While at this time the federal government has not made it mandatory or criminal if you do not, the larger your company is the more likely it could face a civil trial. Target Corporation has been through a suit filed by the American Council of the Blind in which the ACB won $6 million dollars and forced Target to accommodate the blind and visually impaired on their website. The ACB isn’t suing everyone, but they are pushing to make Section 508 a civil rights law rather than a government regulation.

Section 508 subsection 1194.22 of the ADA is the portion of the law that addresses accessibility for things from computers to software to the internet. According to the law the only people required to implement Section 508 are those providing services or product to or on behalf of the government (federal, state and local). If your company provides a product or service to a private company that is contracting with the government and that product or service will be the contracted interface representing the government, then you are obligated to adhere by Section 508 as well.

If you are not in one of these situations, but have a consumer facing web site that MIGHT be used by someone with a disability you should be following the law.

So without further ado…

Do…

• Provide at least one font size larger than your default. Users can increase size with their browser, but if you provide a link you can do it without breaking design which increases usability.
• Provide a high contrast mode. If that majority of your text and links aren’t black or dark blue text on white, give the user this option. You can do white text on black, but limit this to menus or highlight areas as it is harder to read long text.
• Provide alternate, title, or long description text for all non-text elements with a message. This includes images conveying a message (not spacer or decoration), multimedia, and form fields. If the alternate text (alt) is longer than 50 characters, use the long description (longdesc).
• Use tables for displaying tabular data only. This means if you think the presentation is best in a spreadsheet, use a table.
• Provide a summary for all tables using the “summary” attribute.
• Better than alternate text, use labels on all form elements. Do this by adding the “for” attribute to the label with the value equaling the id of the field it ties to. If the label doesn’t work, put the title on the field.
• Provide a link at the top to skip repeat navigation for the keyboard navigators.
• Provide a link at the bottom to take the user to the top.
• Instead of using a drop down for multiple select items, use check boxes (have you tried multi-selecting a drop down using a keyboard to navigate?)
• Any emphasis made using color, should also be understood without color. Bold it, underline it, box it, but just add something other than color alone.
• Provide accessible text versions of multimedia presentations that sync with the presentation.
• Make your pages so that they make sense when no style sheet is applied. This means navigation at the top, followed by content. Use headers to separate your content like a outline.
• Provide redundant links if you use a server side image map. Better yet, use a client side image map or none at all.
• Provide a header row and header column to all tables. Make sure that all the data cells and header cells relate appropriately if there are two or more logical levels of headers.
• Title all frames so that they can be identified and navigated easily.
• Make sure that if your page flickers, that it is between 2Hz and 55Hz.
• Make sure that any items relying on scripting to display can also be accessed when scripting is turned off.
• Provide a method to reset or extend time limits if a timed response is required.
• Provide a link to any plug-ins or applets needed to view the content you provide. These should also be hosted on compliant pages and be compliant themselves.
• Provide a text only version of the site if no other accessible alternate is available.
• Test your project in prototype form before implementing it.
• Use sans-serif fonts for long sections of text. These read better than serif fonts like Times New Roman when on a screen.

Don’t…

• Know if something is accessible? Try using it with a screen reader like JAWS and you will know. Close your eyes and forget the mouse to see how you do.
• Put blue or red text on black or black on blue or red.
• Make a Flash only site. Provide a text based version.

Resources

• Color blind check http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/
• Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
• Access Checklist http://www.access-star.org/ITI-VPAT-v1.3.html#webdetails
• Color blind add-on for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5001
• JAWS screen reader http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp

Just over eighteen months ago I purchased my second iPod, this one with video. It was to replace my ailing iPod Mini that only held a 5 hour charge, had a faulty click wheel and had trouble syncing. The Mini lasted 30 months before reaching this state. Shortly after buying my iPod with video, I started noticing skipping in the middle of my songs. Sometimes it would skip places in the song, but more often it would jump to another song. The tracks played fine in iTunes so I returned to the Apple Store and the Geniuses there look at it. Apple promptly replaced it and claimed it was a hard drive about to fail that was causing the issues. I continued to have periodic issues with the new iPod but mostly on tracks that had skipped previous to the replacement.

Upon connecting it, iTunes informed me the iPod was corrupt and needed to be restored.

Fast forward seven months. I bought an iPhone and noticed that the skipping was happening again on new tracks with my iPhone. I had Apple look at both my iPod and my iPhone and they found nothing wrong. Three months ago, after getting more tracks with issues, I took my computer, iPod and external hard drive that I keep my music on into the Apple Store. There were a couple of settings with my library that the tech found, namely I had moved the iTunes Library XML file to the external drive and it needs to remain on the main drive. This resolved most of my issues, but then we discovered that the skipping tracks were corrupt. We never looked at the iPod.

