a blind flaneur

Thanks to Kestrell at Reading in the Dark for turning me on to this open source accessibility solution for Linux. She writes, “I am really excited about this. Adept1 is the accessible Linux OS I have been beta testing for the past year or so. It is accessible through both keyboard and voice, and the […]

After I began to use my first adaptive computer some 25 years ago, I started talking to anyone who would listen about producing digital textbooks. I knew those books existed as digital files sometime in the production process. It was an obvious solution to the information accessibility barriers that limited blind readers. Publishers and university […]

The Media in Transition 6 conference (MiT6) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is scheduled for April 24-26, 2009. The conference theme is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission.” The deadline for submitting proposals is January 9, 2009.
Ms. Modigliani and I went to MiT5 in 2007, and we found it to be one of […]

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox is geared to web usability for business intra-nets and e-commerce. It isn’t the final word on usability, but I’ve long appreciated his advocacy of web accessibility for computer users with disabilities. Nielsen’s latest column raises some provocative questions about web-based reading and writing:
Web content must be brief and get to […]

Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics, spoke on NPR’s Talk of the Nation this afternoon about Internet projects intended to engage citizens more fully in participatory democracy. According to the NPR blurb, “He says the Internet can make government more open, participatory and efficient — and maybe even smaller and cheaper, too.”
Tapscott mentioned a collaboration with […]

I promised myself that I wouldn’t propose or accept any speaking gigs this spring. I want to plant a tree nursery on my son’s new farm, and I need to rejuvenate my own rose garden lest any more of the old-fashioned roses slip back into the neglect of history.
So much for resolve. I couldn’t resist […]

Paul Strand. Blind. 1916. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
I want to find new ways to talk about accessibility to engage people who would not otherwise consider that it pertains to them. When I talk about accessibility it doesn’t mean whether or not there is wi-fi at Starbuck’s. It also doesn’t mean the larger context […]

David Seymour. “Blind Boy Reading With His Lips”. 1948. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
This photograph could have been framed in a different way to milk much more pathos from it. The blind boy has no hands or arms. A civilian casualty of World War II, he was photographed at an Italian school where he […]

Henry Butler. “Big Ol’ Kiss”. 2005. Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.
I present this image as an example of a blind photographer gazing back. The blind person isn’t the object of the gaze, but the active subject doing the gazing. The photographer said of this shot, “I always wanted to photograph Becky because she has a […]

Cover illustration for Touch the Invisible Sky uses raised lines and textures to depict Kepler’s Supernova Remnant. [Source: NPR]
Touch the Invisible Sky, a new astronomy book for blind readers, transforms visual images into tactile representations accessible to the finger-tip. It isn’t the first book of its kind, but astronomer Noreen Grice brings to it […]