Google has also been working on some other accessibility-related features for Google Docs and Google Calendar.

“This fall, as classrooms fill with the hustle and bustle of a new semester, more students than ever will use Google Apps to take quizzes, write essays and talk to classmates,” says Google Accessibility technical lead T.V. Raman. “Yet blind students (like blind people of all ages) face a unique set of challenges on the web. Members of the blind community rely on screen readers to tell them verbally what appears on the screen. They also use keyboard shortcuts to do things that would otherwise be accomplished with a mouse, such as opening a file or highlighting text.”

The company has been working with advocacy organizations for the blind to make its products more accessible, and has already improved keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers in Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. On the Gmail Blog, the company provides some examples of how screen readers and keyboard shortcuts have been improved specifically in Google Calendar:

• In your calendar lists, you can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between your calendars. For each calendar in the list, you’ll hear its name and can use the spacebar to turn the calendar on or off. To remove a calendar from the list, use the delete key.
• In the agenda view, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move between events and use the left and right arrow keys to move between dates. To expand an event and expose the event details, press enter. To go to the event details page, type ‘e’. To remove an event, press delete. Although agenda view provides the best screen reader experience today, we are also working on improved accessibility for other views.
• In the guest list on the create/edit event page, you can navigate around using the up and down arrow keys. Use the spacebar to switch a guest’s status between optional and required. To remove a guest from the list, use the delete key.
• Additional keyboard shortcuts make it easier to use Google Calendar no matter which view or screen you’re on. Type ‘c’ to create an event, ‘/’ to start a search, and ‘+’ to add a calendar.

For a complete list os shortcuts and more information about screen reader functionality, you can find more info in Google’s help center.

JAWS, VoiceOver and ChromeVox are all supported by Calendars.

Google says it will continue to improve products for blind users in the weeks and months ahead.

Google engineering director Chee Chew said in a Google+ post that Google has been “aggressively improving video quality and stability.”

“It’s still a huge challenge to transmit 10 video feeds to 10 end points, potentially all around the world,” says Chew. “We still have lots of improvements we want to make, but I hope you [have] see[n] a substantial improvement in video stability in the past several weeks. This will be a never-ending effort.”

“Second, as I hungout in signing hangouts, I also noticed that most people were trying to watch others sign from the thumbnail video,” says Chew. “Our voice activated video switching for the main video usually just stayed on whomever had the most background noise.”

Google added a “Take the Floor” feature, so you can have everyone mute their audio, hit “shift+s” when you want to sign something and do so when you see yourself in the main video. It only works when you’re muted though.

Last week, Google told some of its “trusted developers” that it would make available access to the Google+ APIs. While it may be a while until they are widely available, it will be interesting to see what other developers are able to do with Google+ and Hangouts in particular in terms of accessibility.

Google appears to have somewhat given up on Wave, at least as a standalone product. The company posts to the Official Google Blog:

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Nielsen reports that the mobile Internet is more popular in China that it is in the U.S. "Widespread ownership of mobiles is only a fairly recent development in China, but consumers there have fully embraced the technology and in some ways are using it more robustly than their American and European counterparts," says Shan Phillips, Vice President, Greater China, Telecom Practice, The Nielsen Company.

Nielsen also has another interesting report looking at who is buying the iPad, and asking if they will also buy an iPhone.

WordPress has introduced its own "like" buttons. Now readers can "like" posts, although I’d say for publishers, the Facebook "like" buttons will be a lot more effective for driving traffic. Still, it’s nice to provide as many gateways for engagement as possible (without getting too cluttered, anyway).

According to the Financial Times, Motorola and Verizon have teamed up on a "TV Tablet." This is a device with a 10-inch screen that users will be able to watch television on.

Reuters reports that Sharp intends to launch a 3D smartphone this year. This would feature a 3D panel that can be viewed without special glasses and would have a 3D capable camera.

