… which is in stark contrast to the ultra-Orthodox attitude against people with disabilities.
The captioned (in Hebrew) video clip is the second video in http://www.hofesh.org.il/articles/books/books.html (in Hebrew), and it is about a book shop, which avoids displaying an anti-religion book due to threats from the town’s rabbi’s wife.
The newly announced http://www.stackoverflow.com/ Web site confines all communications to the audio format. No provision for textual transcription of the audio podcasts exists. Users’ submissions are accepted only if they are in audio format. This is probably the founders’ newest idea for filtering out spam and flames.
However, it is a case of rude inaccessibility. Please do not contribute and do not browse the Web site - and let the founders know your opinion about this case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The announcements in the founders’ blogs are as follows:
What next, a Web site, which excludes gay software developers?
The podcasts are now transcribed into text, making them accessible to the deaf as well as being helpful to people, who want to discover them using search engines, and people having no time to listen through the entire podcast.
The transcription mechanism is Wiki-based, allowing people to transcribe text piece by piece. So even if you have only 15 minutes to spare, you can still make a contribution.
It is still necessary to persuade them to accept questions as text in addition to sound clips…
I am not going to participate in the Earth Hour, which is due to be held tonight in Tel Aviv between 20:00-21:00.
This is in spite of my support for the idea of taking care of our environment.
The reason - due to my deafness, I need light and various electronic appliances to communicate with other people.
Note: I do not live in Tel Aviv itself, but I’d participate in the project if it were not for the accessibility issue.
Additional links:
Then the following is a must read for you:
Web sites, which support only IE, would not be visited by people, who use other browsers. So OF COURSE, they would not “report enough traffic to justify” support for W3C standards and/or other browsers.
By the way, my Web site’s browser statistics since the start of November 2007 indicate the following browser percentages (disclaimer for Israeli Webmasters: my Web site’s audience is international):
| MS Internet Explorer | 42.6% |
| Mozilla | 31.7% |
| Unknown | 12.5% |
| Firefox | 9.7% |
| All the rest | 3.5% |
I write in this blog not only about crazy ideas, but also about accessibility and deafness.
Lorelle on WordPress wrote a blog article about people who blog about disabilities. This article repeats the old stuff (known to people with disabilities, but not widely known otherwise) about the percentage of people disabilities in the general population, mentions the relevant legal issues (specific to USA), and links to several relevant and interesting blogs.
The above article also refers the readers to Globe of Blogs - Disabled Blogs for more disabled blog links.
Ilan Shavit publicized three videoclips about Israel.
I was happy to be surprised to see that those videoclips have subtitles in Hebrew, making them accessible to the hearing impaired, who know Hebrew!
The links to the videoclips are:
Recently I flew with British Airways.
They seem to have recently made commitment to provide accessible experience to passengers with special needs.
At any case, when checking in for flights, I was now asked if I need special assistance. The accessibility program seems to be relatively new - they now know how to deal with passengers with difficulties in walking, but deaf passengers are relatively new experience for them. So I had my turn at educating the airline employees that deaf passengers need a way to see the captain’s messages in writing, especially in emergencies.
The airplanes, in which I flew both directions, had plasma TVs for each seat. However the video programs were suspended whenever there were announcements - with no written rendition of the announcements. This is something, which can be improved.
An hilarious experience was when the airplane neared landing. I was asked by two stewards if I need assistance. I explained that I’ll need assistance, only if we crash land, and the captain gives instructions to the passengers. We all laughed.
Rabbi Eliashiv, an Haredi rabbi, issued a ruling forbidding schools under his control to admit children, whose parents are using non-”kosher” cellphones (cellphones with intact ability to use SMS, Internet and video).
This ruling adversely affects deaf people, who need to be in contact those parents due to reasons like:
It is necessary to take legal action, with the aim of outlawing cellphones without functional SMS, and outlawing discrimination against deaf parents of haredi school children, who use video for Sign Language communication via 3G cellphones.
Sources (in Hebrew for the time being):
In addition to few massive lawsuits, there is also a petition to add captions to all Hebrew language TV broadcasts in Israel, for the benefit of the hearing impaired. You can find it in http://www.azuma.co.il/show_petition.pl?id=889.
I had a chat with shlomif, in which he told me about http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?perl. This Web page proposes that qwertyists and dvorakists, who program in perl, switch to yet another keyboard layout, which is optimized for this task.
The problem is that if someone, who trained himself to use a customized keyboard layout, needs to temporarily work with another computer, which does not already have his layout - he needs to mentally switch to the standard keyboard layout. Very difficult and highly error-prone.
A solution to the problem would be for people to carry around personalized keyboards. When they need to work on another PC, they plug their keyboard into it and start typing. This calls for standards, and for hardware+software design, which allows keyboards to be plugged and unplugged at any time.
A first step could be for a standard keyboard to provide an USB socket, which allows an user to plug in his own USB keyboard. When a customized keyboard (which, by the way, could be also a chord keyboard for very rapid text entry) is plugged in, the standard keyboard will just pass on the keycodes from the user’s customized keyboard to the PC.
Another problem, which the proposed USB socket in standard keyboards would solve, is that people, who need to use special keyboards due to motor disabilities, are no longer confined to the single PC provided to them at work with suitable keyboard.
