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Catching Up on Web Accessibility News

The AniktoBlog has been dark for too long, mostly due to work and travel. As a result, I’ve missed a number of interesting technological developments over the past few weeks, and many of them involve accessibility within the digital space. With no further delay:

Braille Touchscreens

Finnish scientists have devised a way to bring haptic touchscreen technology to users with impaired vision. Using something called a piezoelectric transducer (I have no idea what that is either), the raised dots common to Braille can be replicated by forcing the screen to vibrate. The “reading finger” touches the screen, its position is logged, and then a sort of Morse code pinpoint is activated. Tests have been conducted at the University of Tempere with single characters; the next step is to represent words and phrases.

Mobile Immersive Experiences

This summer will see the launch of TEVA, a digital platform being dubbed a “mobile immersive experience” that will redefine the future of entertainment. Through a partnership with NBC creator and executive producer Tim Kring, Nokia is set to launch a hybrid of user-generated content and Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) in their Ovi store this summer. Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb explains it pretty well:

(T)he idea of an ARG isn’t an entirely new one, but using the mobile platform to play the game is. Having said that, TEVA isn’t just a traditional ARG moved to the mobile platform – it only involves some elements of that type of story-telling mechanism. Another piece to this mobile experience is user-generation content. This is a new twist. In the past, ARG players would just interact with the story line – now they’re going to help create it. And yet another aspect to this mobile experience will be local. Gameplay takes place in your city – not just in an application or just on the web. How exactly this happens, we don’t know, but TEVA will use GPS and other location-based services in some way.

New WAVE Version Released

Jared Smith of WebAIM announced on March 31 a new version of the free WAVE online tool to analyze the accessibility of web pages. (Updates to the excellent Firefox toolbar will be implemented in the near future.) New features include more simplified feedback, better stability, faster processing, and new rules for greater accuracy in reporting. You can try out the tool at http://wave.webaim.org/.

Beyond the Browser

I’ve been thinking for a while that digital environments will increasingly become less about the browser and more about ubiquitous computing. Meaning that the browser and the OS will at some point harmonize, the OS will bind to a device, the device will become integrated with our life experience, and our life experience will endorse the interoperability of these digital/analog streams.

What this means is that we may see the browser being used in more non-Web contexts, such as the Opera In-Dash Computer User Guide being reported a week ago:

The Opera Internet browser provided with your FWS system provides a superb platform for accessing and viewing websites. Opera works much like the Internet browser on your desktop computer, but it provides improved compatibility in a mobile setting like Ford Work Solutions.