Tristan Nitot (President Mozilla Europe) interviews Mike Schrep Schroepfer ( VP of Engineering ) in the Chunnel.

 

The new Mozilla Firefox accessibility plan from Aaron Leventhal covers Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Platform (XULRunner) on Linux, and Windows.

There's much of importance mentioned but the Alt Input support and SVG particularly interest me.

With Firefox 3 and Gecko 1.9, Mozilla has now become one of the world leaders in accessibility. The infrastructure supports accessibility for both Windows and Linux, along with a number of technologies to develop accessible content and applications.

We now need to step back and ask the big questions. Where are we? What should the next priorities be?

Jython, the version of Python that runs on the Java runtime, gets a great boost as Frank Wierzbicki  and Ted Leung are hired by Sun to to work on Python and dynamic languages full time.

 Last time I looked Jython was several minor version points behind the main CPython, invalidating code that uses the nice newer features.

Gosh.

'The greatest Jazz record you've never heard' proclaims the front of Cherry Red's CD issue of Michel Legrand's Le Jazz Grand. And you know what, it probably was. Gerry Mulligan, Phil Woods and Jon Faddis join the band in playing the most incredible swirling brass and vibes on Southern Routes, South (Les routes du sud, sud). I just keep on playing this amazing composition and performance.

In fact the French musician Michel Legrand was the greatest musician I had never heard of. I did at least know and like the quirky and poignant 'Windmills of your mind' (originally from the film The Thomas Crown Afair, and a great skit by Morcambe and Wise). When I mention him to my muso mate Tim who is also a massive James Bond fan, he immediately knew that Legrand wrote the score for Never Say Never Again (Theme: Lani Hall and Herb Alpert).

Highly recommended. Available on eMusic.

The latest news from Leonard Cheshire.

The Government has also responded to the Support AT Services petition. And right on queue, here is a fantastic personal explanation from Beth Moulam in the Times that shows why AT provision is so critical for many people.

More excellent news about IE 8, this time for the accessibility of web applications,

 

[Update]

John Resig has posted an informative summary and critique of the features in the Beta 1 that was released yesterday.

Internet Explorer 8 is our release.

You could almost say it is Mozilla's release as without Mozilla's powerful influence I very much doubt we'd be seeing these great features and standard conformance that will help keep the Web Open.

I've been working on a website that makes reasonable demands on SQL queries for it's main gallery and I'm really impressed with MySQL's features and speed. I was concerned it would be missing needed features but I'm pleased to find it has come a long way since I last looked at it a few years back. Then postgreSQL was the only obvious Open Source choice for more demanding database applications beyond simple web sites.

Over the years I guess I've become pretty proficient with relational databases. Apart from the common application (sometimes mis-application) as way of persisting application state and data, my first serious introduction to the power of SQL as a programming language for the relational model was for some heavy data feed processing on Microsoft's MSN website, in the stocks and shares section. Then, at Exeter college MIS department we really got serious, warehousing data from many external sources to be presented as data heavy web pages on the college intranet and also providing complex web applications. There we used SQLServer 2000 which has an excellent database engine and management tools (though the GUI-only nature of DTS made be scream for a text based way of creating overnight processes).

The web site I'm working on is an application for managing the process of reviewing and publishing a set of Open symbols which Speech and Language Therapists can use use for their client's communication needs (AAC). It utilises PHP, Javascript and MySQL to give a typical AJAX based web application experience and I've been asked to help sort out the last few issues before it is ready for use.

The main gallery page display as set of symbols based on a search criteria and provides a set of thumbnails with a detailed preview of one item. However the performance was unusable. In this case the database schema is simple and only needed a little attention, providing a link table for a many-to-many needed for the symbol tags and some index optimisation. The main problem was obviously due to a design that was  performing 3 subqueries intermingled with PHP processing in the main query loop. That's never going to be fast so I set to work converting it into a single query which SQL can perform rapidly. Doing that was goign to push the SQL capabilities and I worried that I would hit MySQL limitations as I knew previously it was missing features like subqueries (in addition to transactions and views which aren't of use here).

