo‘s accessibility project. Also known as the guys who maintain screenreader software’s compatibility with that particular flavour of linux. Also, keep in mind, that entire discussion took place on a publicly accessible mailing list over the course of a few hours. You are not going to get that from Micro$oft.

And it’s accessibility related, so naturally, I was all over this. They’re gonna pay me $65 or so if I qualify to take this study, for the sole purpose of seeing how accessible my cell phone is. And apparently, if you choose to use your own cell phone for the process, they’ll throw extra money at you to cover it. I won’t say no to $80 for showing up and texting.

——————————–PARTICIPANTS NEEDED FOR a study of Cellphone Based Payment Systems

Researchers at the Neil Squire Society in cooperation with the Canadian Institute for the Blind are conducting a study to better understand how making retail product purchases using cellular phones can impact members of the Blind Community.

The ultimate goal of this project is to identify potential barriers that would make it difficult for people who are blind to complete mobile retail transactions and to make industry aware of these issues.

We are currently recruiting individuals who are blind, who currently use a cellular phone, and who know how to send and receive a Text Message and use a Web Browser on a cellular phone.

Eligible participants will be asked to participate in one 2 hour test session which involves using 4 types of payment services. You will receive a $65 honorarium for your time.

If you live in Ottawa, Ont, Regina, Sk or Vancouver, BC we would like to hear from you.

To learn more about this research and your eligibility, please contact:

OTTAWA: Ms. Joanne Ahern
Research Assistant, Neil Squire Society
Telephone: (613) 723-3575
EMAIL: joannea@neilsquire.ca

REGINA: Diann Coates
Regional Manager, Neil Squire Society
PH: (306) 781-6023
EMAIL: diannc@neilsquire.ca

VANCOUVER: Harry Lew
Manager of R&D
PH: (604) 412-7599
EMAIL: harryl@neilsquire.ca

Principal Investigator

Dr. Gary Birch, PhD, P.Eng.
Neil Squire Society
Executive Director and Director of Research & Development

As I mentioned a while back, I’ve been toying around with Gentoo linux off and on for a while, and have been considering running it locally for quite some time. Today, well actually last night, out of boredom I decided to burn a CD image of their latest release. I’d of stuck with the image you gave me mike (lightvortex), but it was about 3 years old judging by what I could see of it and didn’t burn properly. Sorry! So, I burned that particular image, and went about the process of testing it out on my laptop (hint: 5 years old, almost 6, very minimalistic – 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, etc). And with absolutely no fussing on my end whatsoever, which is good seeing as there’s absolutely 0 accessibility on that particular live CD, she worky and she worky like beautiful.

So I fired it up, got myself to the command line with absolutely 0 feedback from the computer (I love having had previous linux experience), and set up the CD so I could remote into it from this machine. That took all of maybe a minute and a half to do. From there, it was just log into the laptop (or, rather, log into the CD in the laptop), and poke around. I could have probably gone right to the instalation procedure from there with absolutely no fuss whatsoever. And would have, except I hadn’t had a damn thing pulled off that laptop yet that I wanted to save. Now, keep in mind I’ve had this machine since about October of 07. Since then, the laptop’s been in a state of semi-retirement, only ever really being used when the router decides it wants to enter into a fit of noncooperation. Since the router’s in the bedroom and the desktop isn’t, the laptop became my troubleshooting tool. But I still never bothered to pull what I thought I’d want to save off of it. So I hadn’t planned on formatting it at all until that was done. Last night, after I logged into the system and poked around, I mounted the internal HD so I could access it from inside the live CD environment. And then I downloaded the whole damn thing, Windows OS and all, into a folder on this HD. Took me the better part of 24 hours to do it (I started it at about 1:00 this morning and it only finished just after 10 tonight), but now, what is on my laptop is also on my desktop in a folder unoriginally named “backup” (I was tired. Sue me.). Now all I have to do is get around to actually whiping it and installing Gentoo. Which may or may not happen this year. I’m curious to start playing with gnome and orca, but not curious enough yet to undergo the manual instalation process Gentoo takes. And no, I refuse to install Ubuntu. Debian, *maybe*. But only if I have to.

I don’t know how new this is, but after trying to create a group to replace the less than maintained one I’ve been a member of for a while, I ran into that damnable Yahoo captcha with absolutely no audio or other alternative whatsoever. Except apparently, there is.

Hello James,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Groups.

We appreciate your patience, James. I have verified your account, and have set it so that you should no longer encounter the word verification box when joining or creating Yahoo! Groups.

And, according to the fact I’ve managed to successfully do so, I dare say for the time being, it actually works. I now go pick my jaw up off the floor.

So in between getting things settled up for Christmas, and taking Jess (samari76) out for her birthday, I’ve had a bit of an opportunity to do some technological geeking. I’ve been toying with the idea of installing a local copy of various versions of Linux, mostly for the awesome factor that would go with it. That, plus trish is rather curious to see exactly what the system looks like. So with mucho assistance from Mike (lightvortex), I got my hands on an iso of Gentoo, A.K.A. my OS of choice. Burned two live CD’s, one for my eventual booting/possible installing, and one so Trish can look at it on her own schedule and optionally install it when she decides it’s something she’s got time to dink around with. If I ever do get around to installing Gentoo locally, I’ve still got the HP laptop sitting in the other room that’s been in a sort of semi-state of retirement since about September/October of last year, when I got my hands on this machine. I’m giving serious thought to plunking Gentoo on that machine, and taking the Orca screenreader for a test drive. Thought about a couple others, but from doing my own poking around Orca’s got the most publicly available documentation/information on it. I’m not *overly* impressed with its selection of speech synths, but considering it’s free software, plus is completely and totally open source, I don’t see that being a permanent problem. If it turns out I actually enjoy locally using Gentoo,I may do exactly the same thing with the desktop here; ditch the copy of Windows and subsequent copy of JAWS for Windows I have on here, and stick Gentoo in its place. God knows there’s about 40 billion equivalent programs I can use to do the same every day things I do on here while using that particular OS. Now I just have to muster up the nerve to actually take the plunge. One of these days I’ll let loose with my Windows versus Linux post. But for the moment, I’ll just leave it at Linux will pwn j00. And yes, Rox’e (pawpower4me), it even pwns your macs. Like wo.