According to Unwired Review, Samsung is considering puting touchscreen functionality on the back of a tablet. This is based on a patent application for a "mobile terminal having dual touch screen and method of controlling content therein".

Meanwhile, as Engadget writes, Microsoft has been teasing an as-of-yet unannounced product via Twitter, saying, ""Don’t be so touchy…flat is where it’s at," and offering a small partial image of some object. This may or may not be a trackpad.

ChromeVis, which was designed to improve the visibility of text, is perhaps the main attraction in the new "Accessibility" group.  Engineer Rachel Shearer explains in the video below how it offers all sorts of thoughtful touches that go beyond basic magnification.

Then, as Jonas Klink, a product manager, noted on the Google Chrome Blog, "You will also find extensions like Chrome Daltonize that can help color blind users to see more details in web pages or gleeBox that provides alternatives to actions traditionally performed via the mouse such as clicking, scrolling and selecting text fields."

Klink also wrote, "To encourage more developers to incorporate best practices in accessibility when designing extensions, we’ve open sourced the code behind Chrome Vis and created relevant documentation."

So Google’s effort is likely to be the beginning of something big rather than a one-time acknowledgment.  Or even a two-time acknowledgement, considering that a few more extensions are supposed to be on the way.  And all sorts of people, including those who are just tired of seeing black-on-gray text or don’t like to reach for the mouse, should benefit.

We’ll try to provide an update when Google makes another move in this field.

"Kindle is for anyone who loves to read—in fact, we’ve heard from thousands of vision-impaired customers and customers with learning disabilities over the past two years who have been helped tremendously by Kindle," said Amazon Kindle Vice President Ian Freed, Vice President.

"With some key modifications, we believe Kindle can be a breakthrough device for the blind, and the team is excited about making these enhancements," added Freed.

To make Kindle more useful for the blind, the Kindle team is currently working on an audible menuing system so blind and vision-impaired readers can easily navigate to books without the need for assistance. Blind people will also be able to listen to books with the "Read to Me" feature, just as they can currently do with the Kindle.

Amazon will also include a new "super size" font, which increases the number of font sizes from six to eleven. The seventh size will be twice the height and width of the current largest font.

Amazon’s new Kindle features are scheduled to be released next summer. The device saw record sales in November. Amazon said it was the most "wished" for, the most "gifted," and the number one best-selling product across all of Amazon’s product categories. Amazon was of course one of the top retail sites for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and will likely be up there for the holiday season as a whole.
 

Related Articles:

> Barnes & Noble Says No Nook For Holidays

> Amazon’s Kindle Breaks Sales Record in November

> Walmart Wins Thanksgiving, Amazon Wins Black Friday

"Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands," says software engineer Ken Harrenstien, who helped design YouTube’s caption features. "This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for." (emphasis added)

"However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale," adds Harrenstein. "Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me."

To help with this problem, Google has utilized its automatic speech recognition technology, and integrated it with YouTube’s caption system to offer automatic captions. The captions generated by this will not always be perfect, as you can imagine, but as Harrenstein notes, even when they are flawed, they can still be quite helpful. He also says the technology will continue to improve over time.

YouTube is also launching automatic caption timing to make it easier to create captions manually. With this feature, users can just create a simple text file with all the words in the video, and Google will use the automatic speech recognition technology to figure out where the words are spoken and create the captions for the video. That’s pretty useful stuff.

Google says both new features will be available in English by the end of the week. At first, auto-caps will only be visible on a few partner channels, so they can get feedback. Eventually, they will roll out more broadly.

Related Articles:

> YouTube Adds Captions Option to API

> YouTube Now Allowing For Captions

> YouTube Translation Should Help Globalize Videos

The site includes links to official blog posts that discuss the topic and a place to leave feedback. The site also contains accessibility resources for Google products like:

- Android
- Calendar
- Chrome
- Docs
- Earth
- Gmail
- Maps
- Reader
- Spreadsheets
- Video
- YouTube
- And the AxsJAX framework

Google’s Accessibility Mission as described on the site:

Information access is at the core of Google’s mission – to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. That’s why in addition to crawling, indexing and ranking billions of websites, images, videos and other content, we also work to make that content available in all languages and in accessible formats.