Most PHP + MySQL web application I have seen perform very simple queries and do the main transformation processing in PHP. However it is sometimes faster and clearer to get SQL to do most of the grunt work, even if that sometimes breaks a clean separation between data and presentation. SQL is a powerful and rich programming language, a fact sometimes missed by web developers, certainly in the example code you find on the web. You need to make the shift from procedural thinking to data set thinking which can be hard, even for developers who are used to Object oriented ways.

Anyway, I needn't have worried about MySQL being up to the job as it is highly standard conformant and easily has all the more advanced SQL features that I needed, like aggregating subqueries in the SELECT list, INSERT with SELECT clause and full ANSI JOIN syntax. It even has the wonderful GROUP_CONCAT aggregate function for creating strings from multiple rows, something SQLServer was missing and required a custom functon.

The page is now quite snappy and should scale well.

So  I'm a happy user of mySQL which clearly shows how excellent Open Source platforms can be. A big heart felt 'thanks' to the MySQL community for a great program and congrats to Sun who have just purchased one of the great Open Source projects.

Misty in Roots have now been playing great roots reggae for some 30 years and we caught them last night at the Exeter Pheonix art centre. We had to wait for a late start after the support had finish and the set was rather short but Misty were 'bashy'. I like Reggae in a roots or dub stylee and we were worried when I read a recent review saying they were more 'lovers'. We needn't have worried as they were hard and tight, with storming bass from Tsungi and great drums, guitar, keyboard and horns. There wasn't so much of the hammond sound that is so prominent on the fantastic 'Live at the counter Eurovison 79' LP but the 2 songs they played from it were excellent and somewhat updated. Poko's vocals were a little muddy and down in the mix (also a problem with the support so perhaps a PA problem). That's the first time I've experienced a reggae drum solo.

No band has contributed as much to British reggae as Misty in Roots… they still make some fantastic music. (THE GUARDIAN, 2003)

Before the gig I dusted off my vinyl LP of 'Live at the Eurovision 79' and ripped it (which was really easy on Ubuntu Linux, even though my homemade RIAA preamp has a very high output level.), and have been playing it incessantly over the last few days. That record and Steel Pulse's 'Handsworth Revolution' are 2 of my alltime favourite Reggae albums and it's great they are both British based bands who give the Jamacian boys a run for their money. Both groups perform songs with passionate social lyrics (conscious roots reggae).

"So let's join hands my bredren
Make the way for our children (our children, our children)
And their children (their children, their children)
Ensuring that they get life's fair share of...
Equality..."Steel Pulse, Handsworth Revolution

Misty's Rasta biblical warning songs are something of a trademark.

"Eas', wes', north, south,
Murmurs and rumours of war
Fret not thyself, my brother
For these things must come to pass,
and I say
Oh, wicked man, where you gonna run ?
you can't hide on the judgement day
Wicked man, where you gonna run ?
you can't hide on the judgement day"
Oh Wicked Man - Misty in Roots

Here's a video of Misty playing 'True Rastaman' last year.

Coincidently I heard a live BBC session by LKJ (Linton Kwesi Johnson) on BBC 6 the other night including the classic anti Sus Law protest 'Sonny's Lettah'. LKJ in DUB is another album that I really like and it looks like there are now 2 more volumes. Another great dub poet is Benjamin Zephaniah, the once Baird of Stratford.

The Pheonix is great place to see bands (and I guess play) as the room is small and intimate. So far I have seen several older bands including an incarnation of Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North (minus Dave Stewart) and the mega-tight and oh so funky Blockheads (sadly minus the ace wordsmith Ian Dury himself). I wonder who will be next? [Update] aha I see that Toots and the Maytals are on in June.

- Roots controller

This is cartoon image of  a joke on the definiiton of Kilobyte. Sorry I can't add an alt tag, Time to move over to WordPress.

Poky is designed to help make and develop Linux devices with GNOME and could be great for creating AAC and other AT devices. I haven't checked if accessibility is supported (AT-SPI) but that is going to be be much more compelling when the D-BUS port happens thus greatly reducing the a11y memory footprint.

Stephen Emslie tells me that Opengazer is coming on very nicely, which raises my hopes for a lowcost eye controlled AAC device, pending suitable hardware (eee PC?).

