Dear AccessWorld Editor,

I have followed AccessWorld for the past eight years or so and greatly appreciate the publication.

I have limited vision and use ZoomText with speech.

I have been very disappointed over the years in how Microsoft ignores people with low vision. When Office 2007 came out, I had trouble seeing multiple highlighted cells in both Excel and Access. I looked on the Web for a solution and people with "normal" vision had the same complaints. Office 2013 has slightly darkened the color of multiple highlighted cells in both Excel and Access.

When Windows 7 came out, I and many people with "normal" vision did not like the pale highlight color used in Windows Explorer or any of the newer (I will say excellent) dialogue boxes. I found where you can turn on checkboxes in Windows Explorer for each file/folder listed. I also found where you can change the theme to something retro like Windows 95. I also noted Windows 8.1 appears to throw up an encumbering extra layer or two to keep you from getting to the programs and system tools you need to get to.

In another area, I am very disappointed in Ai Squared; I hope its merger with GW Micro has positive results. I think Ai Squared is now all about public media and sales and much less about reliable up-to-date product maintenance.

I would like to see an honest review of the poor state of accessibility encountered by people with low vision using Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, and ZoomText. Anything AFB or AccessWorld can do to help this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Clark Moore

Dear AccessWorld Editor,

I'm writing to provide information about one of the best-kept secrets for people who are blind and live in the Silver Spring, Maryland area. My fianc? is blind, and we live in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.

Silver Spring seems to be quite unique in that they offer personal escort walking services to and from various places for free within the downtown Silver Spring area. My fianc? uses the escort walking assistance service to walk to the Silver Spring train station from her home every morning, and they escort her back. All she has to do is call. They will also walk her to the store and mall for shopping. Upon arriving at a store, the escort will introduce her to a sales person, and pick her up when she is finished shopping.

The service is provided by the Silver Spring Urban District (SSUD). Its address is 8110 Georgia Avenue 3rd Floor, Silver Spring, MD 20910. The SSUD hotline telephone number is 240-876-2911.

The Silver Spring Urban District provides enhanced services to the Central Business District to ensure that downtown Silver Sprng is maintained as a clean, safe and attractive environment to promote a vibrant social and business climate to support long-term economic viability and vitality. SSUD services include ambassadorship, security, streetscape maintenance, walkway repairs, tree maintenance, marketing, promotions and special events. The Silver Spring Urban District sponsors a summer concert series, the Silver Spring Jazz Festival, the Montgomery County Thanksgiving Parade, and other events to attract people to downtown Silver Spring.

Sincerely Yours,

Stephen A. Sutherland

Dear AccessWorld Editor,

Thank you for this review. I had just created an account last night with My Fitness Pal, but had not yet checked to see if the food and exercise diaries were accessible. I was getting ready to try them out today, when I opened my Access World e-mail and found the link to Janet Ingber's My Fitness Pal: A Guide to an Accessible Fitness Tool article. Now I have some idea of what to expect when I log on to fill in my information.

Thank you,

Paula Muysenberg

Dear AccessWorld Editor,

I really was impressed with Deborah Armstrong's thoughts in the Letters to the Editor section of the May issue. She has made very cogent points that are not always addressed. Financing models would make some of this technology affordable. We all can't get Mama Rehab to underwrite our tech needs and sometimes, Mama doesn't understand our needs and will believe any sighted tech vendor's bologna about how you really don't need quite so uch RAM or this brand is really just as good as that one and when your system crashes, somehow, it's your fault. Not enough best practices of Rehab centers, a national database of best practices in other areas as well. Clients never get interviewed to learn which providers are good and which are in it for the money.

Best,

David F.

Dear AccessWorld Editor,

I am a screen magnification user, and I can happily say the Chromecast app is accessible on the Android platform in response to Aaron Preece's A Review of the Cromecast: A Google Device for Streaming Media to Your TV article.

Also, it is easy to identify whether you are "casting" something onto the TV because the Cast icon within apps, such as YouTube, has a blue outline [that] contrasts against the other white icons. It may be a little unfair to say it's completely inaccessible for all visually impaired people. I do agree with the article that the Chromecast doesn't sync very well with the app as you are trying to connect the two. The app kept telling me it can't connect to the Chromecast, but the TV said it had and also installed updates.

Overall, I found the iOS version to be accessible similarly to the Android version.

As for Windows, I tried Chromecast on the PC and found it quite tricky to set up, because of having to download the plug in. Although, once I had downloaded it, I found the Cast button to be accessible in the bottom right hand corner of the video player. You do have to make sure that you click on the button to reveal a menu [that] asks you whether you want to "cast" to your TV or computer.

The price is quite reasonable, although I wonder if it offers a similar purpose to an HDMI cable except that the Cast is wireless and offers more freedom to isplay content anywhere in the home quickly. I would recommend the Chromecast to screen magnification users, but I hope that the Chromecast supports more apps in the near future as it's limited to a few at the moment.

Sincerely,

Sarah Bailey

Dear AccessWorld Editor,

Bill Holton's Evaluating the Accessibility of Microsoft Office for the iPad was a great review. I'm not holding my breath though. When it comes to accessibility and productivity Apple has miles to go. Maybe its Microsoft's duty to make this app accessible, which is fine, but Apple needs to do its part, too. Why isn't iWorks fully accessible? Better yet, why [doesn't anybody] in the blind community talk about the elephant in the room: […] that Voiceover has never been tested and proven in a work environment? I'll never understand why the blind community keeps giving Apple free passes just because it has come up with a few portable ad glorified jukeboxes with a few extra features.

Regards,

George Nellas

Dear AccessWorld Editor,

The article An In-depth Evaluation of the BARD Mobile App from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped by Aaron Prece was very well written. This is a wonderful app and I'm so glad it is as accessible as it is for us in the visually impaired community.

Sincerely,

Donna Miller

Rehab Act Finally on the Move!

Bipartisan Breakthrough is Mixed Bag of Status Quo and Incremental Change, but AFB Language Supporting Training of O&M, VRT, and LVT Professionals Poised to Become Law!

Advocates following the sad saga of Congress's nearly 12-years-long failure to reauthorize the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, are breathing a sigh of relief as news of a bipartisan agreement among law makers in both the US Senate and House of Representatives reached their disbelieving ears. As part of the so-called workforce investment system, the federal/state partnership to provide vocational and pre-vocational rehabilitative services to people with disabilities, which is funded and described in the Rehab Act, has been held hostage to a protracted legislative process which, until just recently, could not resolve differences both about the structure and function of the broader workforce system and the terms and conditions of VR services themselves.

While this massive legislative package requires further analysis, advocates will be most interested to learn that the bill will not—repeat: will not—move management of the VR system to the US Department of Labor as had been previously proposed, but will leave its management to the Department of Education. Likewise, management of the Independent Living Services for Older Individuals who are Blind (Chapter 2/Older Blind) program remains at Education. However, to satisfy the demands of the independent living community, other independent living services, along with NIDRR (the rehab research agency) and Assistive Technology Act project management, will transfer to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

The announced compromise does not eliminate the ability of certain employers to pay their employees with the most significant disabilities subminimum wages but nevertheless does try to somewhat delineate more precise conditions that must be met, such as the specific type of training and information that need to be offered to such employees, before wages below the federal minimum can be paid.

One relatively small yet very significant piece of the compromise has to do with supporting the preparation of professionals meeting the unique needs of VR clients who are blind or visually impaired. As early as 2002 when discussions about the Rehab Act's reauthorization by Congress officially began, AFB persuaded congressional champions at that time to include legislative language in Rehab reauthorization to raise the profile of, and thereby increase federal investment in, preparation of vision rehab professionals by the Education Department. This language was later updated by AFB in 2011 and again in 2013 to specifically increase the priority of and explicit support for professionals in the vision rehabilitation therapy, orientation and mobility, and low vision therapy disciplines per se. AFB is pleased to see that this important language has survived the Rehab reauthorization rollercoaster, and once the compromise legislation becomes law, we encourage our field to actively make the most of these new provisions to ensure that grater federal investment is made in the preparation of our professionals so that VR clients with vision loss receive more and better services.

One final note about the Chapter 2 program: the compromise legislation would direct a small but useful fraction of federal dollars appropriated to pay for independent living services offered to older individuals with vision loss to technical assistance and related initiatives for both public and private service providers. This is a new provision, though of course long advocated throughout the length of this Rehab reauthorization process, which will hopefully result in higher quality services and better preparedness on the part of professionals and agencies.

As of now, there is no action required or urged of advocates. Staff on Capitol Hill is asking that this newly-minted compromise be allowed to work its way through the remainder of this heretofore frustrating legislative labyrinth and to let the ink dry on this extensive piece of proposed legislation. Both policy makers and staff on the Hill are hoping for prompt action in both houses of Congress so that the President can sign this comprehensive bill this year. With luck and what remains of the disability community's patience, we may very well finally reach "case closure" on amendment and approval of the Rehabilitation Act!

