So if any of you blindies have actually gotten grooveshark to work properly, let me know how you did it? I couldn’t manage.
What I did so far was just google the song, limiting my search results to the grooveshark website and pray that google found something that would autoplay. I no longer need to do that.
Tinysong makes it a bit easier to search for songs if you’re blind, though you still don’t get the search by album or related songs or anything features that the flash interface sports, but at least it’s better than nothing.
Looks like tinysong has a publicly accessible API too, so perhaps I could write a wrapper that would do some album searching? I dunno, haven’t looked at it yet.
Sorry for the style in this post, I’m full of fatigue…
wp3 is out btw, go upgrade.
Haiku (yes I know it’s getting old, but it’s like an obsession, I just can’t stop 
), this one is dedicated to grooveshark:
Drinking diet coke
Not quite as satisfying
Please label your flash
Now to go look at that API I suppose, or sleep… Yeah, probably sleep.
Malthe.
Afternoon.
I know I haven’t updated this thing for a long time, sorry about that.
So I finally made the switch to wp 3.0 rc1, really awesome.
It’s as accessible as ever, and I really like the custom menu concept.
Lots of stuff has been going on lately, I got into college or high school or whatever that would be in english, (gymnasiet, for you danish speaking folks out there), so I’m ecstatic about that. I’ve been busy learning mobility (how to get to the place), so that’s pretty fun.
I’ll try to update this a bit more, but just thought I’d throw this quick post out there.
My virtual machine is acting up, so wrestling with that at the moment… On that note, here’s a haiku to end this post:
VMware fusion
Who or what to sacrifice
To make you run smooth
Good very very early morning, dear readers (12:26 AM here).
Just sitting here listening to
Swiss Groove,
which is currently playing a pretty funky song (Sheila E. – Joy).
That, however, is not what this post is about, sorry for the off topic.
No, today’s post is about screen readers. Did I sound slightly menacing there? Now why would you think that?
I’m a mac user and truly loving it, today I was playing around on a Windows PC though. Don’t get me wrong, Windows has it’s uses, and this is not a post on OS X vs. Windows. Don’t worry. No, this is a post on screen readers.
I was using
jaws
on the PC, and I noticed eloquence actually pronounced youtube correctly for once. In the old jaws versions it’d pronounce it as iaotube (the iao sound from miao, and a british person’s way of saying tube).
Thought that was really odd, so I went to the dictionary manager and saw there were like a hundred exceptions and modifications to the speech synthesizers pronouncement rules.
I don’t really think it’s the job of the screen reader manufacturer to decide how the synthesizer is supposed to say youtube or Gmail. Otherwise you’d have to fix every little unconventional spelling of words in that half-assed sort of way. If it really annoys the person using the screen reader so much that it says iaotube, he can just add the dictionary definition himself.
Also, what’s with the “research it” feature?
Can’t blind people google stuff or go on wikipedia without the help of some external script any more? Hot keys are nice, but if one wants custom scripts one should get them externally or write them. It’s not the screen reader maker’s job. If the methods to search wikipedia and google (in this case web browsing) are accessible, there’s no need to create a sort of blanket for the blind. Otherwise the uninitiated blind person will just wonder where in the world “research it” is when he uses an other screen reader, which is counterproductive.
Freedom scientific should focus on improving accessibility, not bloat the product with useless features. This applies to every screen reader. They should be as lightweight, fast and efficient as possible.
Haiku time! (Note on this haiku, the jaws screen reader’s name is an abbreviation for job access with speech.)
Job access with speech
Plenty of useless features
Make it more stable.
Malthe.
Just finished watching iron man with my family. Good flick, better than most of the super hero movies that’s for sure.
I read the dome by Stephen King all day yesterday. It’s a good thing speech synthesizers don’t get tired, read it pretty much non-stop from 01:00 PM to 02:00 AM. It was really great, I was hooked from page 1.