Then the hard drive with the music was corrupted and needed to be restored. I was able to hack my iPod and pulled my music off so it wasn’t totally lost.

Fast forward to this week. I don’t sync my iPod video often, but wanted to update it Wednesday night as I had finally completed updating all the ID3 tags for my music. Upon connecting it, iTunes informed me the iPod was corrupt and needed to be restored. So I complied with the iTunes request and clicked restore. Three hours later, iTunes informed me that the iPod restore had failed and I needed to reconnect it. So, once again I obeyed the mighty iTunes and reconnected and initiated a restore. Then I headed to bed.

Once enough sectors go bad, the drive just crashes.

Upon rising in the morning, I immediately proceeded to my computer to check my email and see the status of my iPod. The restore had failed again. I removed the iPod from the dock and immediately felt the hard drive spinning. Before I was able to get the iPod more than an arms length away, I heard that dreadful noise….Whhiiiiirrrrr, click, click, whhiiiiirrrrr. As someone who has spent years building and repairing computers, I knew that sound like I know my own voice. The hard drive would spin up to boot, the arms move into place unsuccessfully usually hitting a platter, and the drive spins down. The hard drive was dead and I was lucky if none of the platters had cracked. A trip to the Apple store confirmed my fears.  I never bought Applecare. I have never used any extended warranties I have ever bought, but I wanted one now. It would be $145 after tax and shipping to get my iPod repaired. A new nano is $149.

Before resorting to buying a new iPod, I thought I would try cracking the case open and seeing what Icould do with it. I had heard rumors that the drives used were the same connectors as Compact flash cards. I had a few of those at home for my DSLR, so if I could get it open, then maybe…. But for those wondering, the drives used now have a special ribbon cable for a connector and it is not compatible with Compact flash.

After reviewing a number of threads on the Apple discussion boards, I found a pattern of people with issues like mine. First tracks start to skip. This is caused by bad sectors, the iPod can’t read the next part of the song. Slowly this number of skips begins to increase. Because I had to pull my music from my iPod back to my computer, I had a large number of corrupted tracks (I am still finding some). Once enough sectors go bad, the drive just crashes. So this afternoon, I am off to the Apple Store once again. This time to get a new Nano and to get Applecare for my iPhone. The warranty expires Sunday, and I can’t risk losing my lifeline like my iPod.

With the launch of MobileMe they pitched that they would “push” my calendar down to my phone from the MobileMe cloud. Problem is that it doesn’t push down my subscribed calendars. There have been many work-arounds people have suggested, but none of them are clean , easy, and free as of yet. Apple does sync these calendars between computers (if you have two Macs for instance), but doesn’t push the events to prevent duplicating.

Why can’t Apple treat the iPhone/iPod Touch like another Mac and sync the subscribed calendars but not the events? Both of these devices have the ability to connect to the internet and retrieve the feed data so MobileMe doesn’t need to push the data down. This avoids the duplication issue and still allows us to have our subscribed calendars. At this point my trial period expires on October 9th, and while I enjoy all the features it does have, I am finding it doesn’t replace my web hosting package (I did think I could do more with iWeb) and without my calendars it doesn’t seem worth the cost.

Which brings me to another issue I only thought of today. Once I signed up for MobileMe all my music and applications I bought through the iTunes store were being logged under my MobileMe user name and not my Apple ID that I had previously established. If I let my MobileMe account expire, will I still be able to use my applications and get my application updates or will Apple no longer recognize the user name? If the application is free it doesn’t matter, its the ones I paid for that I want to make sure work.

UPDATE:

After writing this post, I began digging around my RSS feeds and trying to catch up. I came across a reference to the service Calgoo being free now. Using Calgoo and Google’s Outlook sync I was able to achieve my holy grail of sync. Technically I don’t need the Google product, but I was already using it, so there was no need to change. Google also supports CalDav now, but requires that you be on iCal 3.x which is only available to Leopard owners (I am still running Tiger) and has several known issues.
Calgoo offers a desktop application that creates connectors between calendar services. It works with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, 30 Boxes and Sunbird. I set up the application on my Mac at home and connected a new calendar called Work to the feed from Gcal for my synced work calendar. So on a regular basis (every hour) the Google sync grabs my Outlook calendar and puts it on Gcal. Then (also on an hourly basis) Calgoo grabs the feed from Gcal and puts it on my iCal at home. When MobileMe sync runs it updates the web calendar and my iPhone. The caveat is that my Mac has to be running at home in order for me to use Calgoo.
While this solution does work for me, it would still be simpler for Apple to allow the iPhone to fetch calendar feeds like iCal does. And It still hasn’t convinced me to pay for MobileMe yet.

