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Posted by T.V. Raman, Research
Scientist

From time to time, our own href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/" >T.V. Raman
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a
technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among
others, may also find useful.

The advent of RSS and ATOM feeds, and the creation of tools
like >Google Reader for efficiently consuming content
feeds, has vastly increased the amount of information we access
every day. From the perspective of someone who cannot see, content
feeds are one of the major innovations of the century. They give me
direct access to the actual content without first having to dig
through a lot of boilerplate visual layout as happens with
websites. In addition, all of this content is now available from a
single page with a consistent interface.

Until now, I've enjoyed the benefits of href="http://www.google.com/reader/axs" >Google
Reader using a href="http://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2007/03/emacs-client-for-google-services.html"
>custom client. Today, we're happy to tell
you that the "mainstream" Google Reader now works with
off-the-shelf screenreaders, as well as href="http://www.clcworld.net/" >Fire Vox, the
self-voicing extension to Firefox. This brings the benefits of
content feeds and feed readers to the vast majority of visually
impaired users.

Google Reader has always had complete keyboard support. With the
accessibility enhancements we've added, all user actions now
produce the relevant spoken feedback via the user's adaptive
technology of choice. This feedback is generated using
Accessible Rich Internet Applications ( href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-aria-20080204/"
>WAI-ARIA), an evolving standard for enhancing
the accessibility of Web-2.0 applications. WAI-ARIA is supported at
present by Firefox — with future support forthcoming in other
browsers. This is one of the primary advantages of building on open
standards.

We originally prototyped these features in Google Reader using the
AxsJAX
framework. After extensive testing of these enhancements, we've
now integrated these into the mainstream product. See the href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/03/reader-and-aria-new-way-to-read.html" >
related post on the Google Reader Blog for additional technical
details.

Looking forward to a better informed future for all!

Tags: , own, Posted, Raman, Research, ScientistFrom, time

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research
Scientist

From time to time, our own href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/" >T.V. Raman
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a
technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among
others, may also find useful.

Earlier this year, I blogged about the potential presented by

href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html"
>accessibility mashups with respect to
delivering web interfaces that are optimized to a user's
special needs. More recently, my office-mate Charles Chen and I
blogged about our work on

href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/11/introducing-axsjax-access-enabling-ajax.html"
>AxsJAX as a framework for leveraging Web-2.0
for injecting accessibility enhancements into web
applications.

As we head into the holiday season, we decided it was time to have
some fun and generate a few laughs based on what we've worked
on during the year. As chance would have it, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Munroe" >Randall
Munroe, the creator of the >XKCD comic strip, visited our Mountain View
campus to give an com="" v="zJOS0sV2a24" >extremely entertaining talk. He even
made a reference to blind hacker geeks! So the temptation
was too hard to resist. We had to speech-enable his comic
strip.

The XKCD comics are highly visual, with a short comment from the
author accompanying many of the episodes. Having a detailed written
description that is visible to everyone would spoil the comic for
the average user; part of the fun is to understand the jokes purely
from the sketches. At the same time, notice that indexing and
searching online comics runs into the same challenge that blind
users face: to be able to locate past episodes, one needs access to
textual transcripts that capture the essence of each sketch. To
help with the latter, fans of online comics like XKCD have created
a href="http://www.ohnorobot.com/" >search engine
devoted to indexing comic strips, replete with full text
transcriptions. This is an example of a social Web applications
where fans can transcribe their favorite comics including
XKCD.

In the Web 1.0 world, I would have to pull up an XKCD episode, then
go to the site containing the transcripts, and finally find the
associated transcript in order to make sense of the comic. But this
is exactly where Web 2.0 mashups excel; mashups are all about
bringing data from multiple Web sources into a single integrated
view. Once we realized this, we were able to AxsJAX the XKCD site
with a small amount of code. Now, I can browse to the XKCD comic
site, and listen to each episode — with the underlying
AxsJAX-based mashup taking care of the minutiae of retrieving the
relevant transcript and integrating it into the comic strip.

This approach leverages all that is powerful about web-based
applications:

Distributed accessibility — the XKCD author does not need to
create the transcripts.

Transcripts can be integrated from across the web.

The accessibility enhancements do not spoil the fun for XKCD
readers in general.

And with Open Source self-voicing plugins like

href="http://firevox.clcworld.net/" >Fire Vox,
every XKCD user can listen to the strip when desired.

Tags: , own, Posted, Raman, Research, ScientistFrom, time

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research
Scientist

From time to time, our own href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/" >T.V.
Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his
perspective as a technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted
people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

A little over a year ago, I blogged about href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/speech-friendly-textual-directions.html"
id="r7wx" >our simple textual
directions as an alternative to the popular graphical Google
Maps interface. Those directions help me orient myself and learn my
way around. But in the interest of safety — my own and others! –
I choose not to drive and rely heavily on public
transportation.

Now that Maps has textual directions in place, it's easy to
build on top of that interface to introduce new innovations that
become immediately useful to someone like me. href="http://www.maps.google.com/transit" >Google Transit is a
great example of this — it helps me locate public transportation
options and does so in the text format that I need. In addition, it
offers several nice features to help me plan my trip:

I can specify the desired departure or arrival time.

It will show more than one trip choice, allowing some
flexibility with respect to when I'd like to start.

It estimates the amount of walking required to get to a transit
stop/station.

It identifies the length of waiting at each transit point.

It estimates the comparable cost of transportation options,
where available.

But these aren't the only benefits. Behind the scenes is the
href="http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html"
>Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), an
open data format used by public transit agencies to upload their
data. href="http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds"
id="w5r9" >Several agencies are already using these public
feeds. Though GTFS is never seen by commuters directly, it opens up
a wealth of possibilities with respect to accessibility and
alternative access, such as building custom user interfaces and
specialized route guidance applications that are optimized for
people with special needs.

