Tag: ACCESSIBILITY

There are a ton of add-ons that dim the screen while you're watching a video or playing a Flash game. Heck, some Web sites even have this functionality built right in, no add-on required. Reading Glasses for Chrome does the same, but for text. As you can see in the screenshot, with Reading Glasses, only the post text is dark, while all other page elements are grayed out. This is accomplished by ...

Like to spend as little time as possible mousing around your desktop? Windows has a built-in feature called Mouse Keys which lets you move your pointer by using the numeric keypad, but not every keyboard has one. If you're using a netbook or laptop without a number pad and you like the sound of Mouse Keys, check out MouseFIGHTER. It's a free program which lets you use the arrow keys to navigate ...

I recently wrote about a utility called Keyboard Leds which puts a small icon in your system tray showing keyboard LED status, for systems which do not have actual keyboards LEDs (or have tiny ones). Commenter Lonnie McClure pointed out a very handy built-in Windows accessibility feature, which does the same job, but uses sound instead of images. It's called Toggle Keys, and it makes a short ...

For some people and in some situations, using a regular RSS reader is not feasible. Sometimes you may want to, or have to, listen to your feeds, rather than read them. BlogRadio is one possible free solution for such a use case. It's an AIR application, which purportedly uses a "natural voice". Excited, I downloaded it to marvel at what new text-to-speech technology they may have cooked up; I was ...

Firefox's AwesomeBar is great, but there is no easy way to make the text (and the bar itself) larger from within Firefox. So this little trick might come in handy to those of you who use large monitors which are located somewhat far away. 1) Go to your chrome folder (not the browser Chrome, but Firefox's chrome configuration folder): ...

It's fairly inarguable that Firefox needs to exist. Going back just a few years ago to when Mozilla introduced what would quickly become their flagship browser, much of the internet was in the equivalent of the digital dark ages. Netscape was struggling along after Internet Explorer had successfully derailed its efforts years ago, but even IE was suffering from a stagnating development process and ...

Eight percent of all men suffer from some form of colorblindness, a condition that can interfere with their ability to distinguish things designed for unimpaired viewers. Color Oracle aims to change this by making it easy for designers to see their work as a colorblind person would. Color Oracle overlays the user's screen to simulate three different kinds of colorblindness of increasing ...

Target faces a class-action lawsuit this week because their website was deemed inaccessible for those with disabilities like blindness. The judge struck down a motion to drop the case stating that Target must make its website accessible to those with disabilities just as if they were shopping in their physical stores. The judge cited the Americans with Disabilities Act, saying Target is legally ...

Its creators style DENIM "An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design." If you're not exactly clear on what that means, here's my take: DENIM is a program for whipping up quick prototypes of web sites and user interfaces. DENIM lets you draw rough sketches of your user interface just like you've been doing on paper for years, but saves you the step of translating that ...