Note: I found pokey after being attracted to robster blog with this handy hint (rather in the style of the Beano readers tips tha tI used to giggle over).

I'm just about to head off to CSUN which is probably the largest accessibility conference and exhibition. Frank Hecker of Mozilla kindly invited me and it a great opportunity to help man the Mozilla booth and meet up with the team and friends of Mozilla accessibility..

Here's a draft of the handout explaining all the great a11y features in Firefox 3 that Marco and Frank created for the booth.

The Google RSS feed reader is now even more accessible to screen reader users now that it supports the new WAI-ARIA standard for makeing web applications accessible. So users of FireVox and other screen readers will get better access to their feeds and any updates as they occur. This makes a great real-life application of ARIA and demonstrates how it enhances accessiblity of Web 2.0

TV Raman and Charles Chen are currently here at CSUN discussing ARIA and other accessiblity work at Google.

http://letsgoexpo.com/expo/index.cfm?EID=80000093 including a mention of Firefox as an example of a successful Open Source business model and a touching speech from the ex CEO of Humanware.

GNOME 2.22 releases notes including the new accessibility features.

Joel Spolsky's latest long post on the dog fight between 2 views of web standards web standards has lots of background and is quite humerous. Lets hope it's not a protracted war and his prediction in the 3rd-from-last paragraph are not totally true.

In accessibility we wan't people to follow standards like WCAG and ARIA to ensure accessibility but more pragmatically we want all web sites to be accessible as quickly as possible.

Whatever Microsoft do with IE8 standards mode, Firefox has the leading support of standards and accessibility. I know exactly which browser I'll be using and developing with.

hey cool - will be fun to see groups of them playing together and interacting over wireless. Looks like it will be available outside Japan eventually.

I knew there was a good reason I bought my kids a DS each.

While at CSUN I did a deal with Christopher Leung and bought his unused iPod shuffle for a great price, especially when taking the exchange rate into account (I haggled hard and saved about £12). This generation of the shuffle is really small and neat but I was expecting it might take a while to find out how to use it with Linux. It turned out to be ridiculously easy on Ubuntu as it includes the GNOME RhythmBox music player.

Before learning that, I did a quick Google and tried GTKPod but that did not recognise the pod as loaded. On a whim I launched RhythmBox and docked the ipod and saw that it was recognised by a new icon appearing, I dragged some files onto the ipod icon and bingo, they downloaded. That's all that is necessary on a shuffle; no need for tag editing or other fancy features. You will probably be able to drag onto the desktop icon for the iPod as well but I haven't tried that yet.

You need to ignore the iPods status LED flashing amber, which the instructions say means don't unplug. I suspect this means it is trying to synchronise with iTunes and I have had no problems (except when I tried it on a Windows box with iTunes running and it kindly wiped the contents with out any command from me).

I'll try one of my ogg files but I'm not expecting much luck. My initial plan was to get an iPod classic and install the wonderful Open Source firmware  Rockbox, but the shuffle is so cute and has all the features I really want (simplicity being high on the list).

One thing that really amused me was that on the iPod packaging there is the small print:

Like a fine pair of jeans, iPod shuffle colors may vary and change over time.

Me, I get all my jeans from Savile row and they never fade ;-)

As Marco and Frank have already described, this year at CSUN we noticed a definite change in people's relationships with us. Will Walker was showing Orca over at the SUN booth and observed that last year we were really introducing ourselves but this year we were a serious proposition for users and exhibitors alike. By 'we' I mean the Open Source accessibility and assistive technology projects including Mozilla, Orca, GNOME, NVDA and the Open a11y group.

Having just watched Jim Fruchterman's keynote I was delighted to hear his endorsement of Open Source as one of the foundations for his 'raising the floor' theme for the future of fair technology access. Mobile platforms are another foundation and the Mobile Mozilla project is underway. He also specifically mentioned Mozilla as a successful Open Source business model and organisation that engages its users. What a great indication that we've arrived (actually I thought 'Whoo Whoo',).

Our  team was smaller this year and various circumstances meant we had a low key booth with just a few banners, a little swag and a laptop. But then Firefox 'sells' very well on its own strengths along with grass roots support and without any need for glitz.