I haven’t really written much about music on here, but I’m a jazz/funk/fusion fanatic. Bought the
Thunder
album by S.M.V a while ago, which I didn’t regret. It’s a sweet album from start to finish, go buy it.
Think I might have found the next album to buy now.
He had a hat, by Jeff Lorber.
This guy is awesome, he’s one of my favorite keyboardists along with George Duke, Herbie Hancock and many others.
Now for the haiku of the day:
Really groovy song
Jeff Lorber sure is the man
click link to listen
Malthe.
Posted in books, movies, music
|
Sorry for the long break in posting, didn’t really feel like it. I firmly believe that a blog should only get posted to when the author feels like it, and not become like a chore, Thus the absence.
On to the actual post:
Remember when I said I wanted to code a little sound notification when the contact form was sent?
It’s probably me missing something really obvious here, but I can’t find a cross-browser non-flash way of playing a sound when a button is clicked or when an other event happens in javascript.
I’ll always be looking for a javascript way to do this (if you know a good one, feel free to write me or comment on this post), but for now I’ll just add a notice to the contact page explaining that you won’t hear a click when you click the button.
Obligatory haiku:
scripting is a pain
Across multiple browsers
Follow standards please
Malthe.
Good afternoon, my dear readers.
On my way home via train which is boring (it’s gonna take about 3.5 hours), but at least there is network coverage.
I’m really Looking forward to the easter holidays, I’ve been impatient the entire week.
Installed a new contact form plugin, the other one couldn’t handle the danish special characters æ, ø and å properly.
This one uses ajax though, I’m probably gonna code in a thing that plays a little sound when the message is sent successfully, just so blind people will notice they actually sent it. As it stands right now screen readers are not reading the little box that says submitted automatically. You have to go read underneath the form to see it, and some people just don’t do that. Should be easy to code, I might do it on this train, since I have nothing to do anyway.
The new south park episode is pretty awesome, watched it yesterday. Go watch it!
Haiku time!
Apple, Nokia
Lock down mobile devices
Like dictatorship
Malthe.
Posted in site news
|
Tagged News, status
|
Good evening.
It’s finally happened! Adobe has announced that they’re going to
make flash accessible for mac and linux
This is really exciting, that’s one of the few things VoiceOver still can’t play with.
Sorry for the slight briefness of this post, but I’m kind of smashed. It won’t end without a haiku though:
Adobe makes flash
accessible for the mac
can now pause youtube.
End of haiku.
It’s holiday tomorrow for me, gooo easter!
Malthe.
Posted in tech
|
Tagged apple, flash, mac, VoiceOver
|
Why good evening, my dear nonexistent readers.
Tired today, so a short haiku.
Google has now left
The republic of china
it is far too late.
Malthe.
I have a free period, yea!
While reading I came across this:
Pushu Variant Spams Hotmail, Cracks Audio Captchas,
which is slightly worrying in my opinion. I really hope microsoft won’t kill the audio captcha just because of that, there are few enough audio captchas as it is.
That really got me thinking about captchas in general.
Many sites have started using audio captchas which is awesome, but there are still some out there that don’t. I realize we have great stuff like
Web Visum
and
Solona
But web visum requires firefox (which isn’t accessible for mac, hint mozilla), and solona is human operator driven. It’s not that I don’t trust the solona folks, but would you really want them to see which file you’re getting on megaupload or rapid share? Would you want them to see you signing up for a self-help program?
I’m not ungrateful for the stuff that these guys do, but if everyone used audio captchas they wouldn’t need to do it in the first place.
Haiku time!
Audio captcha
garbled words in my speakers
solved itthe the sixth time.
Malthe.
Posted in rants, tech
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Tagged opinions, rants
|
Hello, my nonexistent readers.
Stuff seems to be working now, added the first couple of pages and a contact form. Had to write a quick and dirty hack because of my web host’s configuration of sendmail. It works snazzy now though, so who cares.
Now the usual haiku:
come do my laundry
I sure as hell don’t want to
I’ll pay you 10 bucks.
Malthe.