After about three hours I tried plugging it into the charge. No fire erupted (I wasn’t sure if it would or not) and the little LED indicating it was charging came on, then went out. I left it on overnight. The next morning I took the headset of the charger and tried to turn it on…. Success! It turned on and connected to my phone with no problems. Ten minutes later it let me know they battery was dead and promptly turned off.

Last night I put it on the charger again, this time the LED stayed on until an hour later which is the standard time it takes to charge. Trying the headset this morning it not only turned on, but stayed on, and made calls that sounded fine. Either I got extremely lucky or LG build quality devices. Whichever it is I don’t recommend washing your Bluetooth headset with your laundry.

Over the course of the five years, I have had a total of 5 defective phones. The first was not diagnosed as being defective until 6 months after the warranty was up, but 5 months before I was eligible for an upgrade even though I brought it into AT&T 6 times complaining. Eventually I signed a new contract and upgraded the phone, but that upgrade was replaced 4 times in 4 months. AT&T tried to charge me for the phone twice. Each time I had to replace it I spent an hour on the phone being bounced around to 3 or 4 customer service agents to get the transaction completed.

When the original iPhone price was cut, I decided to buy one and change my plan again because I knew if there was a hardware issue I would be working with Apple and not AT&T. Approximately two months ago I changed my plan again to a family plan and gave my kids a phone. Since this was before the change in pricing and plans with the 3G iPhone, the whole process was a little bit of an ordeal. AT&T at the time couldn’t have the iPhone be a primary phone on a family plan. So I set my kids phone up as the primary, but I couldn’t set it up as a family plan with the iPhone yet. I had to first assign it a standalone plan (450 Anytime minutes, my previous plan) and then call in and have them change the plan to a family plan and add the iPhone. Well this is where things fell apart. Due to all the prorating going on I didn’t notice that they screwed up the first month’s bill. I certainly did when I went to pay my June bill though.

AT&T ended up signing my kids’ phone up for the 450 Nationwide Anytime minute plan, the iPhone for the Family Plan, iPhone data package, Extra line, and the Smart Manager so I can limit the text messages and downloads my kids use. Yesterday I called to correct this error and spoke to someone in billing, which for some reason was the wrong department so she transfered me to sales. I did have to wait for a total of 10 minutes to get into the problem. Once I explained my problem to the rep, she put me on hold again to investigate. When she came back on the line she told me that I did indeed overpay and she had issued credits to my account and set up an alert because another credit would be needed in the next billing cycle. Looking on the website to pay my account at that moment I saw the new balance immediately reflected. Before this incident I would have to repeatedly argue my case to get resolution which was usually a compromise. When I did get a result I was satisfied with I was always told it wouldn’t show up on the website until my next billing cycle. Clearly things are changing. I am not saying AT&T is the best cell phone provider, but they are hearing people complain and it appears they are taking action.

I rebooted the phone, but there was no change. I restored the phone, but there was no change. I couldn’t imagine being without a phone for any period of time, so I scrambled to see if I could get into the genius bar that afternoon. It was 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, the store closed at 6:00. I was lucky enough to be able and get an appointment and grabbed the kids (who had to skip swimming because of this) and scrambled to the store.

It turns out that dust had gotten into the headphone jack (probably when I went to the gym that morning and used my headphones). This caused a short circuit that fooled the phone into thinking headphones were still plugged in. The great people at the genius bar (they have been very helpful to me on many occasions) took my iPhone  in back and used a special machine to remove the dust putting my phone back in action. Since my phone was fixed I began to walk away, but then I turned around to ask if there was any technique to clean it myself so that next time it happened (I am confident it won’t be the last) I didn’t need to scramble up to the Apple Store to get it cleaned. However, Apple doesn’t recommend doing this on your own. The genius that helped me did recommend looking online for a plug to cover the ports when not in use.

Most cell phones have a rubber or silicone protector to go over their ports, but the iPhone doesn’t come with them. I looked online at over 40 pages of results for various Google inquiries and found no plug of any kind for the headphone jack. There are companies that make them for the dock connector, but not the headphone jack. I found several articles that homebrew solutions using erasers and other paraphernalia, but they seem like they will just cause more problems over time. Has anyone found these plugs anywhere?

In my current work environment we are building Java web applications and while I can and do run them locally, it can take a while to put the build up, take it down, modify it and put it back up. Since most of my work is front end focused I spend a lot of time in Firebug testing things before taking the build down to update.

