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.

The information that is most commonly used is displayed at the top of the screen, the layout is simplified, and they’ve added some other features.

"The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen," says software engineer Nassar Stoertz. "Now you’ll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the ‘Repeats’ checkbox."

"You’ll notice a new tab on the event page that should make it easier to find a good time to schedule an event," adds Stoertz. "When your friends or coworkers give you permission to see their calendars, you can click this tab to see a preview of their schedules and hover over their events to see what conflicts they might have. This should make scheduling a tad easier, especially for events with large numbers of guests."

Google Apps users can see data from other calendar services in the schedule preview thanks to Google’s Calendar Connectors API.

Google has also added a "Working Hours" setting and a "Find a Time" tab on the event scheduling page that lets you see coworkers’ schedules and choose meeting times. More on these features here.

There is now a "tasks" link in the upper right-hand corner of the Google Calendar page. Once you click on it, a box will come up on the opposite side of the screen, where you can add tasks in list form. They come with checkboxes so you can check them off as you accomplish them, and a form to enter a due date. The task will then appear on your calendar on the day it is due.

Once you have completed a task, you can check the box, and it will automatically cross that task out both in the list and on the calendar.

Calendar-specific additions to the tasks feature as Google notes include: 

- Tasks that have due dates will automatically appear on your calendar. To create a task with a due date in Calendar, click on an empty space in month view or the all-day section of week view, and be sure select the "Task" option.

- To attach a due date to an existing task, click the right-arrow from within the task list, and then click on the calendar icon.

-  You can modify a task’s due date by dragging it to a different date, just as you would with a regular calendar event.

-  To mark a task completed from within Calendar, just click on the task’s checkbox. (Isn’t that satisfying, overachievers?)

-  To keep track of due dates before they arrive, there’s a nifty new "Sort by due date" feature available in the Actions menu at the bottom of your task list. While sorting by due date, you can reschedule a task by clicking on it in your list, then pressing control and the up or down arrow key.

Google Calendar has long been a fantastic organizational tool. This has just stepped it up in that department even more.

If you use Google Docs, Picasa, or Google Calendar for example, you can now update people’s contact information without having to use Gmail. This was not an option before.

"We hope that you find this new tool useful," says Google Apps Marketing Manager Debbie Light. "It’s just one of many that we’ve been working on to help you access your data more easily and connect with the people that matter to you."

To access the contact manager go to:

http://www.google.com/contacts

Businesses, schools, and organizations using Google Apps will have to go to:

http://www.google.com/contacts/a/example.com (replace "example.com" with the domain name you use).

In these cases, the administrator will have to enable the functionality within the control panel by clicking "add more services," finding "Contacts," and clicking "add it now."

If you are unfamiliar with Google Pack,it’s a free collection of software from Google and other companies. The software in the Google Pack helps you browse the web faster, remove spyware and viruses, organize your photos, and more. Learn more about each of the programs in the Google Pack.

"We think that you should be able to access your favorite web apps with the same ease and simplicity as desktop applications," says a post on the Google Docs Blog. "Today, we took one small step in that direction."

Initially, this seems like a fairly minor announcement, but increasing the convenience of using services like Gmail, Docs, etc. could go a long way toward pushing even more  users into the cloud. Combine that with Google’s 99.9% uptime guarantee on such services, and they probably start looking more attractive to non-users.

Yep, since someone probably realized that people can look at printed notes even without an Internet connection, a post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog explains, "[R]ead-only offline access is now an option in Calendar for Google Apps customers." 

 

Unfortunately, there is that read-only hitch.  If you want to change your schedule while you’re without Internet access, a normal pen and a sheet with a grid on it may still be the best bet.  And this is a wee bit pathetic on Google’s part since, as of nine days ago, even Gmail began allowing folks to compose messages while they’re offline.

Ah, well.  If you’re interested in giving Google Calendar’s offline access a shot, just sign in, look for an "Offline Beta" link in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage, and follow the prompts from there.

Odds are good that the decision won’t lead to the demise of all those calendar booths at shopping malls.

"If you want to easily keep track of your upcoming appointments right from your desktop, this new version has a cleaner interface, fully supports Google Apps calendars, and includes three different viewing modes," explains Software Engineer Benjamin Schirmer at the Official Gmail Blog.

You can click on an event to see details, including a map of the location, a list of attendees, and start and end times. You can also easily create new events.

The Gmail gadget allows users to login to multiple Gmail accounts. I would have to assume that similar functionality is available with this one. The Calendar gadget runs with the latest Linux, Mac, and Windows releases of Google Desktop gadgets.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008.

If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry.

Glotzbach then breaks out some research from the Radicati Group showing the amount of downtime other solutions experience, which can account for hours of lost productivity for their users (particularly when IT Staffs are taken by surprise by that downtime). 

So Glotzbach says that Google is extending the 99.9% "guarantee" to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. While Yahoo seems to be obsessing over "openness," it appears Microsoft isn’t the only one doing so over "the cloud."

When you add them, they will appear in the left-side navigation column, around the area where you find the chat, labels, and, and invitation features. Although, it might be best not to get too attached to this layout.

Perhaps recalling the recent backlash from users over the new navigation style of iGoogle, Gmail engineeer Dan Pupius says,"We’re not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail — in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn’t offer scalable real estate. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we’re using today — they can sometimes slow down the page. We’re fanatical about speed, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on performance."

Pupius also explains another new feature. "There’s a third Lab that allows you to add any gadget by pasting in the URL of its XML spec file (e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml). We realize this isn’t very user friendly right now; it’s a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail." Developers (and anyone else for that matter) can let their opinions be known in the Labs forum.

The Docs and Calendar gadgets integrate nicely into Gmail. You can see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alerts for scheduled events, and you can search your Docs documents within Gmail for easy access to documents you might want to send.

I have a feeling this is just the beginning of the availability of gadgets in Gmail. I expect that we’ll start seeing the addition of others in the not-too-distant future. Other recent Gmail offerings include expanded emoticons, a new version of Gmail for mobile use, canned replies, mail goggles, the "marked as read" button, and a "forgotten attachment detector".

Word of this development comes from Andrew Fogg.  Since Fogg serves as the chief marketing and strategy officer at Kusiri and a senior researcher at RBS, the odds that he’s kidding or incorrect are tiny, and on Twitter, he stated, "Gears on Gmail and Calendar in approximately 6 weeks.  Just had a preview at Google offices."

 Google Calendar Going Offline

The one problem – aside from potential missed deadlines and all other manner of usual hang-ups – is that Fogg continued, "Not sure if it is Google Enterprise only."

Enterprise is probably as good as anything, though, at least in a long-term sense – it’s almost certain that Google will eventually make the upgrade more accessible.  Also, from a sort of business/financial perspective, any Enterprise upgrade might count more than a consumer-level equivalent, since it’ll allow for whole companies, instead of random and far-flung individuals, to convert.

Now we get to just sit and wait for the release, which, it if happens in exactly six weeks, will occur on Jack Black’s birthday.  A hat tip goes to Ionut Alex Chitu in the meantime.