We want to make information available to everyone, and that includes people with disabilities, such as blindness, visual impairment, color deficiency, deafness, hearing loss and limited dexterity. We’ve found that providing alternative access modes like keyboard shortcuts, captions, high-contrast views and text-to-speech technology helps everyone, not just people with disabilities. For example, keyboard shortcuts help power users get things done more quickly without using a mouse, speech-to-text technology enables people to skim and search audio content, and custom product themes give people more opportunities to personalize.

If users can’t find the Google accessibility information they seek, they can leave feedback, but there is also a help center available, where answers may come more quickly.

Well, Facebook has been working with the American Foundation for the Blind to make it easier. A couple years ago, the AFB approached Facebook about making the social network more accessible to the blind and visually impaired.

"From our very first interaction, Facebook has been responsive to our feedback and committed to finding solutions to these problems," says AFB CEO Carl R. Augusto in a post on the Facebook Blog. "This has underscored the fact that Facebook is a community dedicated to all of its members, including those with disabilities."

Facebook’s work with the AFB is a reminder of the accessibility needs around the web as a whole. Facebook being accessible is very important given it’s size and popularity. It’s going to be an ongoing task for the rest of the web to cater to users with disabilities. Some sites have been motivated by the threat of legal action, but so far that’s a pretty rare case. It shouldn’t come to that anyway.

"While our ultimate goal of making the Internet fully accessible is far from being attained, we are making progress toward reaching that goal by working together with organizations like Facebook," says Augusto.

Facebook has an accessibility help center in place that offers frequently asked questions related to accessibility, and provides tips for users with assistive devices. They also provide a contact form to reach Facebook’s accessibility team with questions/concerns.

The majority of screen reader users are blind or have some form of vision impairment, but that doesn’t apply to all users. Participants of the survey cited other disabilities as well as accessibility evaluation:

The data shows that most screen readers have to do some kind of customization to meet their preferences. An interesting point that WebAIM makes is that those without disabilities are much less likely to customize their readers, and this is probably the category that most often contains webmasters performing accessibility evaluations.

There is a ton of interesting information to be gleaned from this survey, but some statistics that stand out to me include:

- Respondents with no disability were nearly twice as likely to list Firefox as their browser of choice than blind respondents – 66% to 37%.

- When accessing an unfamiliar home page, 46% read through the home page as opposed to navigating, searching, or looking for a site map.

- 22% skip links whenever they’re available, compared to 19% who seldom skip links

- 52% say they navigate by headings whenever they’re available

- When it comes to site search, 26% use it when available, with another 25% claiming to use it often. Only 4% say they never use it.

When it comes to locating search on a site, there were a variety of ways listed as preferred techniques:

As I said, there is a ton of useful info in these survey results, and plenty more than what I have discussed here. If you are seriously interested in making your site more accessible and enhancing the user experience of your users who use screen readers, I would definitely check out the entire thing.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) sued Target, and they settled for $6 million in damages. That’s a lot of money for not including some "alt" tags, which was the  biggest problem with Target’s site. Dave Chartier at Ars Technica explains, "Specifically at issue in Target’s case is a lack of ‘alt’ tags throughout its site, tags which are used by screen reading technology to help disabled users navigate web sites."

As part of the settlement, Target will have to make employees responsible for coding its site attend periodic accessibility training sessions conducted by the NFB. Target has to pay them for this as well.

This case will likely have a large impact on eCommerce as a whole. More lawsuits will probably start coming out of the woodwork. Online retailers will scramble to get their sites within compliance. Accessibility experts will start getting exponentially increased business for their consulting services. The blind will no longer be ignored on the web.