For further information on this legislation, contact:

Mark Richert, Esq.
Director, Public Policy, American Foundation for the Blind
202-469-6833
MRichert@afb.net

American Foundation for the Blind to Hold Breakfasts at Summer Consumer Conferences

If you will be attending the National Federation of the Blind Conference in Orlando or the American Council of the Blind Conference in Las Vegas this year, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) cordially invites you to join us for breakfast. Along with updates about AFB, the breakfasts will feature presentations on the AFB CareerConnect program, AccessWorld, the AFB technology magazine, and the latest information on AccessNote, the AFB note-taking app. Space is limited so please check your particular conference agenda for breakfast dates, times, and registration procedures. We look forward to seeing you there!

Online Registration for ATIA 2015 Is Now Open

You can now secure your spot in Orlando, Florida, from January 28–31, 2015, for a leading education and networking event for professionals, parents, and students in the field of Assistive Technology. Online registration has opened earlier to help you plan ahead or for those who can take this opportunity to utilize training budgets from this school year.

ATIA 2014 was the most highly attended conference yet, so make sure you don't miss out on the excitement at ATIA 2015. There are several new programs planned for ATIA 2015, including more Pre-Conference Seminars, extra time in the Exhibit Hall and a new International Strand.

Register now to receive early registration savings of over $100 and lock in at the best price. Take advantage of the early, risk-free registration with the option to cancel by November 28, 2014, without penalty and free transfer to future events.

Register for ATIA 2015 today!

Talking GPS apps for North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland

Sendero Group, a developer of accessible GPS and talking map software, this week launched a second fully accessible turn-by-turn GPS app for the iPhone on the tail of its release of one for North America. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) Navigator, which offers way- finding information for the United Kingdom and Ireland, was released on May 4, 2014. The Seeing Eye GPS, which was described as the first fully accessible GPS product for the iPhone when it was released, offers navigation information for the United States and Canada and is in its fourth iteration (version 1.4 was released in March 2014). Both apps include all the typical features expected of GPS navigation products, plus features that meet the unique needs of individuals who are blind. For example, instead of multiple layers of menus, the three main navigation elements are situated in the lower portion of every screen; the cross street and its orientation are announced at intersections, and intersections are described according to the clock-face configuration of the streets; and directions are provided appropriately for pedestrian and vehicle routes, including heads-up announcements for approaching turns, turn now, continue straight, and points of interest. With the LookAround Wand feature, individuals can point their phones in any direction to hear about establishments that are nearby. The apps can be downloaded for free, but require monthly subscriptions to operate. RNIB Navigator and The Seeing Eye GPS are designed to be compatible with various iPhone devices—iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad WiFi 3G, iPad 2 WiFi 3G, iPad WiFi 4G, iPad mini Wi-Fi Cellular—running the operating system iOS 6.0 or later. The apps use the Apple VoiceOver feature for audio voice output and do not contain their own voice synthesizer. RNIB Navigator and The Seeing Eye GPS can be downloaded from the iTunes store, and the RNIB Navigator User Guide can be found online.

Contact: Sendero Group, 29 F Street, Suite 4, Davis, CA 95616, ict@rnib.org.uk

Perkins Products Honored as Business Innovator

Perkins Products received the 2014 New England Innovation Award from the Smaller Business Association of New England (SBANE) on May 7. The honor recognized Perkins Products as a transformative leader in the field, producing innovative technology and accessible products for customers who are blind or visually impaired worldwide.

SBANE received more than 200 nominations for the prestigious awards, and judges selected Perkins Products as the winner in the not-for-profit category.

Perkins Products, a division of Perkins, provides access to assistive technology solutions and services that support literacy, employment, independence and equal access to information for people with vision loss. Marketing in 175 countries, Perkins Products offers the Perkins SMART Brailler, Philips' LightAide, and Zoom Capture, among hundreds of other items.

Perkins provides education, services and products to people who are blind, deaf-blind, or visually impaired with other disabilities, to build more productive and meaningful lives.

Long before Apple's groundbreaking introduction of the 2009 VoiceOver-equipped iPhone—a smart phone that blind people could use right out of the box—some of us in the blind community were fooling around a bit with photography. Twenty years ago, with a then state-of-the-art camera, I remember trying to get a picture of my husband cutting down a Christmas tree and being proud that I actually got all of him in the shot. Years later, I tried my hand at taking my own picture with a flip phone. I sent it to a friend with a request that she act as my "talking mirror" before I stepped out my door to attend an important event.

With the image explosion wrought by the ubiquity of iPhones and social networking, everyone around us seems to be taking hundreds of pictures and videos every day. Maybe you've played with this functionality a bit, too. I've used FaceTime, for example, to show my daughter a shipping carton and to consult on the health of a certain aloe plant. Many of us, with the advent of handheld text-reading devices and/or object-recognition apps for our smart phones have begun thinking a bit more about the process of aligning a camera lens with an item as solution to a problem.

Judy Dixon has taken that general "fooling around" that some of us have done to an entirely new and absolutely wonderful level. Recognizing that everyone around her was capturing images on a regular basis, she writes that she wondered, "Why not me?"—and she didn't stop at wondering!

Dixon researched. She studied. She took lessons from a professional photographer and, in that uncommonly clear way she has of communicating information, she has gathered her findings into a singularly fascinating and useful book.

Get the Picture! Viewing the World with the iPhone Camera was produced, of course, by that publisher nonpareil, National Braille Press of Boston. National Braille Press has released a variety of books containing practical guidance for blind users of iOS products, but this addition to the collection is the first to take an in-depth look at one particular iPhone function—the very function that would typically be deemed off limits to people who can't see—the camera.

Whether you have ever played with the iPhone camera or not, you will want to read this book. From the perspective of a blind person who is writing in order to share what she has learned with other blind people, you will learn about concepts that have perhaps seemed traditionally out of bounds. Judy Dixon writes about distance and light and glare and framing a shot — and yes, even if you have never seen, I promise that the discussions you find here will make sense.

She writes about tools and techniques we can use to have a better chance of capturing a reasonably clear image with our phones, even images we can't see with our hands—like a sunset or the view from a window. Through this book, you will learn something about the art of photography in general and the specific details of using the iPhone camera. You will learn about apps that can assist you in getting the proper light and distance and ensuring that you have all three friends in view. In addition, the book guides you through such matters as identifying photos long after you've taken them, as well as provides information for organizing photos and sharing them with others.

There are wonderful instructions in every chapter, but this book does not read like a dry instruction manual. Judy engages the reader with plenty of personal examples and a conversational tone that holds your interest while always staying right on track in delivering the information.

If you just don't care about taking pictures for fun, though, there are still plenty of reasons to read this book. If you are blind and use an iPhone, you already know that there are hundreds of amazing apps that can enable you to do things that you possibly could not do otherwise. Judy experimented with droves of them that utilize the iPhone camera and she shares the best of them in this book.

Light, Color, Money

There are countless questions unique to blindness that many of us ask every day. Is there sufficient light in the living room when a guest is about to arrive? Are these the blue shoes or the identical (by touch) green ones? Is the unopened box in your hand the crackers or the cereal?

These sorts of nuisance questions have always been there for us and a number of wonderful gadgets have been developed over the years that offer solutions: one device to detect light, one to identify color, one to tell you whether that bill in your hand is a $5 or a $50, and one to read bar codes (enabling you to distinguish shampoo from conditioner and a Louis Armstrong CD from one featuring Josh Groban). Now, you can add a selection of apps to a single device, the iPhone, and many of those gadgets are no longer necessary.

Of course, with so many apps to choose from—some delivering the solution promised and others not so much—the process of investigating them all can be daunting and even costly. The book covers apps that address all of the above questions and more. In the realm of color identification, for instance, she tells us that she has used 32 apps for the purpose of identifying color, and then proceeds (wisely) to list the top five.

A number of apps that can recognize objects are included as well as several designed for reading bar codes. While the seasoned iPhone user who is blind will undoubtedly be familiar with some of the apps included in these pages, I can almost guarantee that the book will hold surprises for everyone. Did you know, for example, that there is an app that will let you know when a person or dog walks past your office? Or one that will take a panoramic photo of your newly remodeled kitchen? Again, Judy Dixon engages the reader effectively while conveying details about these applications, thus making lively conversation out of what might have been, in less capable hands, a sleep-inducing catalog. The book is extremely well organized and consistently formatted. With each app we are given the relevant details first (name, developer, price, and so on) and then a careful explanation of what the app can do, how the screen is organized, and the purpose and location of each button or tab.

Why Not You?

