Unintentionally Blank

Yesterday I found out that IBM were taking matters of accessibility to a new level by developing a browser that helps the blind and partially sighted deal with mutlimedia content. Today I discover that Amazon is going to collaborate with the National Federation of the Blind in order to “make more improvements for both our sighted customers and those customers who use screen access software to browse and shop the Internet.”

Continue reading “Accessibility Matters To Amazon” »

According to the BBC, IBM are set to release a web browser specifically for blind and partially sighted users. The aim of the Accessibility Browser is to give access to and control over multimedia content embedded in websites to those who can’t use a mouse for browsing.

Screen readers and self-talking browsers are not able to deal with video and animation, some of which starts playing as soon as a page is loaded.

This often interferes with the synthesised speech output from the screen-reader software.

Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

Continue reading “Accessibility Browser From IBM - Helps Blind “See” Web Video” »

You may have noticed that I’ve spent a bit of time over the last couple of days tweaking my design a bit. Some of this tweaking was to make the design a bit more readable, some of it was to help out the search engines in deciding what each page on this site was about and finally I made a change to make it easier to submit my articles to any social bookmarking or social media sites. Some changes you will have noticed, others might slip by you and some you will only have got if you regularly view the source of the different pages on this site.

Continue reading “Tweaks For Readers, For Search, For Social Media” »

First Yahoo released their oneSearch, now Google have improved their mobile search. The mobile web is growing and the big search engines are pinpointing how we like to search and use our mobile devices. Now they will look to localise results and return information within the search page rather than make us click through. Yahoo will return results in your area for searches for things like movies and food and will return local news, weather and traffic reports if you type in a city. Google too promises to make an informed decision over whether you want web, local or image searches based on what you input.

When Read/Write Web broke the story on oneSearch, they had me sold. The next time I was going to use my mobile to look something up, I was going to go straight for Yahoo as opposed to my standard use of Google. Now it has all changed and I have a decision to make again. I will be trying out both Google’s new mobile search and Yahoo’s oneSearch to find out which suits me best. I need to know who provides the best data, which search is quicker, who’s search is the most accurate in my area and ultimately which search answers my questions the best. I’ll post my results when I’ve decided.

In the meantime, what mobile search engine do you prefer? Do you tend to stick to your favourite desk top search or do you shop around? Do you even use the mobile web? Let me know your thoughts on the potential competition here.

Last week, Google announced themes for their personalised homepage. I love using the personal homepage and thought this was an innovative and endearing idea, even though it is quite a move from Google’s standard stark white background. My one problem was that I couldn’t use it to start with.

Continue reading “Google’s Personalised Homepage Themes - Not So Personal In The UK” »