We were primarily letting people know about the the new accessibility features in Firefox 3, due out in May with the Beta 4 available now. A version of the flyer can be found here on www.accessfirefox.org. We also had information and CDs of NVDA (Mozilla are funding James as developer for a year)

Frank Hecker joined us for one day and as always rolled up his sleeves, ordering networks and chatting to people. He treated us to a great meal at a French style restaurant selected for us by Christopher who is a local.

Many great conversations were had and some that stay with me include the councilor from Nigeria who left saying he was 'very happy', the chap who is developing a web application that uses ARIA, Chaarls of Opera, a Microsoft technical author and numerous everyday users who say they use and love Firefox or were very interested to hear about it and NVDA as high quality yet free products.

I had an excellent time with many contacts made or developed and thoroughly enjoy talking to people about Mozilla and open source accessibility, feeling right at home. The team are really easy going, friendly folks who are dedicated to a11y and I'm proud to be associated with them all. Shows are tiring but very rewarding and I'm sure improve our standing in the public's mind. I've done shows for proprietary companies and it has never been so rewarding, perhaps as we are now not selling anything, so the relationship with visitors is founded on a more equal basis. Having people proudly saying they are Firefox users and love it is unmatched in feel good factor. Two of my personal highlights were hooking up with the Project Possibility team and students (about which I'll blog later) and the conversation Mick and James of NVDA had with the technical manager of Jaws about Python, C++ and Open Source sustainability.

Joanie introduced us to Twitter micro blogging service and we plan to use it next year to help organise ourselves (note to self: get a triband mobile/cell phone). Joanie also work tirelessly on Orca and found a couple of interesting bugs on some web sites when accessed with Orca.

Charles and T.V dropped by to work on some issue with the Google Reader ARIA support and NVDA and Orca.

Some Firefox temporary tattoos that the marketing group sent us in the swag provided us some amusement. I put one on the back of my hand (like a night club stamp) on the first day and 7 days later it's still there. Marco also had one. My kids went to school today proudly wearing them as well (and no there was no pressure from me, or any leading as to what to say to people who asked about it, honest).

I only attended one session which was the well attended and informative IA2 session with individual talks from the various people using the latest accessibility API for Windows.

At the Inclusive Technology stand I chatted with Sukhjit GIll, Commercial director. Inclusive are the largest distributer of Assistive Technology and accessibility products in the UK and who also develop their own software. Sukhjit suggested that I visited them and met up with the developers which is an excellent idea and one I will follow up. Inclusive's web site and free publications are a treasure trove of useful information.

An interesting coda to the visit was that on the plane back I sat next to the European buyer of ingredients for the organic food range 'Seeds of Change' (part of Mars). We had a fascinating conversation about several topics that concern me but the real reason this struck me was that Mozilla's latest Marketing campaign is '100% Organic software'. My thoughts are along the lines that Firefox is great on it's own and is also perfect as the vital ingredient in 'recipes' like Songbird, Miro and accessibile web browsing.

Note I was tempted to title this post 'California Uber a11y' but I guess it's best that I didn't (that's a reference to Punk group Dead Kennedy's first single).

Will Walker's post clearly demonstrates the way Open Source can embrace users and deliver the features that they really want.

Eitan highlights how cute those hard working service dogs are and how restrained we had to be (I can at least console myself with the Nintendogs that I bought my daughter).

Good article from the OSS Watch team.

Age related accessibility is an important extension of general accessibility as our abilities degrade with age. It is an area I am becoming more aware of and involved in, starting with the training courses for Age Concern Exeter.

Sus-IT is a research program led by Loughborough University and supported by New Dynamics of Ageing initiative. 

The outcomes of the research promoted by the Sus-IT network will help to shape the design of future IT-based products, systems and services for older people which take account of the way their needs, capabilities and circumstances may change over time. Further, the research will identify important social policy issues regarding provision of IT support and capacity building to enable older people to fully exploit the benefits of IT and enjoy increased autonomy and independence.

It's good to see that user participation is a vital part of the process.

On a related note, having met Michael Takemura, director of the accessibility program office at HP, it's clear that HP are working on age related accessibility.