For Judy Dixon, what began as curiosity has clearly become a passion. She approached the picture-taking puzzle with both merriment and scientific accuracy, and then wanted to share what she had learned with the rest of us.

What she discovered—and what the book reveals—is that we can all be photographers, whether we have sight or not. Whether you wind up sharing Dixon's passion for pictures or just learning some new tricks for using your iPhone more productively, you will enjoy reading about one woman's quest to find solutions for participating in yet one more task skeptics may have deemed "for sighted only."

Product Information

Get the Picture is available in a two-volume, soft-cover, embossed braille edition or in a variety of electronic formats, including DAISY, .BRF, and Microsoft Word, any of which can be either shipped on CD or downloaded directly from the National Braille Press site.

All versions are $15 each.
To order via telephone: 800-548-7323 ext. 520.
Visit Judy Dixon's blog for more information.

In an instant, Mike Malarsie's world changed. He was an Air Force Sergeant serving in Afghanistan when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) went off, leaving him with numerous injuries including total blindness—but it didn't injure his spirit. Via his How to Be Blind website, and with creativity and technical skill, he is now helping other people who are blind. His story is an inspiration.

Joining the Air Force

Malarsie wanted to join the military years before he was able to sign up. He says, "I was always really adventurous, the crazy kid. I was always doing the high adrenalin things, I loved it."

Malarsie's parents wanted him to go to college and then into the military as an officer. He wanted a more exciting position.

After graduating from high school in 2006, he agreed to go to college. After one semester, Malarsie decided college wasn't for him, and he enlisted in the United States Air Force. In May of 2007, he left for basic training at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, and then went on to Tech School at Hurlburt Field, Florida. There were 43 people in his Tech School class, but only 10 graduated, including Malarsie. While there, he learned about all the different radios used by the military, and about foot and vehicle navigation. "We spent a lot of time wandering around the swamps in Florida, with a map and compass in our hands," he says. Among other things, Malarsie learned how to call in air strikes, and he mastered all of the technical material on how the Army and Air Force are integrated. In addition, he enjoyed the most intense physical workout in his life.

After graduating from Tech School, Malarsie went on to Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape (SERE) School at Fairchild Air Force base in Spokane, Washington. Most of his class members there were air crew who might be in an aircraft that could crash into enemy territory. The rest, like Malarsie, were Tactical Air Control Party (TACPs). They learned how to survive in the wilderness, evade enemy pursuit, resist interrogation, and escape capture.

Malarsie's first duty station was Fort Riley, Kansas. He was scheduled to deploy to Iraq on three separate occasions, but because of cutbacks in US troops, each opportunity was canceled. Though he was able to pursue additional training while waiting deployment, Malarsie remembers: "I was getting frustrated about being cancelled; I wanted to deploy. That was the point of all this work." In October of 2009 he was informed that he would be deploying soon to Afghanistan, along with his friend Brad Smith. They left Kansas on December 2, 2009.

Afghanistan

After arriving in Kandahar, Malarsie and Smith took a helicopter to Forward Operating Base Wilson just west of Kandahar. Their mission was to support the Fourth Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colorado. Malarsie was excited. He learned that Bravo Company was seeing the most action and was looking forward to going with them.

On Patrol

On Wednesdays, a group would go out on patrol, driving about two miles to a "strong point," and staying in an old bombed-out school that had a bunch of desks inside of it and a dirt barrier and some barbed wire around it. The group would live there until Sunday of each week. The Americans went on at least two foot patrols each day. They'd introduce themselves to locals, offer assistance, and seek information. They got into a few firefights on these patrols, but Malarsie said they weren't really serious.

The Day Everything Changed

All of that changed on January 3, 2010. Malarsie, Smith, and 11 Army soldiers were on routine foot patrol, walking south toward some mountains. Near the base of the mountains was a small village. Between the patrol and the village was a river that villagers used for irrigation. Malarsie says, "The whole area was a farming community. It was little mud huts and big gray fields; lots of marijuana fields and a bunch of orchards." On earlier patrols, the men had given the kids who lived in the area things like candy, pens, and water bottles. On that day, as the patrol approached, they could see that nobody was outside, which was unusual.

The patrol watched for about 30 minutes, then called back to the base to check if anything had changed, but there was no information as to why the locals weren't there. After a while, the platoon leader decided that the group would cross the river and go into the village. He broke the group up into two squads, one to go across the river and set up a gun site on a hill to cover the second squad as it entered the village. Malarsie was in the first group and Smith was in the second.

The first group proceeded over the bridge. The first member was an Army specialist named Josh Lengstorf. About 10 feet behind and to the right was a private named John Dion and about 10 feet behind and to the left was Malarsie. Malarsie explains, "I remember walking across this bridge and looking over my left shoulder and thinking, 'This looks like Albuquerque, this looks just like where I'm from.' As I turned my head forward, everything went black. The next thing I knew I was in the water." Malarsie has no idea how long he was there, but he does remember thinking that he was going to drown because he couldn't orient himself. Fortunately, someone grabbed him and pulled him out. His rescuer told him to lay still and that help was on the way. "I remember lying there, wiping my eyes and wondering why I couldn't see anything." He adds that he knew something was very wrong, because he could hear gun fire and people yelling. He tried to crawl around to find his rifle. He said, "As I put my hand out in front of I felt this liquid landing on my hands and I thought it was water. As I think about it now, I was bleeding out, and they were trying to get me to lay still." He was in and out of consciousness. He then remembers a second explosion. He says, "I felt the concussion and the debris landing around me and I blacked out again. The very last thing I remember is a buckle being strapped over my chest in a helicopter."

It wasn't until he was back in the States that Malarsie learned what happened that day. When the squad crossed the bridge, Lengstorf, who was first in line, stepped on an IED, killing him instantly. Dion, the second man in line, was also killed. Malarsie was hit in his face and neck, the impact throwing him into the river. Malarsie said, "The shrapnel completely demolished my left eye, blew out my left ear drum, shattered my jaw, broke my nose, [there was] severe shrapnel damage all along my face and neck, skull fractures and moderate traumatic brain injury." He had a three-inch gash in his neck. Although he was wearing a helmet and eye protection, the helmet had been blown off and his eye protection had been driven, shattered, back into his face.

During the ensuing firefight, while the medic was attending to Malarsie, his teammate Smith was calling Kandahar for air support. The medic, Brian Bowman, and Smith saw Lengstorf's body in the river and went to retrieve him. As they were carrying him back, insurgents detonated another IED, killing both of them and injuring other troops. Air support arrived and Malarsie and several other soldiers were airlifted out.

Recovery

Malarsie underwent surgeries in Afghanistan and Germany before arriving in the US. After the blast, the next thing he remembers is when, a week and a half later, he woke up in Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington, D.C. He remembers his dad pushing him down the hall in a wheelchair. They stopped in front of a doctor who said, "Mike, I'm really sorry. We thought we could save the vision in your right eye. There's nothing we can do. You're going to be permanently blind." Since his jaw was wired shut, Malarsie took a pen and paper and wrote. "I just want to thank you very much." It was then that Malarsie's dad wheeled him back to his room and told him what had happened.

Malarsie said, "When my dad told me about the guys we lost on that patrol, I had decided right then and there to try to constantly improve and be a better person, to live up to their sacrifice. They gave their lives to save mine. I wasn't going to insult them by feeling sorry for myself. I was going to make the most out of my life. I was all in, all the time."

After more than a month at Walter Reed, Malarsie went to the VA hospital in Palo Alto, California, where he underwent testing to determine if there would be residual effects from his traumatic brain injury. He passed all the tests and went on the VA Western Blind Rehabilitation Center, also in Palo Alto, where he stayed until May 12^th, 2010.

In April, while at the Western Blind Rehabilitation Center, Malarsie was visited by Smith's widow. Since Malarsie and Smith had been friends for many years she came to California to see him. She brought along both the widow of the medic, Bowman, who was killed along with Smith, and the widow of Lengstorf, the soldier who stepped on the IED. There was an immediate connection between Malarsie and Lengstorf's widow, Jessie. They were married on June 25th.

They moved to Lackland Air Force base where Malarsie took over the newly established Recovering Airman Mentorship Program. The program pairs personnel who have experienced trauma and have gone on to live successful lives with people in the initial stages of recovery from traumatic injuries and experiences. Malarsie developed training and recruitment procedures and traveled extensively. After holding this work position for about eight months, he wanted to take the promotion test to Staff Sergeant. According to Malarsie, the Air Force gave him only a huge MP3 file as the single accessible study aid. Sighted people were given study guides and other resources. His response to the Air Force was, "That's not going to cut it. I want to be competitive with everybody else." He said that the Air Force's response was, "Since you can't take the test because you're blind, we can just step promote you when you reach the amount of time it takes most people to make the next rank." He refused the offer saying, "I don't want this handed to me. Who is going to respect any of these stripes if they're free? I want to earn any stripes on my shoulder." He decided it was time to leave the Air Force.

