AFB Blog

AFB Puts Match.com, eHarmony, and Love is Blind to the Accessibility Test By Adrianna Montague-Gray, AFB Communications, and Marc Grossman, AFB Consulting With Valentine's upon us—that time of year when everyone's talking about relationships and dating—I was curious about the accessibility of online dating sites, so I asked my colleague Marc Grossman to help me evaluate a few. We didn't do a formal evaluation of each. Instead we looked at the homepages of Match.com, eHarmony, and Love is…

Guest Blogger, Caitlin McFeely, AFB Communications Over the past few months, AFB's Communications Department has spread the word about AFB through the "Cause" application on the social networking site Facebook. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, the Cause application allows individuals and organizations like AFB to explain their mission, invite other "Facebookers" to join and learn more, keep individuals up to speed on issues, and raise money. To date, AFB's cause has 334 members and…

Good news on the cell phone front. This week, AT&T Inc. announced their new partnership with Code Factory and their initiative to increase usability for wireless customers who are blind or have low vision. AT&T will now offer the screen reader and magnification software, Mobile Speak and Mobile Magnifier, on select Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 phones. Consumers with vision loss are advised to contact AT&T's National Center for Customers with Disabilities at 866-241-6568 with…

Ah, campus life. Dormitories, dining halls, and...GPS? The newest school staple for co-eds with vision loss is a talking Global Positioning System (GPS). Some of you readers might not be familiar with GPS, how it works, or its level of effectiveness so you should read AccessWorld®'s—AFB's online technology magazine—review< of Sendero GPS 3.5 for BrailleNote. Now, back to school. Florida State University recently completed mapping its campus so that various important spots can be picked up by…

Late last week Glenn Beck made some offensive comments on his CNN Headline News program about braille signs on walls. Media Matters has a clip on their site. The reality is that braille signage is extremely important for information and orientation purposes just like signage for anyone. And though we wish Mr. Beck would have thought twice before making such stupid remarks on national television, it has given us the opportunity to address some of the questions people have about braille in…

We're home! Ralph drove Paige and me home this week and worked with us in my home neighborhood for several hours. I guess most people fly home, so the trainers take them to the airport and go through security with them to the gate. This is great, since the dogs have not flown before and often the people don't have much experience with it, either. And, getting a dog through an airport is different from getting a cane through. I'll have that experience sometime in the near future. Being so…

Before I came to the Seeing Eye to get my dog, all my friends and coworkers wanted to know what I would do when I wasn't in class. I wondered the same thing. Would I be able to work? Could I train for a marathon? How about a triathlon? Could I catch up on my reading? I imagine other people planning to get a dog might be wondering the same thing. To what extent is my life on hold? The first-timer's program is 26 days long. People getting a second dog are here for a shorter time. Training time…

Tomorrow Paige and I will have been working together for three weeks (I'm at the Seeing Eye getting my first guide dog, if you're just tuning in). We're really starting to work together as a team. We're a little rough around the edges in a few places, but we do mostly look like we know what we're doing. On Friday we did a solo, where we walked in partly unfamiliar territory without a trainer on hand. I had a walkie-talkie and Pete, the trainer, walked far enough away that Paige couldn't really…

A lot of people have asked me how dogs and people are matched up. I'll try to describe what I've observed about the process at one school, the Seeing Eye, and maybe other people will fill in or contradict me. I'm sure every school has its own way of doing it. Before I arrived on July 22, many of my friends asked me what kind of dog I would get. Lots of people assumed I would pick out my own breed or even my own specific dog. Apparently if you feel you must have particular traits in a dog you…