Project Possibility is the brain child of Christopher Leung and has similar goals to OATSoft.org, namely forging community and participation around Open Source Assistive Technology and accessibility software. In fact I'm proud to say Chris lists OATSoft as one of his influences. Where Project Possibility excels is in inspiring USC students to engage in extra-curricular development work, learning about Accessibility and getting some real world development experience. These highly motivated students will take their knowledge and experience with them and spread experience of open accessibility throughout the industry.

The recent SS12 code-a-thon had enthusiastic students creating several useful projects over a weekend in a code sprint type event. Now a semester-long project has 5 teams of 5 students plus a team leader from industry working on projects using formal software engineering practices. I was invited to the first review presentations and was very impressed by the ambitiousness and quality of the work. If they all complete we will have Open Source code for an AT repository, a mobile bill/note reader, a gesture recognition system, a community caption system and a word prediction engine. The technology being used includes web, SunSpots, Mozilla Firefox & greasemonkey and Java.

This student lead initiative has so impressed Mary Ann Cummins Prager, director of CSUN, that she arranged a meeting with some of the leaders in the accessibility field. 3 board members and a student had a chance to get feedback and suggestions from Jim Fruchterman, Klaus Miesenberger and Michael Takemura. It was a very positive meeting and a fantastic experience for the team who left with several ideas to improve the project.

I'm so glad I had a chance to hook up with Chris at CSUN and that he so graciously invited me to take part in the events. I'm am now an inspired fan of Project Possibility and hope to contribute as I can.

Project Possibility nicely complements the excellent work David Humphrey and Chris Tyler are doing at Seneca with the Mozilla Open Source project courses by adding accessibility to the mix.

Watch out for a Project Possibility near you soon.

A community can take on a giant

Chris has posted some photos of the Semester Project review that I attended and the orientation.

Rich Schwerdtfeger's review of CSUN is also very upbeat.

James Tey provides the NVDA team's view of the conference.This coment really pleased me:

She told us that it would be great for some of her students whose families probably could not afford to purchase any of the commercial screen readers and took several of our CDS for her students, even coming back to take more for others. This is a fantastic validation of the mission of NV Access and NVDA: to lower the barrier to accessible computing.

Gerv has announced a draft update to the document describing which of several licenses apply to the Mozilla code. While primarily for internal use this is also useful for any one wanting to use parts of the large code base (and see the MPL page).

Coincedently, the mozpad community that acts a central point for projects based on the Mozilla platform (or XUL), recently released a list of the 100 or so known public projects.

After a year of happy listening to theJazz on DAB radio I'm saddened that it is closing at then end of this month. Jazz is really underserved on public broadcasting in the UK and after being unable to get the main JazzFM DAB station in our area (why is that?) I was excited when the Jazz started. The promised Blues programming never materialised but a wide range of Jazz is played and Mike Chadwick plays the best of new  contemporary music and Latin.

ClassicFM is taking over and that really disappoints me for a number of reasons. The Jazz coverage is relagated to a measly 12 - 2 am slot and worse ,Classic FM drove me away a long time ago with its endlessly annoying jingles and adverts. The great thing about the Jazz was that for a long time it had no DJs and almost no jingles. Even when they did  introduced them a large part of program was kept clear free of interruptions. With DAB if you want to know what a track is you can just look at the 'info'display. As the approach to take over occurs I'm driven to distraction by all the noise that is now interrupting the music (an add after every track for goodness sake). ClassicFM tend to play the more popular toons which destroys the chance for discovering new music whic his the reason I listen to radio.

Another issue with Classic FM is that their 'Listen Again' service is woefully naff on non Windows/IE combination. Worse their much touted My Classic FM only works on Windows + IE. This is inexcusable and worth making a fuss of as many of us did with the BBC, even though Classic are not a public service. I've emailed them and so should you.. At least the excellent and mature LastFM isn't so dum and uses a flash player and is anyway a great service with a very wide range of music on offer (though still no National Health). Last also provides great ways to explore music with links to other media such as youTube as well as good social networking facilities. So why bother with My Classic FM? This is a great example of the internet giving us choice and I certainly voted with my feet/mouse.