Helping Others

During this time, Malarsie received computers with screen readers from the VA and discovered that he enjoyed learning the technology. In July of 2011 he purchased a Macintosh computer and admits that initially he hated it, but when his PC got a virus, he was forced to use it. He says, "It took me forever because I couldn't find any resources out there, so I just struggled and fumbled my way through it and slowly started learning it." He adds, "That totally sucked so [I decided] I should make YouTube videos and record this crap so other people don't have to deal with this." He discovered that he enjoyed making videos about the Mac and iPhone.

Malarsie started a blog which eventually became the How to Be Blind website. He explained, "I settled on that name because I felt like I was teaching people how to do things. It was all about accessibility. I did it because even if just a couple of people see this and it helps, that's good enough. This is helping me pass the time. I went from being active, on the go, all the time, [to] all of a sudden being confined to base housing with a brand new family (Jessie and her 16- month-old daughter). There were so many adjustments going on. It was hard for me to go from where I was to where I am now. This whole project kept me sane."

He remembers the first e-mail he received from someone helped by his videos. He said, "That was awesome. Here's one person that I helped and that's so cool. It kept me going. It started off on YouTube with just the internal microphone on my computer and now it's grown into a website, with four different shows and a whole panel of hosts. It's grown well beyond what I ever expected and I love every minute of it. It makes me feel accomplished. I get to help people, which is even more important to me. I don't know where I'd be without this thing that helped me pass the time. It really has turned into one of the most fun things that I do."

Malarsie uses a variety of access technologies including two Macs, an iPhone, an iPad, a Windows laptop with JAWS, a Nexus 5, and a Nexus 7.

From White Cane to Guide Dog

Malarsie contacted an Air Force buddy who had also lost his sight in Afghanistan a few years earlier. His friend had just gotten a guide dog from Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation and was very happy. He told Malarsie that Fidelco had gotten a grant to train five dogs for blinded veterans. Malarsie sent in an application and on January 3, 2011, a year to the day of his injury, a Fidelco trainer was at his house with a German shepherd guide dog named Xxon. He said, "I got this dog and I was so excited to be out. It was a huge boost in confidence. One of the things I learned early on is that society doesn't know how to deal with blind people. I could go anywhere with that white cane in my hand and might as well be invisible. I remember being really frustrated by this. Then I get this dog, a beautiful German Shepard and all of a sudden I exist again. People are coming up and talking to me, because it's an easy way to break the ice. I go from being completely invisible to being part of society again. That was exciting and liberating all on its own. It's been phenomenal. Xxon has changed my life and I don't know what I'd do without him."

Caption: Mike Malarsie and his dog guide Xxon. Photo credit: Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation

Staying Active

Malarsie has an active lifestyle and takes advantage of invitations to sports camps and other events. He explained, "Just because I'm blind doesn't mean I can't do this kind of stuff anymore. Before there were so many opportunities I almost never got to have. I have a really hard time saying no to anything, even if it's something I don't think I'll like. It turned out to be a really good decision because I discovered so many new things that I never thought I would enjoy that I love. He admitted that he didn't like running, but has finished three half marathons. Before his injuries he used to snowboard and didn't think he'd enjoy it since he's blind, but that too has been fun.

Malarsie and Jessie now have three children, Kadence (age 5), Sophie (age 3), and Jack (17 months). They will be moving to Colorado. Malarsie plans on going back to school and returning to work. He will continue all his work with How to Be Blind and still loves helping others learn to use technology.

Website Information:

How to Be Blind

How to Be Blind – Facebook Page

Malarsie's personal website

Comment on this article.

In An Introduction to Accessible QuickBooks by Intuit and My Blind Spot, published in the May 2014 issue of AccessWorld, we brought you an evaluation of the latest version of the accounting software. That one article was just not enough to cover all of the information about Accessible QuickBooks. In this piece, I speak directly with Albert Rizzi of My Blind Spot and Lori Samuels of Intuit to get their personal perspectives on the successful partnership that lead to the new version of QuickBooks.

Aaron Preece: Albert, how did you decide to become involved in technology accessibility? When did you decide to found My Blind Spot?

Albert Rizzi: I started My Blind Spot after I lost my eyesight and I started running into literal and virtual walls because I could not independently file applications, bank independently, or do a lot of things I took for granted when I could see. The more I learned about accessibility, the more interested and committed I became to using my voice to draw attention to this need for the vision loss community. When I found out the access technologies were not only used by the blind and visually impaired but the print disabled as well, it just seemed like something I had to tackle.

Preece: Why did you decide to advocate for QuickBooks accessibility?

Rizzi: I lost a lot of access to many things when I lost my eyesight. Given my focus on accessibility since the founding of My Blind Spot, I knew adding code to programs or tags to sites can be easy to do when engineers know about Section 508 and W3C.

I also wanted to try and rebuild my life as a business owner and nonprofit professional, and QuickBooks has been used in nearly every business I've operated. And, I wanted to use QuickBooks for the nonprofit that I and 12 other blind people served on. We had over $100,000 to manage, and the antiquated tools we were using to manage the finances just seemed like tools from the dark ages.

So I called Intuit, and the call was escalated to Lori Samuels, and the rest is history. It was a combination of the right people, at the right time, with the right commitment.

Preece: Who is on the My Blind Spot accessibility team?

Rizzi: My Blind Spot is determined to hire people who are one degree of separation from someone with a disability or who themselves have a disability. We are currently working with about 60 blind or visually impaired beta testers, testing the popular screen readers on the market. We are a team of professionals, including accessibility professionals, where 80% of our staffers themselves have a disability, including people who are blind or visually impaired.

We could not be at our best if we did not walk the walk and talk the talk.

Preece: What ideas do you have for future accessibility projects? Are there any other pieces of technology hardware or software that you would like to make accessible?

Rizzi: I am already working on that. I am taking my cue from Tom Wlodkowski and looking at cable and Internet providers on the east coast as one consideration. There is a need for cable programming to be more user friendly, as well as websites that need to be accessible so the community can independently manage their accounts.

I would also like to continue the financial management wave that we are riding thanks to Intuit. I think My Blind Spot needs to approach financial institutions and investment firms, like Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Ernst and Young, etc.

[I'm] thinking that would serve a couple of purposes for what we started with Intuit: 1) It would be a natural progression that once someone is able to become an accountant because they are able to use QuickBooks, they might want to climb the financial management ladder and set their sights on working for a brokerage firm or investment firm, [and] 2) If they were less adventurous they could start their own business and build an investment portfolio that they could then independently manage. Either way they can pursue a set of new dreams and dream like they were not able to before.

I truly believe access equals ability. Access to the right tools promotes ability and restores infinite possibilities.

Preece: Lori, what is the process for applying accessibility fixes? Are accessibility issues discovered and fixed by Intuit teams, or does My Blind Spot report accessibility issues that are then fixed by Intuit engineers?

Lori Samuels: The process always starts with an assessment to determine where the critical gaps or problems with accessibility may exist in the product. We followed this process with QuickBooks and gathered inputs from multiple sources. Our own internal team at Intuit partnered with subject matter experts at My Blind Spot and our other accessibility consulting partner, Deque. We also focused our attention on the most commonly used workflows in the product and prioritized those areas first. As with all software development and testing, the process is iterative and involves discovery of new issues along the way. What worked incredibly well on the QuickBooks project was the fact that we had regular communication with all the key members of the team working on accessibility improvements. We had a weekly meeting where we all reviewed progress, shared new learnings, and aligned on our next steps. Given that we had team members in two different cities in India, [and in] San Francisco and New York, it was critical that we keep in close communication.

We also made a conscious decision up front that we would fix as many core issues in QuickBooks software itself as we could in the time that we had, but we would also create custom scripts in all three popular screen readers to improve usability and/or work around any issue in the product that might take too long to fix or potentially introduce too much risk of breaking the software functionality. QuickBooks presented a unique set of challenges from an engineering perspective. First, it is an enormously large, complex body of software code that has been inactive development for about 20 years. Secondly, because it is a desktop product that still sells in traditional retail channels as CDs, there is a very strict schedule for releasing (unlike web or mobile products, which can be more flexible about how often they update and release new versions). Lastly, QuickBooks has a large installed customer base and we are always very careful to make sure that any new work on the product, including accessibility, doesn't introduce defects. So, we had to operate within these constraints but were still able to make tremendous progress in the QuickBooks 2014 version and continue to work on improving accessibility for QuickBooks 2015.

Preece: What features of QuickBooks will be made accessible next?