Though we added this alternative view to enhance the
accessibility of Google Maps for blind and low-vision users, we
hope that everyone finds it a useful addition to your commute
arsenal. So next time you use the Maps graphical interface, give
its cousin, the simple textual directions, a try — there might be
times when you find yourself using it even if you can see.

And here's to ever more open data feeds from the various
public transport agencies!

Tags: , own, Posted, Raman, Research, ScientistFrom, time

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research
Scientist

From time to time, our own href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/" >T.V. Raman
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a
technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among
others, may also find useful. - Ed.

As someone who cannot see, I prefer to live in a mostly paperless
world. This means ruthlessly turning every piece of paper that
enters my life into a set of bits that I can process digitally. I
scan in everything. Until now, I have relied on commercial OCR
packages to convert these images into readable text. OCR is perhaps
one of the areas where the benefits of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law" >Moore's
Law are most evident; today, OCR can do remarkably well when
handed a page image. Until now, my only dissatisfaction with the
status quo in this area has been that commercial OCR engines afford
me little flexibility with respect to training them to do better on
documents that are specific to me.

The advent of our own open source OCR initiative, href="http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/" >OCRopus (source code:
Ocropus
Sources) is a welcome change in this regard. I introduced
support for OCRopus in
Emacspeak recently, and the HTML output this produces compares
favorably with output from commercial OCR engines, provided you
place the page at the right orientation on the scanner.
OCRopus' extensibility, and the ability to express the OCR as a
structured HTML document makes it an ideal starting point for
producing rich spoken output. The possibilities are enormous for
people being able to collectively train, customize and improve an
OCR engine.

Tags: , own, Posted, Raman, Research, ScientistFrom, time

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research
Scientist

From time to time, our own href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/" >T.V. Raman
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a
technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among
others, may also find useful.

As a book lover, I couldn't have been more excited by the
advent of electronic books in the early 90s. And with the rise of
the Internet, the possibility of being able to discover books
online was really exciting.

I work on a project at Google called href="http://labs.google.com/accessible/" >Google Accessible
Search, which helps promote results that are more accessible to
visually impaired users. Building on that work is today's
release of accessible public domain works through href="http://www.books.google.com/" >Google Book Search.
It's opening up hundreds of thousands of books to people who
use adaptive technologies such as speech output, screen readers,
and Braille displays.

I'm extremely enthusiastic about many of our efforts at Google,
which ultimately have the potential to make the experience of
accessing information for visually impaired users just as easy as
it is for those with sight. My reading used to be determined by
what was available in a form I could read. But today it's a
question of using Google effectively so that I can find the right thing to read. Today's
Book Search launch is an excellent example of how technology is
truly democratizing access to the world's information.

If you have feedback about Google's accessibility services, href="http://groups.google.com/group/accessible/" >join our
group to share tips on what works well and what could be made
better. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , own, Posted, Raman, Research, ScientistFrom, time

Posted by Sanjay Raman, Google Apps
Product Manager

Our mission is to "organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible
and useful." Note that twice in this eleven-word mission
statement, we mention that this is a global effort, not just a
problem we're solving only for English-speaking users in the
U.S. That global focus is critical, because fully 65% of Internet
users around the world speak a language other than English. In
fact, the Internet's top 10 languages still only account for
around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200
million people.

As part of our broader effort to make Google accessible to more
people in their native languages, we're announcing a number of
updates for >Google Apps, our customizable package of
hosted communication and collaboration href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/user_features.html"
>applications for businesses, schools, and
other organizations. Several features and components previously
available only to English users and administrators of Google Apps
are now available in other languages, too. Here's a quick
rundown of what's new for non-English speakers:

Google Apps href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html"
>Premier Edition for companies and
organizations needing an uptime guarantee for email service, 10
gigabytes of email storage per user, href="http://code.google.com/apis/apps/"
>integration APIs and multi-lingual
telephone support for critical issues (support experts are
available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch).
Also, for a limited time, you can try Premier Edition for free for
30 days.

Google Apps >Partner Edition for ISPs and portals
that want to offer Gmail and other applications to their
subscribers.

Google href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/dands.html"
>Docs & Spreadsheets, which
lets Google Apps users create and collaborate in real time, right
from their browsers.

The href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/start_page.html"
>Start Page, a central place for Google Apps
users to preview their inboxes, calendars and documents, access
their organizations' essential content, and search the
web.

A more user-friendly href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/control_panel.html"
>control panel interface for Google Apps
administrators.

href="http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=61369"
>Mail migration tools for
administrators who want to switch from a different email system
(available with Premier and Education Editions only).

Not only are we adding these features to the languages Google Apps
already supports; we're also rolling Google Apps out in six
more languages. Here's the full list: href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=fr" >French, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=it" >Italian,
German,
>Spanish, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=nl" >Dutch, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=sv" >Swedish,
>Norwegian, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=da" >Danish, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=fi" >Finnish,
>Turkish, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=pl" >Polish, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=uk"
>Ukrainian, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=cs" >Czech, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ru" >Russian,
>Chinese (Simplified), href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=zh_TW"
>Chinese (Traditional), href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ja"
>Japanese, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ko" >Korean, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=pt_BR"
>Brazilian Portuguese, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=th" >Thai, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=vi"
>Vietnamese, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ar" >Arabic, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=iw" >Hebrew, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=id"
>Indonesian, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=hu"
>Hungarian, href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=en_GB" >UK
English and >US English. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Apps, google, ManagerOur, Posted, product, Raman, Sanjay

The person that publish: Sanjay Raman is compiled from American government gain guest

The whole world has full the Internet user of 65

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