While staying in Seattle a few years back when working for a certain large software outfit I discovered the unrivalled KPLU. A fairly broad selection of Jazz and Blues blesses this public radio station that is part of the NPR network. They have a high quality stream that is much better fidelity than many you hear but Windows only. The MP3 32K stream works fine in Totem on Linux (use Open Location), and in any case I'm more tolerant of MP3 / DAB quality these days for general listening.

It seems many people are lovin' Firefox 3 even though it is still a Beta, but a very stable and usable one at that. Full page zoom is a feature that is particularly popular, especially as an accessibility feature (and good for sites that are just too small). Ken Saunders gives some examples and a neat add-on that gives control with toolbar buttons.

I've just finished leading the first sesssion of our 'Computing for the Terrified' course at Age Concern Exeter. It went well and without my getting too tongue-tied or bogged down in details. I felt my chosen approach of a hands-on session emphasising basic principles and customisation worked even with a mix of 'students'. 2 have dabbled with laptops at home and 1 was completely new to computers. One of the team had set up the laptops up for me which meant I had a relaxed start; a big relief after dropping the children off at school and cycling like mad to get there on time.

We only had 2 hours to introduce all the basics of a computers but my co-trainer who takes alternate sessions has produced some excellent sheets that gave me a firm framework to use. I expanded some areas and created a shortcut to notepad (the simplest program) which lets us try out various actions and learn about windows menues etc. We soon developed a relaxed rapport, with all 3 asking good questions and I adjusted the course as we went to address their interests. I also managed to answer some of specific questions that had arisen from previous use at home and was great to get a positive response at the end. We finished bang on time and the tables were set for lunch as I cleared up as quickly as possible.

When one of the student's arthritis made double click hard for her I had the perfect opportunity to demonstrate one of the accessibility adjustments I had mentioned before and I simply slowed down the double click speed (in control panel -> mouse settings) making it useable.

I'm really looking forward to next week's session on email which should provide more interesting insights into the needs of the older user (and a chance to mention Thunderbird).

Matthew Gertner's guest post at Tech Crunch about Prism and Antonio Gomes blog about getting it working on Nokia N*** internet tablets.

I just tried the Firefox 3 add-on for creating Prism icons with gmail on Linux and it works a treat. As expected accerciser shows full AT-SPI access so screen readers etc should just work..

This has exciting accessibility possibilities. One obvious  use is simplified browsing for PWLD.

Fun.

Keyboard Access Functional Specification - release candidate 3

Persons unable to use a keyboard and mouse sometimes use alternative input devices. However, many users can be accommodated programatically through software that causes a standard keyboard to behave differently. Many of these features and behaviors have long been available in The X Keyboard specification (XKB). The Open A11y Workgroup at the Linux Foundation has identified those features and functional behaviors important to accessibility and developed standards to insure their availability and proper functionality on Linux -- and other -- platforms.

Individuals with mobility impairments will benefit by having such features built-in and available through standard activation strategies, such as tapping the Shift key five times to activate StickyKeys. The routines provided by the API will also benefit assistive technologies such as on screen keyboard and screen reader applications.

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief evangelist, gives an in depth interview about Mozilla's approach to Open Source software development of the highly successful 'product' Firefox. It gets to heart of issues like how do you motivate developers to scratch someone else's itch (perhaps a not so hygienic concept) and code a feature that users want. He also discusses some of the tricky software development issues that occur when, for example, you have an ecosystem of third party plug-in authors.

I get the impression of a small company scaled up big. There's a passion for the code and yet close engagement with users and 'employees' get to make a high impact contribution. That and an open approach were nothing is a secret that must be  closely guarded or hidden from anyone, including fellow workers. Let's call it good honest enthusiasm (so I'm getting all starry eyed here). I personally gravitated to smaller companies for these sort of reasons, even though large employers offer many benefit.

[enough acronyms already] Having used CPAP for some 2 years and found it beneficial I was interested to see this Times article about how NICE have approved it for NHS. It focusses on the road safety angle and here is the official info from NICE.

