Tesco Access - Case Study: Tesco was the UK’s first grocery chain to invest in an accessible online shopping site called Tesco Access. It cost £35,000 to develop. It was calculated that if all 1.9 million visually impaired adults in the UK (estimate at the time of launch) purchased just one average trolley-full of shopping through the new site it would be the equivalent of £161 million of business.

Epic Thinking

Technically a web page can call the extension code though a Javascript API. The extension code in turn talks to a small server program that being wirtten in Python can access an any platform services it likes. There more details on the project site.

This is almost perfect timing for a project that I'm working on where I would have duplicated much of this effort. Having examined the code and played with it it seems suitable for my needs and I can contribute back to the project. Oh Open Source is just great. Together these projects will help extend Firefox's utility as a platform for creating great a11y solutions, something I've had in mind for ages now.

And Peter Parent has created a nice Outfox + Greasemonkey script to add voice to Gmail inbox updates (oh Peter, I can't help thinking that post title calls out for a brief spell in a jacket ;-)) .

Orwell's writing style is exemplorary and the excerpts I heard were facinating, using language that has not dated. There is much more to George Orwell than 1984 or Triffids and his social observation and commentry is powerful reading. I'm very much looking forward to getting these in my RSS feed each day from 9th August.

Like Rich, I seem to be collecting SCM systems, and I even worked on developing versions based on RCS and Make, progressing to high level config managment tools while at Intasoft.