IOS7 Visual Accessibility
Is there anyone over the age of 45 who thinks iOS 7 hasn’t been a visual disaster? I’ve been using the iOS7 interface for quite a few months now, and having seen my friends and
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Captivate, right-click and accessibility
One of my colleagues wrote that she had used the right-click feature in her latest Captivate project. When she previewed the file using Preview > Project, it worked fine. But when she attempted to publish
Continue readingWhat would a truly Senior-friendly Operating System look like?
From many sessions helping seniors with their computer problems, I’ve gleaned some idea of how they think a computer should behave.
Note that the ideas listed here only apply to the current generation of seniors. It is doubtful that when the current generation of children grow old, they will have the same requirements.
My usability wish list:
- Most important is that the interface be DOCUMENT-based, not application-based. There should be no distinction between the operating system or shell (Finder, Desktop, whatever) and the applications. In other words, there should be only one big application that does everything.
- For example, the idea that there is a separate application to manage and edit photos and one to edit text is a needless complexity.
- Tree-based file systems are completely lost on them – there has to be a simpler way to find documents.
- Documents should end up in only one place, with no alternatives. They should not be asked to add meaningful metadata to anything. The computer must figure it out somehow. Perhaps they could be asked once to find a picture of each family member, and from then on, the computer could recognize that person and tag them for searches. Continue reading
iPhone review
I’ve been using a Blackberry 8700c through Cingular for a couple of years now, and I really like being able to check all my email accounts on it and using the google apps wherever I happen to be. Typing on it is pretty easy. However there were many reasons I was looking for a replacement.
- Email is merely forwarded, so you aren’t dealing with the actual imap server you use when at home or work. So junk mail rules aren’t followed, any deletions or drafts are not seen by your other mail clients, etc. You used to be able to set up filters on the blackberry web client, but they removed that feature last year. Continue reading
Increasing System font size in Tiger
I got a new 30″ Cinema display, and the high resolution setting is wonderful for working, but the system fonts are too small in some cases for my tired eyes. Here’s how to increase their
Continue readingThe Wacom Tablet and Fireworks MX 2004
Macromedia vector applications- Fireworks and Freehand – all seem to share problems with the Wacom tablets and have for quite a while. It used to be that the problems with Freehand and Fireworks could be
Continue readingClosed Captioning Part II, Synching SAMI files using MS Producer
Synching Sami files using MS Producer:
I received the MS Producer resources disk in the mail, and it contained one example of a template that has a captioning window below the video area.
To use it, you need to create a “SAMI” file, which is a text file with HTML-style tags to describe the captioning styles and timing for each line of caption text.
Lacking anything better at the moment, I use Producer to do the synching: Play your video in Producer for the length of one phrase, stop it, note the timing, and use “control-tab” to switch to a text editor where the SAMI file is being edited.
I found this procedure a bit slow, and had some problems with getting the exact timing right, but it does work. Complete instructions for captioning with Producer are available as a (Windows-only .exe file !) download HERE
A non .exe resource for understanding SAMI files is HERE
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