black labrador and iPad

I often discover new and useful apps for my iPhone or iPad by just randomly poking around in the app store. I really found an awesome gem this week. It needs some accessibility improvement, but I think you'll find it useful, even in its current version.

Marcus Roberts was on 60 Minutes last night! Take a look, if you didn't get a chance to see it. He plays piano, he talks about music, and, my favorite part, they talked a little bit (too little to suit me) about the fact that he uses technology.

No question, Marcus Roberts' most important piece of technology is the piano. He is first and foremost a talented musician, composer, and entertainer (this is my blog, I'm allowed to have three foremosts).

iOS 7.1 is experiencing an issue that affects all VoiceOver users who are using a Bluetooth QWERTY keyboard. Apple is aware of the issue, and is presumably working on a bug fix. The problem stems from using the control key. After pressing the control key, it acts as if the control key is “sticking,” and all subsequent keyboard actions act as if the control key is being held down. This has a significantly detrimental effect on all iOS apps, but particularly impacts AccessNote users.

You may have recently read the Wall Street Journal article by Lauren Weber about bosses asking employees to disclose whether they have a disability. Ms. Weber frames the issue pretty accurately, and I loved the comments included overall. Starting next week, all federal contractors (i.e., companies that do contract work for or with the U.S.

Technology innovation

I've just wrapped up my second visit to the mega Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. There's been tons of coverage of all the exciting new products, especially wearable technology, health and body monitoring technologies, devices to enhance our autos and, of course, more and more 3-D printing.

Braille Bug poster displaying braille alphabet and images of kids reading braille

Saturday, January 4, marks the 205th birthday of Louis Braille, the inventor of his eponymous code for people with vision loss. In celebration of his birthday, as well as National Braille Literacy Month, we’ve assembled a roundup of braille-centric content throughout AFB's family of sites.

The American Foundation for the Blind is getting started with the AFB Access Awards process earlier than in past years, because the awards will be presented on February 28, 2014, at the AFB Leadership Conference in Brooklyn, NY.

There are just a couple of other items I want to share from CES. I did get a chance to play with the Fleksy keypad from Syntellia. As many know, this is an app for Android and iOS that allows text input using a touchscreen keyboard using the relative position of your finger touches to mimic the qwerty keyboard. In other words, you start typing where you think the letters are, and Fleksy fills in what it thinks you're typing. It works quite well and I found the learning curve to be very short. I can see why so many users are finding this popular.