Samuels: As we worked through the changes and improvements in QuickBooks 2014 at Intuit, My Blind Spot was also busy finding people who would be interested in being beta testers. We had great response from the community and started beta testing in November 2013 with pre-release versions of the QuickBooks software and our early versions of JAWS scripts. The feedback gathered from these customers (all of whom were blind or visually impaired) was invaluable and also guided our priorities during the QB 2014 development. As we finally reached the very end of the release cycle for QuickBooks 2014 in March, we have now used the input from our beta testers to guide our plans and priorities for QuickBooks 2015. This input plus our own software QA testing has helped us identify where we still have areas to improve accessibility. More specifically, we hope to address access in the areas of Product Registration and Processing Payments in future releases.

AccessWorld will continue to check in with the folks behind QuickBooks access efforts and keep you informed about new developments.

It's been a busy 2014 for GW Micro, makers of the Window-Eyes screen reader. First, on January 14th, it announced a groundbreaking partnership with Microsoft to provide a free, full-feature version of its Window-Eyes screen reader to anyone who owns a licensed copy of Office 2010, 2013, or has a subscription to Office 365. You can learn more at www.WindowEyesforOffice.com. Next, on April 2^nd, it announced a new service, Accessibility Solutions—a fee-based service available to persons and organizations interested in making their websites, documents or software accessible and compliant with Section 508 standards, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), or the internationally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

Finally, on May 1^st, GW Micro and Ai Squared, makers of the ZoomText screen magnifier and text-to-speech software package, announced the two companies had merged. The name GW Micro will be retired, and going forward, all products and services are being produced and marketed under the AI Squared brand name.

For members of the print-impaired community, the word "change" is all-too-often synonymous with a reshuffling of corporate priorities, the most worrisome of which is the company's dedication to creating, maintaining, and upgrading the accessibility of their various products and services. These concerns grow even larger when the product in question is a screen access product—especially if it's a screen reader or magnifier you rely on to stay connected to the world, attend school, or perform your job. This is why AccessWorld invited representatives of both companies to speak with us about the merger and what it means to their customers and employees, as well as the combined company's commitment to continue serving the sight-impaired community with ongoing product enhancements and technical support.

The Merger

According to David Wu, President and CEO of AI Squared, "Even though we're merging, there will still be a great deal of autonomy between the divisions." The new AI Squared will keep the same offices and employees in Manchester Center, Vermont and Fort Wayne, Indiana. There are no plans to relocate the GW offices, and there were no layoffs or staff reductions.

According to Dan Weirich, Vice-President of the newly-combined company, "Technical support options will also not be affected. The same support personnel who assist our customers now will continue to work with them."

Going forward, GW Micro products and services will be branded with the AI Squared name. Instead of GW Micro Window-Eyes, for example, it will now be redubbed AI Squared Window-Eyes. Adds Wu, "About the only other noticeable difference most users will experience will be when, very soon, we will be combining our web presences into a single site: www.AISquared.com. That work is already in progress."

Why Now?

AI Squared has been creating and marketing screen and text access products since 1987. GW Micro entered the field in 1990. So, why merge now?

"This merger has actually been in the works for quite some time," says Weirich.

"The cooperation between the companies started a long time before the papers were signed," added Wu. "We assigned one of our programmers to work directly with GW Micro on Window-Eyes some months ago to help ensure our products work more seamlessly together. There are also many program elements we had each developed separately that could help the other improve its products once we were in a position to share them."

According to Weirich, "It took us awhile to figure out how things would work and what a merger would mean for both companies. We also had businesses to run, products to develop and ongoing negotiations with other companies, such as our joint venture with Microsoft to distribute Window-Eyes for Office, which we had to keep confidential, even from our potential merger partners at AI Squared.

The Synergies

Successful mergers always create synergies, efficiencies and economies of scale that lead the merged company to be greater than the sum of its parts. According to Wu and Weirich, these synergies are numerous.

Observes Wu, "People don't generally wake up one morning and say, 'Oh my God. I'm blind. I need a screen reader.' The odds are good that sight-impaired individual start out with partial vision loss, and a screen magnifier—ZoomText or ZoomText Mac, we hope—was one of his or her first accessibility purchases. As that individual's vision diminishes, however, he or she needs to transition from a screen magnifier to a magnifier with voice assist, and finally, to a full-featured screen reader such as Window- Eyes. With all three of these elements now under one metaphorical if not actual roof, we can make that transition much smoother, and we can do this both on a program level with shared code and scripting, and also on a support level with combined training and conference booths and presentations."

Wu and Weirich were both rather circumspect about when they would offer a single product package that would combine Window-Eyes and ZoomText. "We don't want to announce any new products until we can say exactly when they will be available," says Wu.

"It's an obvious route to pursue, but for now, we're still finding our way together," added Weirich.

Both Weirich and Wu stated categorically that there were no plans to work with Microsoft on a free ZoomText for Office product similar to their Window-Eyes for Office offering. "Both companies have enjoyed excellent working relationships with Microsoft for many years," says Wu. "Going forward, that relationship can only grow stronger."

With their newly-combined product portfolio, Wu and Weirich predict they will have increased strength in the marketplace, selling to government agencies and other institutions. As for their current dealer networks, "A large majority of North American dealers who carry ZoomText also sell Window-Eyes," says Wu. "So we anticipate few, if any, changes to our current dealer network."

"Our Accessibility Solutions initiative should also dovetail nicely with AI Squared's sitecues," adds Weirich. sitecues is an access technology that makes web properties more accessible by building magnification and reading capabilities directly into a website.

Both AI Squared and GW Micro also sell and support various hardware magnification products, including ZoomText Image Reader, the i-loview hand held digital magnifier, Koba Vision, and the ReadIt Scholar HD. "There isn't an excessive amount of feature overlap in these products," says Weirich. "We're still figuring out what we'll do long term, but our customers can be assured, they will continue to receive full support for all of our current software and our low-vision hardware products."

Going Forward

"With AI Squared firmly behind us, our developers will have even more financial and technical resources to produce Window-Eyes Version 9, and the many versions after that," says Weirich. "Now more than ever, we can say with certainty, Window-Eyes is here to stay."

"AccessWorld readers can feel confident that they will still receive the same excellent products and support from our merged company as they have come to expect from both companies individually," says Wu. "The AI Squared motto used to be ?Making Accessibility Simple'," he says. ""Now that we've merged, a better motto for our company is: "We've Got Accessibility Covered."

Staying in Touch

Keep up with news and events from AI Squared by signing up for its information mailing list, or send an e-mail request to Becca White.

Comment on this article.

Each year at its leadership conference, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) bestows Access Awards to the individuals, companies, and organizations that go above and beyond when it comes to improving accessibility for people with vision loss. Among the honorees for 2014 is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also known as the Met.

A Bit of History

The Met, which is composed of the main building on Fifth Avenue, and The Cloisters museum and gardens in northern Manhattan, traces its origins to 1866, when a group of Americans in Paris, France, agreed to create a "national institution and gallery of art" to bring art and art education to the American people.

According to its website, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded on April 13, 1870, "to be located in the City of New York, for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said city a Museum and library of art, of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction."

This statement of purpose has guided the Museum for more than a century.

The Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art have reaffirmed the statement of purpose and supplemented it with the following statement of mission:

The mission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards.

The Met Today

Today, the museum's two-million-square-foot main building houses over two million objects, tens of thousands of which are on view at any given time, and it hosts approximately 6.2 million patrons annually from around the world.

AccessWorld recently toured the Met to bring our readers firsthand information about its access efforts. Rebecca McGinnis, the Met's enthusiastic and knowledgeable Museum Educator, oversees its Access and Community Programs and acted as our tour guide. McGinnis is partially sighted. She holds a master's degree in Art History and another in Museum Studies, and she is currently working on her PhD in Cognitive Psychology.

As we began the tour McGinnis stated, "The Met now has an array of offerings. We feel it's really important to offer choice. The museum wants people to connect with art in whatever way that interests them, whether it's making art or learning about art in the galleries through touch and description. Some programs are scheduled, where people can come to meet with others and have a social experience, and we offer touch and descriptive tours by request." When staff members conduct these tours, there is a dialogue between the patron and the tour guide. During this conversation, the patron can ask questions and make choices, and the guide can tailor the tour towards the patron's interests.

In most art museums, people are not permitted to touch art or artifacts on display, but at the Met, there are numerous items that may be touched.

The Met's Touch Collection was established in the 1970s, and it currently consists of approximately 130 unique objects, representing most of the museum's departments. McGinnis once found a museum bulletin from the early 1900s that indicated that, even then, there were tours and talks specifically for the blind.

McGinnis was kind enough to show us several touchable artifacts, including a variety of small sculptures. She described each piece in great detail, telling us what it was, its approximate age, and what it was made from. Here are just a few of the touchable artifacts that were included in our private tour:

• An early 20^th-century Inuit soapstone sculpture from either Alaska or Northern Canada. The mother and child are facing each other with the mother's hands outstretched and the child's hands across his chest.
• A fragment—a foot in a sandal—from an ancient Roman marble statue,
• A 3,500-year-old piece of a mummy's wrapping made of gauze and resin.
• A carved scarab with hieroglyphics. The scarab was placed on a mummy's chest before wrapping.

