Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I enjoyed Bill Holton's article Spotlight on Personal Finance Accessibility and look forward to reading future articles and reviews.
I am one of the fortunate people who has had very few problems accessing financial institutions on the web. I've done online banking for at least two decades; my credit union and online savings bank have both been very accessible. My former employer's NetBenefits site had a couple problems one year when my screen reader hadn't caught up with the newest HTML navigation technology, but there have always been work-arounds for that.
Occasionally I have problems navigating that site to determine how my 401(k) is doing, but there are a couple work-arounds there too. My credit card company's site is very accessible.
Mary Emerson
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
The article, Making the Transition from English Braille to UEB by Jamie Pauls, mentions use of contractions that look different to those in English Braille American Edition (EBAE.) I've read British contracted braille for many years and suspect that the decision to use contractions in different ways was influenced by British contracted braille. I've seen words such as "fever" written as f followed by dot 5 e, "edition" written with the ED sign at the beginning of the word, and the "of" sign in the middle of words such as "professor" and "profound."
BANA has a book called The ABC's of UEB. It's intended for transcribers, but some of the rules described there might be helpful. BANA also has links to some UEB publications produced overseas; one handy one is the Guidelines for Technical Material, which describes symbols and usage rules for math, science, and computer notation.
Mary Emerson
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
Great article on Making the Transition from English Braille to UEB by Jamie Pauls in the January AccessWorld issue! While its true screen readers are incorporating UEB into their translation tables, I've found one very annoying thing they've not addressed as yet, that being the way a string of words in all caps is handled. The BANA website says:
A triple dot 6 means that the next passage (three or more words), is capitalized. To show the end of the capitalized passage, the capitals mode terminator (dot 6, 3) is placed, unspaced, following the last capitalized word.
With JAWS and NVDA at least, this is not happening as yet, and I'm not sure note takers are doing it either. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to address this, as for me at least it's very annoying to see the double dot-6 in front of every word of a long paragraph written in all upper case. I frequently read products from National Weather Service including technical discussions, and they always enter the text in all upper case.
Thanks,
Pete De Vasto
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I liked the January issue. I have these observations.
Don't forget Michael Mellor's book Louis Braille: a touch of genius (DB63350) about Louis Braille, too. It was very well-written and narrated biography of Louis Braille (1809–1852), a blind Frenchman who by age 16 designed a code of raised dots enabling blind people to read and write easily. [The book] discusses his schooling, his love of music, and the advantages of his tactile reading system. For junior and senior high and older readers. 2006.
I was sorry you only had one letter in the Letters to the Editor section. I enjoy those. Did no one write last month?
UEB will continue to be interesting. I'll figure it out and read it, but I suspect for personal use, I'll stay with the braille I know—at least for the time being.
Thank you
David
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I'm just writing you to let you know that I made a Jet account after reading
To me, it appears really usable. I browsed and added an item to my cart. I will use it when I buy online next I think. The accessibility could of course be better, but it works for what I would need it for.
Thank you for this article, Evaluating the Accessibility of Jet, a New Online Shopping Site, by Bill Holton.
I was going to check the site out, but forgot about it actually until I saw this review.
Scott
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I liked Janet Ingber's Article, Focus on the Hospitality Industry, Part 2: Using Your iOS Device to Book a Hotel Room. She did a great job in the March 2015 issue of AccessWorld. I think it is very important to educate the hotel developers about blindness. And they need to make their apps fully accessible to blind and visually impaired users. This way, blind and visually impaired users can independently book hotels. Some hotel websites are not fully accessible to blind and visually impaired users. The developers need to be educated about blind people and their needs. Right? I love reading AccessWorld. Thank you for making this publication accessible to blind and visually impaired users.
Have a good day,
Valentin Eugen
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
This letter is in response to the holiday shopping articles published in the November and December issues of AccessWorld. I did all of my holiday shopping on Groupon, and I love it. I found this site to be super accessible with VoiceOver, and it has a free app to boot. I would suggest trying it out. The point of the app is to give lower prices, and it even tells you what the original price was. It's a very straightforward free app, and it has a wide variety of products for sale.
Best regards,
Destin Miller
