So far I have been reading just various novels, so I didn’t really get the push for using a Kindle for education. I read my first text that I needed to make notes in. It was extremely handy to highlight passages, and make side notes on the side. For somebody who has difficulty highlighting or writing in the margin, this opens some doors. Unless you cannot operate the small 5-way navigational button.

Seeing that Amazon is releasing a few new models of Kindles, will the accessibility issues be handled? There has already been a lawsuit over the lack of accessibility.

Accessible Complex Table Example

It has been an incredibly long time since I have updated this thing. The last time I posted here was back in Nov 2009. My girlfriend at the time, Noelle, did a series of posts back in January.

I will just say Noelle, and I parted ways back in late March 2010. We tried to work things off and on until mid June, however that was not successful. So those three posts will be the only ones by her.

School

I finally became a graduate of the University of Washington! I now hold a BA in Political Science. I graduated June 12, 2010, at Husky Stadium. It was near chaos, just over 5,000 people walking across the stage. UW graduations are notorious for being bad weather, for mine it was the opposite. I think it topped out in the upper 70s or low 80′s.

Everybody in my party got burnt! It was pretty funny to see the little strips where we missed. I still remember sitting there in the football’s indoor field seeing all the people. This really made me think of things, like I said I majored in Political Science. If you talk to me, you will see my lack of interest and passion for the field. As I sat there waiting for things to begin, I sat there I saw all the groups of friends or colleauges, however I just didn’t click enough with anybody to feel right.

The only downfall of graduation, which was not that big of a surprise, was my dad not coming. Since it was so warm out, sadly he didn’t want to deal with the heat, the people, and the traffic afterward. In turn, my grandmother could not go due to dad not attending.

Work

Like every college graduate, I was worried about getting a job. I applied to a list of places, and got turned down to everything. If I didn’t get turned down, I simply didn’t hear back from them. That being said, something I have done every year while I was at the UW was signed up for a program that hooks students up with federal agencies. So, in late May I got an e-mail from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) asking me to work for them. After an interview over e-mail, I was offered another interview, this time over the phone, with the woman whom I was in contact with, the guy who would be my boss, and my team lead. Days after the interview, I was told they were interested in passing my name onto HR. Just over two months later, I was boarding a plane to head to North Carolina.

Anybody who knows about usability, this hopping back and forth between the mouse and keyboard slows a person down no matter how fast they think they are. Staying on one device will be faster. One of the things you can do to speed up your bookmarklet speed is to give them keywords. Depending on your browser, determines how you do it.

• Firefox – v 3.5.5 – After putting the button/bookmarklet in your toolbar, right click it, and choose properties. You should see a field labeled keyword, put whatever word/phrase you please and hit ok.
• Internet Explorer – 7 & 8 – There is a shortcut key field after getting into the bookmark properties like described for Firefox. I recommend that you do not use this tip in IE because setting a shortcut key only just launches a new window/tab in your default browser using that link.
• Opera – v 9.5+ – Once in the properties window, there willl be a nickname field. Input whatever nickname you desire.

Now since you have a keyword/nickname/whatever, you can just type that into the address bar and automatically be sent there. The most speed that will be gained is when people use URL shortners, over things like blog pings. I have tried a handful of shorteners, and the best so far is: is.gd. The way I have mine set up is I have the is.gd keyword set to is. So I browse to a long URL site, press <CTRL> + <L> and it jumps to is.gd’s shortened version. Since is.gd puts the new url into a text input box with the text selected, I can copy the url without pressing anymore than the copy hotkey. Then I am set to go.

A lot of people like the bit.ly service. I don’t exactly want to use that as my update platform. Since bit.ly is designed to be namely a status updater with links, their shortened url is in an HTML textarea element. So you have to highlight it if you are not planning to use it in a status update.

Why am I so harsh?

Well, I instinctively put in my site. One of the “potential problems” reported is the following”

Tabular information may be missing table markup.

Well I am sorry to say, nothing on the page in question has a table, nor data of any kind that makes it look like a table. So if you try this checker, I wouldn’t take the results to heart quite yet.

With that being said, it has some hopes. The information is quite complete, with samples of valid code. I would however make the code in question highlighted somehow (color, a border, background color) within the code block. Currently it gives a full source code sample, which is a bit tedious to skim through if you don’t know what exactly is wrong.

I also have been terribly busy with school. I am currently trying to write a policy review on something from the Social Security Administration. It is really hard to track down stuff beside the laymen level explanations. I am slowly getting there.

President Obama’s first press conference, courtesy of C-SPAN. Mainly about the economic stimulus package. I am not 100% on his ideas. I believe that while it is good that he is wanting to give money to the people. However, I think that it is important that citizens should begin saving again… It is a long video, but is worth the watch.

Technorati Tags: press conference, obama, president

One way I can tell is the default notification on where you are at if via keyboard navigation, is gone. I personally rely on this quite heavily. If I know I need to hit Tab 10 times to get somewhere, I am forced to count now, versus watching visually. Another thing is since I have the wp.com stat plugin activated, the cursor is by default is placed in the login box for that. While it is cool that I can login with just hitting enter, since that password is saved, but my focus is now halfway down the page. Where will I be located after a few tabs? Who really knows.

The sad thing about this is, I was asked my opinion if WordPress would be a good option for a blind user. At the time, I was still running 2.6.* and said it’s ok, not the best thing to use. I added that if the said user was considered a power user, they could make it work. I don’t think this will be the case anymore. Like I said, this is sad, so many people are using WordPress not only for bloggin but things like a CMS! It is shame that the dev team doesn’t adhere to standards. Going off that, it says they have no interest is accessibility. You can stretch that out to include usability even.

My birthday is coming up, it is actually this Saturday. Yes, the 14^th. My mom, her boyfriend, and my sister are coming up most likely for lunch or dinner. Mom wants to do something at Pike Place Market, but considering it was snowing a little bit ago, we’ll see what happen.:)

Anyhow, I saw that at Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 EET 2009, the Unix time for the given date is: 1234567890, unfortunately that’s only 3 in the afternoon on Friday (Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 PST 2009) here in Seattle. I was so close!

Hi Ryan,

We have investigated the issue that you describe, and have determined that this error is caused by the firewall on your computer. Sometimes computer software will block sites that are important for Facebook to operate. If you temporarily disable your firewall before making profile changes, this should resolve the issue.

Let me know if you continue to experience problems after attempting this solution.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

xxxxx
User Operations
Facebook

I wrote back to them saying how utterly ridiculous such a solution is. I said that if you hovered over the link, the link pointed home.php, and no firewall can intelligently redirect a link unless I had hand-coded it. I also informed him that for a firewall to block a firewall, the link would have to be something along the lines of: http://iam.goingto.spamyou.com/, then your firewall would nullify the link OR give you some warning message.

Of course I didn’t stop there, I asked why Facebook was telling people to disable their firewall to use their product. Doesn’t sound right to me. Thoughts?