Kestrell

Then check out virtual Boskone Feb. 18-20!

Boskone 59 will be happening February 18-20, 2022, and it will be a hybrid event, but for anyone interested in exploring the intersection of disability and science fiction, many of the most fascinating events will be virtual. The Guest of honor is writer Ted Chiang, but Boskone will also feature two amazing female writers with disabilities who will be reading and speaking about their fiction and participating in panels about how to create more inclusive spaces.

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a Hugo Award-winning speculative writer and a disability rights activist. in 2018 she was the Co-Guest Editor in Chief of
Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction
https://uncannymagazine.com/issues/uncanny-magazine-issue-twenty-four/
Her new memoir, _Being Seen: One DeafBlind Woman's Fight to End Ableism_,
https://www.snarkbat.com/being-seen
is available to registered readers with disabilities as a downloadable audiobook on Bard and also on Bookshare.org. Read about her many other writing credits and her activism at https://www.snarkbat.com/about

Ada Palmer
https://adapalmer.com/
is a professor of Renaissance history and an award winning writer, who also maintains the history blog Ex Urbe, where you can read
her Campbell Award and Invisibility Disability speech
https://www.exurbe.com/campbell-award-invisible-disability/
The book for which she won the award, _Too Like the Lightning_ (2016) is available from Bard, while Bookshare has Palmer's non-fiction scholarly work, _Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance_ )2014).

Among the virtual panaels which these guests will be speaking on are:
Inclusive Design For the Future
Monstrous Façade: Disability and Disfigurement as a Villainous Trope
Creating Inclusive Cons
and they will also have Kaffeeklatsches and readings.

In addition, media studies and fan studies scholar
Henry Jenkins
https://henryjenkins.org/ (
and my Dumbledore! er, former head of the media studies program at MIT), will be leading this workshop: Civic Imagination Workshop
Join this hands-on workshop for social change, that teaches attendees how to borrow principles from areas of fandom and apply them to real-world activities to help generate lasting, positive change. The workshop will apply ideas from activities such as speculative worldbuilding and fan fiction writing.

The convention schedule is available online in two forms, interactive and non-interactive
https://boskone.org/program/schedule/

The virtual membership rate is $25, and the in-person adult membership is $70. Convention rates are good through February 20, 2022.
You can buy a membership here
https://boskone.org/registration/buy-a-membership/

Kes: I just spent the past two weeks working with David Kingsbury, the author of this primer, and an extremely knowledgeable instructor at the Carroll Center for the Blind. Anyone who knows me knows what a Hermione I am, so they will not be surprised to discover that I had prepared a long list of things I wanted to learn, then added a bunch more, and not only did he teach them all to me, but he kept saying, "This is in my new book."

So this is my combination book launch announcement and book review: this is an invaluable book for any screen reader user or instructor, and I would also recommend it to any usability/web developer who wants to have insight into how screen readers work with the web and various programs. Note: there are also chapters on working with PDF documents and Excel sheets, and how to handle some basic problems you may run into.
Last but not least, David is going to tell you how to download the ebook for free!

Announcement:

Join author David Kingsbury at a Window of Opportunity, the virtual book launch for his newest book, The Windows Screen Reader Primer: All the Basics and More.

For people with visual impairments, screen reader software is crucial for living in today’s world. Screen reader software converts text and other digital elements into speech or braille so users can get information in a way that is accessible to them.

The Windows Screen Reader Primer: All the Basics and More is a new book written to help JAWS, NVDA, and Windows Narrator users to work more effectively with the most important PC applications—like Microsoft Office, email clients, and web browsers.

During this event, come enjoy a reading of short excerpts, get priority access to download the free book and ask the author questions.
Time
Feb 17, 2022 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Book Launch Zoom Webinar Registration Form
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y_KcmX0xR7SR84jG0i4InQ?bblinkid=257734724&bbemailid=37795482&bbejrid=-2050942267

Kes: Love this MIT model which has usability and accessibility as part of the same service instead of creating an accessibility ghetto, but that's the good news, because the ebook accessibility Webinar seems to fail to mention that the only way to convert most proprietary format ebooks is to first crack the DRM, and that would count as a big intellectual property no-no, kiddies so, unless you are the Librarian of Congress, it would be wrong to promote such an act, which of course, I totally do not.

1. Free Webinar-Accessibility and Usability: Working Together at MIT
Tuesday, June 26, 11 Pacific, noon Mountain, 1 Central 2 PM Eastern
Presenters: Katherine Wahl and Stephani Roberts from MIT
The Usability and Accessibility teams in MIT's Information Services and
Technology Department (IS&T) always worked closely together, but were formally
merged during a department-wide reorganization in 2009. Our goal in
blending the
teams was to provide a comprehensive service to clients without diluting our
individual practices.
After two years, we have strengthened our ability advocate persuasively for
both
usability and accessibility with clients, have provided more comprehensive
services, and have observed standards applied more consistently.
This Webinar will share the MIT experience as a model for other
institutions to
emulate.
Register for this free June 26 Webinar: http://bit.ly/JiIYW8