Caption: A closeup of the carved scarab in a visitor's hand

The Egyptian Touch Tour is one such tour that does not require an advance reservation. At this time, three to six artifacts in this particular collection can be touched. These include two sarcophagi (Egyptian caskets) and a statue. McGinnis is currently working on updating the descriptive book that goes along with the tour. The updated book will have braille, large print, and tactile graphics. She added that the museum is working to set up additional touch tours that will not require reservations.

Caption: Statue of the goddess Sakhmet, featured on the Egyptian Touch Tour

Like many museums, the Met has an audio guide, which is free for people with visual impairments.

McGinnis is also working closely with the staff in the Met's Digital Media department to develop new ideas to make sure that all digital media is accessible. She added that she is working with the developer of the Met app, explaining, "We're using the development of that app as a pilot to develop a process to insure that future digital media projects are accessible to people with little or no vision."

The Met has a wonderful children's book entitled, Art and the Alphabet: A Tactile Experience, co-authored by McGinnis. The book incorporates braille and print and features art from the museum's collection. Each page has a tactile representation of the print letter and a tactile representation of the artwork that goes with each letter.

Additional Programs for People with Visual Impairments

The Met offers programs for all ages, from preschoolers to senior citizens.

Picture This!

Picture This! is a monthly program designed for people with visual impairments. The program focuses on special exhibitions primarily made accessible through verbal descriptions. Other techniques used include touch and conversations with a curator.

Picture This! Family

Picture This! Family is open to visually impaired children and their families. McGinnis explained, "We use a lot of hands-on materials which connect to how art is made. The combination of touch and making art, with supportive description and conversation, is how we approach family programs with children."

Seeing Through Drawing

Seeing Through Drawing is a monthly class open to anyone with vision loss. Emphasis is on the act of drawing and the feel of different materials rather than the final product. Sometimes the class touches objects that they then draw, and other times, they bring drawing boards into a gallery and draw from a description. Sometimes they draw as a response to sound or music. The class meets one Saturday per month, and pre-registration is not required. The class is taught by two artists and is usually attended by 15 to 20 people. The instructors for this class also teach at local colleges and often employ the same teaching techniques with their sighted students.

Special Events

The Met has many special events open to the general public. You can join a mailing list specifically for notifying people who have visual impairments when accessible events are scheduled. For example, an accessible event may include features such as audio description, tactile exploration, or exploring different scents.

In addition to programs for people with vision loss, the Met offers programs for people with other disabilities including hearing loss, developmental or learning challenges, and dementia. You can visit the museum's accessibility page for more information on these offerings.

Teaching about Museum Accessibility

Last fall, McGinnis and the director of the Met's media lab worked with a professor from the Parsons School of Design in New York to develop a graduate-level lab course on museums, technology, and accessibility. McGinnis said, "I established a group of advisors with different disabilities who are museum goers. The advisors talked about their experiences in museums: what they liked, what works for them, what doesn't, and what access and mainstream technologies they use." Throughout the semester, those advisors worked with the graduate students, and helped them with their projects by providing user testing and general feedback. In addition to the advisors, the students also worked with access technology experts and museum staff.

During the semester, the graduate students divided themselves into four groups based on their interests. One group developed a way finding app for the museum. The second group evaluated the Met's website and developed and implemented new code to improve the screen reader experience; drafted some guidelines for art museum websites and for creating descriptive alt tags; looked at optimizing the Met's website for people with low vision; and developed an eye-tracking device for people who are non-verbal and/or have dementia. The fourth group laser cut a raised copy of Picasso's painting of Gertrude Stein and added audio content into the painting.

McGinnis explained the range of, and need for, the class this way: "The graduate students learned about museums, the needs of people with disabilities, and how to create accessible technology that will help museum patrons access art. Most of the students were working toward a Masters of Fine Arts in the Design and Technology program, yet none of them had heard of universal design."

A Continued Commitment to Access

Through fellowships and professional exchanges, ongoing excavation work, traveling exhibitions, and many other initiatives, the Museum continues in the twenty-first century to fulfill its mission and serve the broadest possible audience. AFB and AccessWorld once again commend the Metropolitan Museum of Art for taking a proactive stance and continuing to improve upon access to its collections for people with vision loss and all disabilities. If you live in or are traveling to the New York City area, we urge you to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We also encourage other museums across the country to follow the Met's example and improve upon the accessibility of their art collections.

Hours of Operation and Contact Information

Hours: Open 7 days a week, except closed Thanksgiving Day, December 25, January 1, and the first Monday in May.
Sunday—Thursday: 10 am—5:30 pm
Friday and Saturday: 10 am—9 pm

Contact Information:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
Telephone: 212.650.2070

Accessibility Information:
To arrange a tour or to get on the mailing list for programs for the visually impaired:
Phone: 212-650-2010
Email: access@metmuseum.org
Website for information about programs for people with visual impairments.

Comment on this article.

In 2013, Sprint and Virgin Mobile announced an ongoing commitment to make products and services more accessible to the sight impaired community. We took a look at two of these companies' premier accessible devices in the November 2013 AccessWorld article Cell Phone Accessibility: Reviewing the LG Optimus F3 and the Kyocera Kona. Both came with built-in enhanced voice accessibility. More recently, Sprint has released a third phone with a built-in screen reader, the Kyocera Verve, a value-priced feature phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard aimed at users who want to call and message frequently without the expense and learning curve of a touch screen smartphone.

A Brief Tour

My sample Kyocera Verve arrived in a braille-labeled box that contained the Verve itself, the battery, a USB power adapter, and the print manual. An accessible copy of the manual is also available online. Most electronics manuals are at least partly inaccessible because the graphics are not labeled, resulting in any number of sentences that basically say, "To do this, press the (blank space) button." In this case, however, the company has taken the trouble to give each of the images an alt tag.

The Verve is a candy-bar styled phone, which is to say it is the approximate shape and size of two Hershey bars stacked one atop the other: 4.53 inches by 2.13 inches by 0.59 inches. The phone features a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 2-megapixel camera, and a battery rating of over six hours talk time and over 260 hours of standby.

The front of the phone resembles a permanently open flip phone, with a 2- by 3-inch screen at the top and a 1.5- by 2-inch keypad at the bottom. The dial pad contains the standard 12 keys: 1 through 0, with * and # to either side of the 0. The last row of keys sits extremely close to the phone's bottom edge, but the 5 key does have a raised dot, making it easy enough to orient yourself to make an entry.

Centered above the keypad is the Menu/OK button, which is surrounded by a cursor ring for moving up, down, left, and right through menus. These buttons act as features shortcuts when pressed from the main idle screen: Calendar (left), Contacts (right), Send message (up), and My Stuff (down). You can change any or all of these by accessing the Settings / Other Navigation Keys menu.

The Call and End buttons are positioned to the far left and right of the Menu/OK button, respectively. Between them, stretching between the Home button and cursor ring, are two larger, square buttons on the left and two on the right. The upper of these are the left and right soft keys. The bottom two buttons are the Speaker button on the left, and the Back key on the right. These buttons are fairly small, and the lower pair sits extremely close to the 1, 2, and 3 keys. Nonetheless it only took a short while for me to become oriented and accustomed to the configuration.

The Speaker key toggles the speaker phone off and on. The Back key will back you out of any menu, and if you hold it down for two seconds the phone will lock—handy for avoiding accidentally dialing one of your contacts while you're carrying the phone in your pocket. Unfortunately, when locked, the Verve announced the instructions to unlock it whenever I pressed one of the command buttons, so if you want the Verve to be absolutely silent you'll have to lower the volume before you lock the phone—there is no mute switch. Press the Menu/OK button, followed by the Back key, to unlock the phone. Sound cues let you know when you have successfully locked or unlocked the phone.

There are two additional buttons on the front surface of the Verve, located at the far left edge of the screen. These are the secondary left and right soft keys, and they only work when the built-in keyboard is extended.

The left side of the Verve contains the USB charging port, toward the bottom, and the volume rocker and Vibrate button near the top. There is an obvious seam that runs along this edge, and the others, that allows you to slide out the built-in QWERTY keyboard.

Also on the left edge, toward the top but nearest the phone's back, is a tiny thumbnail lip used to pry off the phone's plastic backing for battery installation. There is a headset jack on the top edge of the Verve (a headset was not included with the phone). The Camera button is located on the right edge, toward the bottom.