When Firefox 3 launched on Tuesday, I diligently downloaded and installed it. I played around with it a little and saw that Firebug wasn’t updated for it yet. So I packed it away and pulled out Firefox 2 and got back to work. Then I started having tabbing issues. I have had to restart my PC three times because my tab button on my keyboard stops working in Firefox 2. Additionally, if I am in Firebug’s CSS live editing window  and highlight a property it automatically deletes the property when I tab out. Becoming increasingly frustrated I dug around and saw they now have Firebug updated for Firefox 3 but in a beta format (although is it beta 3). so like a good little boy, I installed the new extension and booted Firefox 2 back up.

One of the beautiful things about Firebug is the ability to turn on and off various properties. However in the new beta on Firefox 3 this is causing the entire browser to crash. So here I come Firefox 2, wait what is this…the new beta is incompatible with Firefox 2 BUT deletes the old version on install. Come on guys, if you are going to not be functional, you can at least not touch my previous install.

By the way, what is with Firefox 3 not importing all my bookmarks from Firefox 2 on install? It captured my IE and Opera ones, but ignored the ones I actually use.

I just received a notification from Schmap.com saying they want to use my Cleveland National Forest image for an upcoming edition of the application. The terms look ok even though there is no pay. They do link to my Flickr account and only use a thumbnail, so I will use the publicity.

If you are not familiar with Schmap.com (I am not) they make a free web and desktop application that combines Yahoo! Maps and a travel guide. There are suggested places to visit and activities to do along with photos of the area. It appears as there are some reviews as well. It may be a good resource to check out if you are traveling.

Update:

It looks like they did accept my photo to use for their California guide. You can see it here.

This past year I have been conscious of everything that I do and its effect on my surroundings. As such I have take the following actions and I encourage you to take similar ones for yourself.

I purchased a new car. This car, while not a hybrid, is a compact Chevy Cobalt that averages 32 miles per gallon. In my mind, this still isn’t very efficient, but it did replace a 10 year old Ford Explorer that averaged 16 mpg so I have doubled my efficiency.

I began using reusable shopping bags. I purchased some bags from Trader Joe’s for $0.99 each and have continued to use them for over 8 months now. I have eliminated the the 8 plastic bags per week on average that I used at the grocery store. In addition I purchased some smaller canvas totes that I now use at stores like Target and Walmart eliminating those bags as well.

I am reusing all plastic and glass containers that I purchase from the grocery store. Instead of throwing out that salsa jar or hummus container, I wash it and will use it later instead of purchasing Tupperware. In addition I began buying in bulk. I no longer purchase boxes of cereal or cans of beans, but will purchase them from the bulk containers at the local Whole Foods store. I store these items in my reused containers.

I no longer eat meat and now opt for organic vegetables. By choosing locally grown organic veggies, I am reducing the use of fuels in production and transport as well as the chemicals that are used for growth and pest control. This results in better food for my family and a lower impact on our surroundings. By not eating meat, we are again removing chemicals from our bodies, but also we help reduce the demand for feed crops. these feed crops are often heavily treated to control pests and growth which get into the livestock. The livestock themselves have a large impact on the environment. I am not condoning eradicating cows, but by growing them in large herds in confined spaces is not natural.

I am purchasing natural cleaners that don’t use lab created chemicals and have a low impact on the environment in their creation.

My family has reduced computers down to one from three. This saved on the energy vampires and we recycled the computers and donated the ones that still work to Goodwill.

Some additional small steps to take on a daily basis that I have included: turning the dishwasher to air dry instead of heat dry. Turning the thermostat to only turn the heat on when it gets below 66 degrees and turn the air conditioner on above 75. Air dry as much laundry as possible (this tends to be tough due to the volume we seem to have in my house). Eating as much raw food as possible (this is not only healthier for you, but reduces energy used in cooking). And of course recycling as many plastics, papers, and metals as possible.

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar.

Well it looks like issue number one no longer exists. I am not really clear if this an update or just a case of poor documentation, but looking around today I found out how to make this work. Item number two on this page explains it in detail but the short is this:

1. You must first associate your Outlook email address (this is my corporate address) with your Google account.
2. When setting up the syncing program on your Windows machine, enter this address as the one to sync AND NOT your Google Gmail address as you would think.
3. Run sync. This will add all of your Outlook appointments that you either organized or are a guest on to your Google Calendar. It will also pull down all your appointments on your Google Calendar primary calendar and place them in your Outlook calendar.

While still lacking in the ability to sync multiple calendars from Google to Outlook or to add to Google those meetings set up on a distribution group, this is much closer to the holy grail and accomplishes what I was trying to do. I now have the ability to automatically sync my work calendar (in Outlook) to Google which I then use the iCal subscription URL to import to my Mac’s calendar and sync to my iPhone. Now I have my complete calendar (with a few minor exceptions) on my phone (my true goal) and accessible via the web if I don’t have my phone (Google Calendar).