2. EASI Free Webinar: The Cutting Edge of E-book Accessibility
Friday June 15: 11 PM Pacific, Noon Mountain, 1 PM Central and 2 PM Eastern
Presenter: Norm Coombs, Ph.D. CEO EASI, Professor Emeritus RIT

The explosion of e-books is changing the face of book publishing and changing
the role of book stores. Different vendors of e-books created their unique,
proprietary document formats which required their being read in e-readers
designed specifically for that format. Imagine having to use different glasses
to read print books depending on who was its publisher! Of course, the
document
format and the specialized e-readers were inaccessible to many people with
what
used to be called "print disabilities". The DAISY document format opened up a
wider and richer reading experience for people with disabilities, but DAISY
books were incompatible with commercial e-readers like the Kindle or Nook, and
commercial e-book formats were incompatible with DAISY.

All this is changing while we ponder these problems. Some software and
hardware
DAISY players have added the ability to read some books in the epub format,
and
the next version of that standard will include even more features that will
support accessibility for users with disabilities. This promises to open up a
new and larger collection of e-books for this population.

What will happen to the divergent proprietary e-book document formats? Either
all publishers will adopt a common e-document standard or, as is happening
already, tools to convert different formats will become common. This Webinar
will explore this complicated picture and try to simplify it for the audience.

Webinar participants will learn which formats are already accessible to them,
and they will be introduced to some tools for document format conversion.

Register for this June 15 Webinar
:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEFRVmhpOGFlTVN5T09ScWREeDdsVWc6MQ

I would love to know more about your book or article, but my screen reader program is not able to read the title in the image of your book cover, so if you don't mention the title, I won't know what it is, and just posting a link to the publisher's Web site doesn't typically offer that info either. The upside to this request is that other users will get better search engine results if you include a text title, rather than just an image of the book cover.

Thank you.

Kes: Alexx forwarded this to me, and I really like the idea of architects and designers having the opportunity to walk in someone else's orthopedic shoes. I've had arthritis since I was a baby, but some days it is still kind of embarrassing to have to ask someone else to open my package of food, or that stupid plastic bubble stuff that everything gets packaged in nowadays. I seriously worry sometimes what elderly people who live alone eat. And you know what else sucks? Commercial scissors--it's only in recent years that I found the more expensive sewing scissors didn't hurt my hands.

Yes, we can make the design easier, so why not start now and get a jump on the rest of the revolution

from
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129307071&sc=fb&cc=fp

What Does It Feel Like To Be 75? Say Goodbye To Spry

by Jennifer Ludden

August 29, 2010

While reporting my recent series on Aging At Home, I came across a special
suit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab. It's meant to
help 20-something engineers feel the aches and limitations of an average
75-year-old so they can design better products for them. Think of it as
working like those outfits Superheroes put on, only backward. Of course, I
couldn't resist.

Now, I'm 40-something - no spring chicken. But if the crosswalk light is
blinking, I can still dash across the street, no problem. Until, that is,
MIT researcher Rozanne Puleo starts strapping me into what she calls her
Age Gain Now Empathy System.

I pull a harness around my waist and Puleo starts attaching things to it.
First, stretchy rubber bands connect from my waist to the bottom of my
feet.

"It will limit your hip flexion," Puleo explains.

That means no more sprinting. More stretchy bands restrict my arm
movements. There are knee pads and Velcro wrist braces; rubber gloves to
lessen sensation in my fingers; yellow goggles to limit my depth
perception. Everything on the suit is carefully calibrated to mimic the
loss of function that happens as we age.

Finally, Puleo fits me into a hard hat and attaches yet more things to
that. And that's when this all starts to feel like a bad idea. It has
become work simply to stand up straight. And to walk? Puleo has me in
Crocs sandals, with bits of rubber foam taped to the bottom. I haven't
exactly lost my balance, but it feels like I easily could.

"The act of having to balance makes you more fatigued, makes you more
tired," she says.

MIT researchers say baby boomers, of course, aren't the first to get old.
But Joseph Coughlin, the head of the AgeLab, says they're the first to
say, "Wait a minute, there's gotta be a product, a service or something to
make this better, easier, more convenient."

And that's the AgeLab's mission.

Puleo has outfitted graduate students in her age suit and taken them
grocery shopping. Each had a list of typical items a senior might want.

"What we found," she says, "was a lot of the low-sugar, low-sodium items
were either at the top of the shelf or the bottom of the shelf - not in a
place where an older adult would have the easiest time locating."

Sure enough, when I step over to the AgeLab's mock grocery store, that box
of Ritz crackers sitting way up on the top shelf does not seem worth the
trouble.

Coughlin says he wants to spread this kind of "aha moment," not just to
grocery chains but also to product designers and city planners - "The
'aha' for the 30-year-old that says, 'Wow this box of cupcakes is hard to
open. Wow, getting out of this public transportation system is more
difficult than I thought.'"

Puleo wants those who try on her suit to feel more empathy for seniors. I,
for one, have come to appreciate that spring in my step while I still have
it.