Turning on Speech Accessibility

Unfortunately, the Verve is not configured with an easy way to turn on speech access, such as Apple's triple-tap gesture on the Home screen or Android's two-finger hold during startup. You will need sighted assistance to get up and running with speech. Or you can follow this list of commands step by step:

• Turn on your charged Verve by pressing the End button and holding it for a few seconds.
• Wait a few seconds after you hear the start fanfare, and then press the Menu/OK button once.
• Press the down button (the south edge of the ring surrounding the Menu/OK button) twice. This will take you to the Settings menu. You should hear a beep with each movement down.
• Press the Menu/OK button to open the Settings Menu.
• Press the 0 key on the dial pad to move to the second screen of options. You will now be on the Accessibility menu.
• Press the Menu/OK button once to enter Voice Services
• Press the Menu/OK button a second time to reach the Voice Guide option.
• Press the Menu/OK button a third time to reach the Speech Output option.
• Press the Menu/OK button again to Toggle speech on.
• Use the Back key to return to the previous menu, or the End key to return to the phone idle screen.

There are three voice speed settings, but no pitch controls. For the most part I found the voice clear and understandable. Unfortunately, when it is not, there is no hotkey to repeat the last utterance or review it word-by-word or letter-by-letter.

Also in the Accessibility menu you will find options to change the font size from regular to large. (Note: This setting does not affect all screens.) The phone includes a high-contrast black and white setting, and settings to enable TTY and to improve audio quality using a hearing aid. You can also set different vibration patterns for incoming calls, text messages, voicemail alerts, and calendar alarms.

Using Voice Commands

One of the easiest ways to use the Verve is via voice command. Press and hold down the Call key until you hear "Say a command." After the tone you can issue a number of different commands. I was successful trying "Call Bill" from my new contact list. I could also speak the entire number, including area code, and the Verve would autodial the number. "Check time," "Check battery," and "Check network" also returned the appropriate responses.

"Go to Calendar" and "Go to Contacts" also worked, as did "Go to Voice Memo," a phone app that allows you to record and playback brief spoken notes.

I found the Voice Recognition features useful, to a point. There is an option to train the voice for better recognition, but these screens did not read—even if I plugged in a pair of ear buds. You also cannot dictate text into message fields.

Making and Taking Calls

The Verve is a standard feature phone with the standard command structure. To make a call, enter the numbers on the dial pad, and then press the Call button. You can also press the right soft key to summon a list of your contacts. Cursor up or down using the ring, and when you reach the desired contact, press Call. You can also press the Menu/OK button if you want to get your contact's details, alternate phone numbers, ring tone and vibrate pattern selection and picture ID.

Users of feature phones like to keep it simple, and the Verve offers three ways to make a call quickly and easily. First, pressing the Call button without pre-entering a number summons your recent history list. From here you can return a call, send a text message, and add a caller to your contact list.

As mentioned previously, you can also hold down the Call button until you are prompted to enter a command, at which time you can say "Call" followed by a phone number or the name of one of your contacts, and the Verve will dial the number for you.

One other way to dial a number quickly and easily is by using speed dial. By default, the Verve comes with the number 1 set up to access your voicemail, and the asterisk key at the bottom left to dial your ICE (In Case of Emergency) number. You can change the ICE number by editing the contact. You can set other speed dials by entering the appropriate settings into contact entries and choosing a speed dial number there.

With Speech Output enabled, the Verve will announce the Caller ID, speaking the contact name or the phone number at the end of each ring. Press the Call button to answer the call, the End button to send the call directly to voicemail, or to hang up after a completed call.

If you miss a call, the Verve will announce a waiting voicemail, and prompt you to press the left soft key to listen or the right soft key to dismiss the prompt. Press and hold the number 1 key to access your voicemail. You can also press the right soft key at any time to call up a list of your voicemails, or to send or read text messages.

Text Messaging with the Verve

The Verve announces incoming text messages and voices the contact name/phone number and message text. You can also press the left soft key at any time to review the current or previous message. Unfortunately, when the message is read, voicing begins with the time and date, then the sender's info. This results in several seconds of extra verbiage. The more messages I listened to, the more I wished there were a way to change the reading order, but there is not.

The Verve also sends and receives e-mails. The "Sent from" address is [your device's phone number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com

You can reply to a message from the reading screen, or press the left soft key at any time to create and send a new text message or e-mail, select a contact, or enter a phone number.

The Verve offers the standard dial pad text entry, pressing each key once, twice, or three times to enter the appropriate character. Press the Back key to delete the previous character. The phone only announces your final press, however, so if you press the 2 key 3 times, the only letter you will hear will be "C." Personally, I prefer this method because it produces less extraneous verbiage. There is no way to change this setting.

The right soft key offers several options. You can use it to change the dial pad from letters to numbers. You can also add symbols, emoticons, and punctuation, or use a preset message, such as "Can't talk right now" or "I love you."

Of course, the main reason for purchasing the Verve over standard feature phones is that it comes with a slide out keyboard. Let's have a look.

The Slide Out Keyboard

The slide out keyboard contains three rows of 10 keys each and a fourth row of 9 at the bottom. The Spacebar is the width of two keys. In the default mode, the first row, from left to right, contains the Q through P keys. The second row contains the A through L keys, with a slight indentation on the F and J keys instead of a raised dot to accommodate the tight fit of the slide.

To the right of the L key is the Delete key. Pressing the Delete key removes the last entered character, and announces "Cleared."

The third keyboard row has the Z through M keys, the question mark key, the Up Arrow key, and, to the far right, the Enter key.

The bottom keyboard row begins with the Shift key at the left. Press it once to capitalize the next letter, twice to toggle caps lock on or off. Unfortunately, there is no audible feedback for the toggling or capitalization—the key does not speak when pressed, and character voicing does not change when a capital letter is encountered. A higher pitched voice, or an audible click before a word is spoken, would have been very helpful here.

To the right of the Shift key is the Function key, labeled FN. Pressing this key toggles you to function mode, which allows you to enter numbers, punctuation, and symbols similar to using a standard keyboard's top number/punctuation row. For example, pressing the Function key followed by the Q key enters the number 1, pressing Function followed by the H key enters a colon.

A second press of the Function key locks you in function mode, so you can type several numbers or symbols. A third press unlocks function mode and returns you to typing letters. Here, there is a bit of extra verbiage that can be confusing. With each press of the function key, the Verve announces the mode, followed by "ABC." So "Function Lock ABC" actually enables you to type symbols, not letters.

Continuing to the right, you next encounter the Comma key, the Spacebar, and then the Period key. The final three keys are the Left, Down and Right Arrow keys. Now, with the keyboard extended, if you reach up to the main phone unit, you will find smaller, alternate Left and Right Soft keys, which are more convenient for use with the keyboard.

This was my first experience with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, and at first it felt a little tight, which is to be expected. I quickly learned, though, that if I used just three fingers on each hand instead of the usual four my typing speed increased significantly. Unfortunately, I found the voice response to be a bit sluggish. In addition, since interrupt ability is always enabled, quickly typing T-H-E caused the phone to only voice the final E, and there was no way to review my typing or audibly cursor back to make sure I had typed the word correctly. An option to have the Verve announce both letters and words, or just words for the confident typist is sorely needed here.

Calendar and Web Browsing Accessibility

The Verve's calendar is completely accessible with speech. You can set appointments, reminders and to-do lists and view your schedule by day or week. About the only complaint I had regarding the calendar was in setting a time appointment. As with the messages, the voice announcement speaks month, date, year, then, finally, time. This caused a lot of extra verbiage when I set an appointment time to, say, 11:45 am.

Browsing the Web was surprisingly improved over previous feature phones I have tried. The Verve does not read out those super-long URL names for each link and image, and the right soft key menu offers the option to turn off image downloading. There are preset bookmarks for CNN, the BBC, ESPN, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook.

Web navigation is still painfully slow, but on the plus side, Web surfing with the Verve is done through SprintWeb, which gives you online access without extra charges for a data plan.

The Verve voice guide does not include hotkeys to navigate by links, headings, or lists. You have to use the Down Arrow key to make your way through the entire page, and whenever I tried to read a Web page, after every few lines the phone would re-announce: "left key navigation, right key options." If there is one accessibility improvement this phone desperately needs, it is the addition of a "Read All" command.

Recommendations

The Kyocera Verve is an excellent, value-priced feature phone available both on and off contract. The built-in screen reader is among the best I've experienced on a feature phone, and in my opinion it represents a solid step forward in Sprint's commitment to accessibility. In fact, the company was eager to receive my feedback, and stated that they are already planning to address most of the few accessibility quirks I did discover.

If you want to use a phone for frequent Web browsing, or as a GPS device, the Verve is probably not for you, but if you are looking for a basic feature phone you can use to make and receive calls and send text messages—even a lot of text messages—the Verve will get the job done.

Product Information

Kyocera Verve
Company: Sprint
Price: $19.95 with a 2-year contract
Color: Grey or Pink.