CPAP is recommended as a possible treatment for adults with moderate or severe sleep apnoea. CPAP may also be a possible treatment for people with mild sleep apnoea, but only if:

• their symptoms affect their quality of life and ability to go about their daily activities, and
• lifestyle advice (for example about losing weight, stopping smoking and cutting down on alcohol

and all other possible treatments have not worked or are not appropriate for that person.
A person with sleep apnoea should be assessed and treated by a specialist in sleep disorders.

It seems I was lucky to get a machine as up to now it has been a postcode lottery as to whether your local NHS trust supplied it. Exeter has an excellent service in the Clinical Measurements dept., though I had to go private to jump the year waiting list (but we were desperate as I was not functioning and getting depressed).

I'm still trying to get the best solution as the current full-face mask leaks and often keeps me awake (doh) and chills my eyes. I asked the manufacturer if they did a 'activa' version of the full face but they have not replied. So it seems I have really run out of options now as I could not use the nasal Pillows due to the fact they irritated by nostrils to much.

Sennheiser make great cans and my new HD25s are really good. As expected the build quality is excellent with rugged construction and attention to detail, especially important as they're used by DJs.

I selected them despite the fairly high cost as as my wife will be joining me  in our home office and will be on the phone for conciderable times. The 25s have excellent ambient sound attenuation ("perform exceptionally well in high-noise environments" tee-hee) , have low pressure on the ears and a great head strap. You also get an extra pair of velvet pads to ease wear and tear on the lobes.

Used on my HiFi they sound fantastic, revealing lots of exciting new detail with a good range of frequencies and no obvious colouring. The listed frequency response of 16.....22000 Hz is for -3dB which makes a refreshing change. The only down side is they show up my very bad PC sound and MP3 encoding artifacts.

TWiT have an interview with Ward Cunningham, inventor of the WIki and early exponent of Agile methods. Since Ward created the first WIki, the Web 2.0 and social networks have blossomed, expanding on the ideas of collabouration and self publication.

When I stumbled across the Portland Pattern Repository's wiki back in 2001 it was a inspiration to me. I immediately loved the collaborative method of group discussion on a page and then 'distillation' and refactoring into  a document encapsulating the new knowledge. It seems I was inspired enough to have a go and made a small contribution.

Ward provides more background on his C2 home page.

David Humphrey pointed me to this useful post on keeping a healthy work/life ballance as a dad. We've come across many of the ideas before so it's great to have them in one place along with some excellent new ideas.

GeekDad looks like the web site I've been needing for ages.

The current top of my ever-growing list of things to learn and explore when time permits:

• WAI-ARIA
• JQuery - framework for web client side
• Ruby on Rails and Ruby - server side - this has been on my list for way too long now
• Mozilla XUL with Python, probably starting with OpenKomodo 
• git - local version control that likes to party
• TWiT FLOSS weekly podcast - interviews with industry leaders
• SQLite - play with it and explore the code

http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2008/viterbi-computer-science

Mario Lang is a '100% blind' developer who has created a MusicXML to braille converter and editor. In his cheerful post to the GNOME Orca list he describes how pleased he was to find that GNOME accessibility features made the job much easier than he expected, saving him a lot of boring work.

I did not have to do anything to get braille displayed correctly, it all just worked magically. The fonts for unicode braille were already installed apparently, and BrlAPI already handles Unicode braille if it comes from a client (orca in this case).

I am actually using GNOME to develop a user interface for something I need to do. While I could have done this on the console as well, it seems much more efficient to reuse the great work already done for building user interfaces. In fact, all I need is a gtk.TextView widget, reimplementing all of it in a separate console application would have consumed far too much time for no real gain at all.

What a great example of how good open accessibilty helps developers create more accessibility tools.

FreeDots sounds like a good project to contribute to.

(Thanks to Joanie for pointing this out on Twitter)

Mozilla's FAQ on WAI-ARIA and HTML makes it clear why web app writers should support ARIA now. The list of those known to be already supporting ARIA is impressive.

[Update] Aaron pointed out couple of nice ARIA examples with extensive resources from the Paciello Group. With Firefox 3 you can use Firebug to watch the DOM ARIA updates or use FireVox, ORCA or NVDA to get a realistic experience.

10 today.