This weekend's bits and pieces...

The next AT Blog Carnival is coming up fast. They're accepting submissions until the 27th of October so you only have another week to get your posts submitted! It has the theme "Mad Scientist", and Lon says he's especially looking for posts about things created with assistive tech, and "how to" type posts but anything is welcome. It'll be posted on 31st of October at the AT Blog Carnival website.

I've updated ATMac's "About" page and created sub-pages for Joe Barnick and Paul Natsch, who regularly write articles for ATMac - well, they wrote their own pages actually. I'd like to give a big "thank you" to Paul and Joe too, for their recent articles. My goal is to publish three articles per week plus perhaps a round-up like this on a weekend which adds up to a lot of words - it really helps to have other people write articles sometimes! What's your favourite disability-relevant Mac topic? Want to write an article?

Other work has been going on lately behind the scenes. It will make ATMac easier to maintain in the long run and make it easier for people to find relevant articles in search engines, amongst other things, so it's worth doing. Unfortunately, it's the type of annoying work that takes a lot of time and makes absolutely no noticeable difference to the appearance of the site, so it feels rather like a black hole for my energy. On the plus side it doesn't take a lot of concentration, so I've been able to do it while I still have my brain fogged up by the virus I have at the moment.

In statistics news, you may be interested to know that ATMac is now seeing 700-900 different visitors on a regular day. This means that, overall, there's a lot of people out there who are interested in disability and Apple-related information which is good news for all of us. More people means more leverage and more possibilities that Apple will concentrate on assistive technology. Good stuff all around.

Have a good weekend, all.

- Ricky Buchanan

The Assistive Technology Blog Carnival Edition #6: Back to School Issue was released this week. It seems most of the bloggers are still on school holidays so the entries are a bit thin on the ground. The Mac AT bloggers can do better than this at representing ourselves in the blogosphere - submit something at the AT Blog Carnival website. You can submit articles for the carnival at any time - no need to wait until near the end of the month. Just pick a post you've made that talks about computers and disability in some way and submit away - it doesn't have to be a grand masterpiece or anything.

There's a new poll available on ATMac - this time we're exploring what Apple hardware you all own so select as many boxes as apply to you ... I added a box for "other" too, but I don't think I missed anything major. Here's the poll:

[poll id="3"]

You can find the poll on the right hand side of the web page all the time if you want to fill it in later, or want to watch the figures change as other people answer. I'm especially curious how many people have iPhones and iPod Touches because I'm so envious of you! Please leave comments if you have any further poll ideas.

There's another way to browse the archives now, with the new Categories page. There's a link to this page in the navigation bar at the top of the website pages, and it's listed on the Resources page also. The new page shows you all the categories that blog posts are listed in, so if you're looking for just the posts relevant to switch users, to VoiceOver users, to teachers, or any other specific topic, this is the place to go. A big thanks to Afuna for helping me with the behind the scenes code to make the page work - she spent a whole day figuring it out for me after I broke it (oops!) and I was tearing my hair out over it. Thanks Afuna, it's much appreciated.

That's all for now. What happened in your computing world this week?

- Ricky Buchanan

Lots of good bits of accessibility news this weekend. This is my way of catching up, as I've got a virus or something so individual articles for all these things just isn't happening at the moment.

Firstly Apple's own accessibility website has been completely overhauled. This has been a long time coming, and it's great to finally see proper up to date accessibility information about Mac OS X Leopard as well as the new iPhone and iPods. They put a link to ATMac in too, which I'm inordinately pleased about!

Lioncourt.com have two new guides for VoiceOver users who want to get the most out of GarageBand. That makes three GarageBand Guides now:

1. General GarageBand Introduction
2. Using Multiple Tracks with GarageBand
3. Using Special Effects with GarageBand

Remember you'll need Leopard and iLife '08 for the accessibility you need to use GarageBand with VoiceOver.

The Deafmac blog points out to us two old Apple advertisements which feature the use of ASL - American Sign Language. The first one is about schools using the internet:

[embed width="640" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJS46y7pa_k[/embed]

I don't know what date the advertisement was made but apparently the little girl who uses ASL in the advertisement is MarloJo Lovitch and is currently a Gallaudet Univesity student.

The other advertisement seems a bit newer and features Marlee Matlin, a well known Deaf actress:

[embed width="640" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr618Y73sJQ[/embed]

I like the use of silence in this one - there's only the occasional soft sound of typing and it's very effective.

So what's new on your side of the world?

- Ricky Buchanan

A weekend round-up post for all those small bits and pieces that aren't big enough to merit their own post, or don't quite fit into ATMac but are still interesting.

Firstly, I hope that you are enjoying the new site layout! I have become aware that it unfortunately triggers a bug in Internet Explorer that makes the left column abnormally narrow. Being a Mac user, I'm really not conversant in Internet Explorer quirks so I'm having trouble fixing it - if there's anybody out there who is good enough with CSS to figure out what's wrong, I'd greatly appreciate a hand! In the mean time, I apologise to those who are stuck with the improperly displayed page. I'll get it fixed as soon as humanly possible.

Secondly, we have a readership poll in progress:
[poll id="2"]

I thought it would be interesting to find out why people are reading the blog and what your backgrounds are, I'd love it if everybody filled it in. If you have an idea for another poll we could run, please leave a comment.

MacWorld magazine recently ran a series on "Portable Office" style computing, and as a sidebar have an article on Travel Terrors. It's a series of stories about mishaps with equipment while travelling, and very amusing to read. There's some great additional stories in the comments after the article, too. Have you had any assistive technology mishaps that you laughed about afterwards?

I've had one comment from a reader who preferred the "old" layout with the full articles displayed one after the other. The good news is that something very similar is still available if you select the blog page and bookmark that. The articles displayed there are identical to those on the "regular" front page, just that the layout is more top-to-bottom full articles like a traditional blog. There's a link to the blog format at the top of each page on the website, if you ever want it.

I'd advise you to explore the other pages linked at the top of the site too - we have greatly enlarged the resources area, and the archives are much easier to access. Coming soon will be a simple way to display the archives by category, so you could pick all the articles aimed at Windows users, or those with hearing impairments, or developers, for example. Stay tuned for that.

Lastly somebody let me know that the graphic I've used as the header is not of great quality. It's only a minimally adjusted screen capture, but I don't have the skills to do it properly. Anybody be willing to work with me to produce a higher quality graphic for the header please leave a comment or contact me by other means.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Ricky Buchanan