Company: Boost Mobile
Price: $49.99 without contract
Color: Navy Blue

Comment on this article.

For many people with visual impairments, finding an accessible, reliable, and affordable means of transportation is of paramount concern, and is very often integral to pursuing social and employment opportunities. Ridesharing companies such as Uber are becoming an additional mode of transportation in many American cities, and in most cases, competing directly with the taxi cab industry.

Caption: Screenshot of Uber User Interface

What Is Uber?

Uber was launched in San Francisco back in 2009. It is currently available in 47 cities in the United States alone, and has expanded to 35 countries worldwide. The company relies on a mobile app to connect passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire. The term "ridesharing" is frequently used to describe services such as Uber, but this term may be a little misleading. The basic model of paying a company to transfer you from point A to point B still applies. However, unlike a taxicab, Uber drivers use their personal vehicles to drive passengers. Rather than communicating with a dispatch to arrange for pickup, passengers request pick-ups directly through the app. UberX is the most popular service that Uber provides, and is also the most affordable, since the vehicles used for this service are not considered luxury vehicles. Depending on the city, Uber may also provide other types of vehicles and rates to choose from, including "Black Car" and "SUV." The "Black Car" option represents a high-end sedan, while the "SUV" option provides a larger vehicle with seat capacity for up to six people. There are other companies that provide a similar service to Uber, including Lyft and Sidecar.

Pricing and Availability

Uber rates can vary from city to city. Typically, the cost of using UberX is less than that of a standard taxicab. During peak times, when there are more requests for rides being made than there are vehicles available, Uber uses what it refers to as "surge pricing," which means passengers are charged a higher rate for their rides. The higher rate is displayed within the app before the ride is requested, which gives a passenger the option to complete or cancel the request for a ride at that point. In the most extreme cases, surge pricing can increase the standard Uber fare by multiple times the standard rate. Fortunately, extremely high rates due to surge pricing are rare. Uber experienced considerable backlash when rates went as high as eight times the standard rate on New Year's Eve in New York City. Fortunately, New Year's Eve in New York City only comes around once a year, and when surge pricing is in effect, it typically does not exceed more than two to three times the standard fare. In March of 2014, presumably due to the backlash that Uber received because of its surge pricing practice, the company introduced "Surge Drop" notifications, which notify customers via text message when surge prices drop in their area. UberX rides have recently become subject to a $1.00 "Safe Rides Fee" as a means to offset rising insurance costs.

Uber App Setup and Accessibility

The Uber app is available as a free download for both the iOS and Android market. For this review the app was tested using the following devices and software:

• iPhone 5 running iOS 7.1.1
• Nexus 4 running Android 4.4.2

Uber is to be commended for making the Uber app accessible with VoiceOver, the native screen reader for iOS. All of the buttons and controls within the app have been effectively labeled. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Android operating system when using its native screen reading program, TalkBack. Several buttons and edit boxes within the Uber Android app are unlabeled. Therefore, the initial setup, and functionality of the app with TalkBack after setup, is inaccessible.

The app's user interface for both iOS and Android platforms provides a high contrast color scheme combination of white, light gray, and black, which makes the app easier to use for people who benefit from increased contrast levels. The native screen magnification features of iOS, and Android Version 4.2 or higher, work seamlessly with the app by allowing you to increase the size of the viewable area. However, there are no additional options within the app itself to increase any of the text size. If you have low vision, and you are using an Android device that is running Version 4.1 or later, there are unfortunately no accessibility options to increase the viewable area or font size of the app.

In order to register an account, Uber requires that you have a mobile phone number. The registration process can either be done online, or within the app itself. During the registration process, the app is linked to a credit card, PayPal account, or Google Wallet. Your account is automatically charged at the end of each ride. This automated electronic transaction completely eliminates the need to exchange cash with or submit a credit card to the driver. Tipping the driver is also automated. By default, the Uber account is set up to automatically tip the driver 20%. You are given the option to change the tip amount by accessing your account online. Changing the tip amount is a feature that is currently only available via a Web browser, and not within the app itself.

A detailed statement is sent to your e-mail address after every trip. It provides the pick-up and drop-off addresses, the amount you were charged, and the total length of the trip. It will even provide you with the first name of your driver.

The app displays a map of your area at startup, with all of the Uber vehicles' locations within your vicinity. This map is not accessible via the iOS and Android screen readers. However, the map itself is much less important than the estimated pick-up time and the rate that you are being charged, since you have no control over which one of the displayed vehicles may respond to your request for a ride. Once again, the estimated time of arrival and rate is completely accessible using VoiceOver on the iPhone. Unfortunately this is not the case with the Android app using TalkBack.

By default, the app will auto-populate your current location using GPS on your phone. If the auto-populated address is incorrect, you can manually enter the correct address. You are also given the option to enter your destination and receive an estimated fare quote before you decide to go through with the request.

Communicating with the Driver via Text or Phone

After a pickup has been requested, the app provides you with the driver's name and the type of car he or she is driving. The app does not currently allow a person with a disability to indicate any additional needs or assistance that may be required. The app does provide an additional Actions button, which becomes available after a pick-up request has been made. One of these actions includes the ability to contact the driver before they arrive, either by phone or by text message. Since the Uber driver will not know that you are visually impaired or blind, contacting the driver before they arrive to indicate precisely where to meet, and to let them know how to identify you, is extremely useful. For a person with low vision, it may also be difficult to identify the vehicle when it arrives. Since the vehicles are privately owned, they will be more difficult to identify than company-owned taxicabs. The app does not currently indicate the color of the vehicle that is being used, although it does let you know the type of car being driven. As the driver arrives at the specified pickup location, a text message is sent to your phone stating, "your Uber is arriving now." Receiving this text message allows you to know exactly when your ride has arrived, and reduces the need to be on high alert for an extended period of time. It also reduces the time that you need to wait outside to meet your driver.

The positive impact of the estimated time of arrival, and the line of communication between the Uber driver and passenger, is significant. Knowing the driver's estimated arrival time, and actual arrival via a text message, will allow you to more effectively manage the time you have remaining before the driver arrives, thereby allowing you a greater amount of control. I have found this to be especially true in social settings when I know approximately how much time I have to wrap things up and say my good-byes, and to gather my belongings before the Uber driver arrives.

Uber Policy on Guide Dogs and People with Disabilities

Uber has yet to adopt a policy to accommodate the needs of people who use service animals. In fact their policies make no reference to service animals. The only reference made to animals is a section in their policies entitled "Can I Ride With My Pets?" Uber states that they "leave the decision whether or not to transport pets at the discretion of your driver." Read Uber Policies for their full statement.

Uber is enmeshed in a number of legal wranglings within several states for not abiding by the same local and state requirements of taxicabs. A growing number of people are also challenging Uber and other ridesharing companies' policies regarding people with disabilities. Since the vehicles are privately owned and operated by independent contractors, Uber and other ridesharing companies are currently not required to adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which states that "public transportation authorities may not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their services."

After each trip, both the driver and rider rate each other with a one to five star rating system. This system can be an effective method to provide accountability for both the driver and rider, and improve the experience overall. However, in the absence of any policy in place by Uber regarding people with disabilities, the potential exists for a rider to potentially receive a negative rating from a driver simply because of their need for a service animal, thereby potentially compromising future requests for pickups.

The Bottom Line

In a country that continues to maintain its love affair with automobiles, Uber offers people with visual impairments an alternative to the traditional taxicabs in several cities within the United States. When surge pricing is not in effect, the cost of UberX can be very reasonable. The iOS app allows a person who is blind to easily schedule a pickup with just a few gestures on their smartphone, and the automated system eliminates the hassle of having to pay the driver directly with cash or credit card. Uber's estimated arrival time is also much more exacting than traditional taxicabs, since GPS is used to accurately track the distance between you and the driver.

Uber is clearly not for everyone. There are many American cities that do not offer Uber services at this time. In the cities that Uber is available, the company's business model is highly reactive to the supply and demand of the market, which can sometimes translate into a lack of available Uber drivers at the time a request is made. On the flip side, it can also mean that if surge pricing is in effect, the service may not be feasible for many.

If you happen to be a blind traveler with a guide dog, and are refused a ride from an Uber driver, there appears to be no legal recourse that can be taken under the ADA at this time. This makes the Uber service unreliable at best for people using a guide dog, and discriminatory at worst. Although it's evident that Uber has invested resources into making their iOS app accessible for people who are blind and visually impaired, the current version of the Uber app for Android is virtually unusable for a person who is accessing it via TalkBack. With the proliferation of Android smartphones on the market today, it would be in the company's best interest to make it more accessible, not only because it happens to be the right thing to do, but because it would also be a profitable investment.

Product Information

Uber app and website
Cost: Free
Apple App Store
Google Play Store

Comment on this article.