Alexander’s Blog

Several years ago I was teaching a class at a local training center. One of my students, who worked for the Help Desk department at a large enterprise in Seattle, was blind. At the end of the week the student wanted to take the exam associated with the course. This required that a custom screen-reader software be installed on the computer where the exam was installed. We called Prometric who administers the exams for Microsoft. Prometric is a company that is well-known in the Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) community for their lousy service. So it was no surprise when they said they can’t really help because they don’t know what to do. Then we called Microsoft to see if they can help us accommodate the blind student so he could take the exam. Microsoft said we need to call Prometric because they are the ones who are responsible for the exams. We eventually ended up working a solution and the student was able to take the exam. The student missed the exam by only one question……ouch! That was very disappointing. But he was the only student bright and daring enough in that class to dare take the exam at the end of the week.

So when I read about this screen reader called WebAnywhere it caught my eye. I don’t know if it would help in the situation that I described above but it seems to be a great tool for the blinds to access the Web.

WebAnywhere is a Web-based screen reader for the Web developed by University of Washington computer science graduate Jeffrey Bigham. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and enables blind people to access the Web from any computer that has a sound card. Check out this link to go directly to WebAnywhere.

With WebAnywhere there is no need to purchase any software. Best of all, WebAnywhere will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.

If you are looking into WebAnywhere, you might also be interested in this white paper.

Another fascinating research story from University of Washington. I saw this article on Washington Post’s Web site that I had to share.

“Move over, Bionic Man. Engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle have come up with a nanotech device that Steve Austin would have loved: a contact lens that displays images, letting a person surf the Web, read e-mail, scan a spreadsheet or play a video game, all without using a computer screen.

The lens has not undergone human trials, but it has been tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes without ill effects.”

Click here for this interesting story posted by Washington Post.

The research activities at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle are often fascinating. I just read the other day that the UW, along with researchers from Harvard and UMass Amherst showed how it is possible for someone to extract patients’ private medical infromation from implantable devices. Not only that, but it is also possible to reprogram the medical settings without patients’ approval or knowledge.

The research has been reported widely in the medical community and in the press. According to the uwnews. org “In computer laboratory bench tests, the research team used an inexpensive software radio to intercept and capture signals sent from the implantable device. They were able to obtain detailed information about a hypothetical patient, including name, diagnosis, date of birth and medical ID number. Researchers could determine the make and model of the device and access real-time electrocardiogram results as well as data on the hypothetical patient’s heart rate and cardiac activity.”

You can read the entire news story here.

Jason Hiner, the Executive Editor of TechRepublic has written an interesting article Prediction: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business in which he states that “Microsoft will ultimately try to quell the embarrassing Windows Vista debacle by making a bold move with Windows 7 to win back customer loyalty and generate positive spin for its most important product.” He goes on to say that “My prognosis is that Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.”

Check out his prediction and the reasoning behind why in his opinion Microsoft will leapfrog Vista and change its OS business.

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, has quietly deleted more than 100 controversial sites from some search result listings. Absent from Google’s French and German listings are Web sites that are anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi or related to white supremacy, according to a new report from Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Also banned is Jesus-is-lord.com, a fundamentalist Christian site that is adamantly opposed to abortion.

Google confirmed on Wednesday that the sites had been removed from listings available at Google.fr and Google.de. The removed sites continue to appear in listings on the main Google.com site.

The Harvard report, prepared by law student Ben Edelman and assistant professor Jonathan Zittrain, and scheduled to be released Thursday, is the result of automated testing of Google’s massive 2.5 billion-page index and a comparison of the results returned by different foreign-language versions. The duo found 113 excluded sites, most with racial overtones.

“To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search results pages that may conflict with German law,” said Google spokesman Nate Tyler. He indicated that each site that was delisted came after a specific complaint from a foreign government.

German law considers the publication of Holocaust denials and similar material as an incitement of racial and ethnic hatred, and therefore illegal. In the past, Germany has ordered Internet providers to block access to U.S. Web sites that post revisionist literature.

France has similar laws that allowed a students’ antiracism group to successfully sue Yahoo in a Paris court for allowing Third Reich memorabilia and Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to be sold on the company’s auction sites. In November 2001, a U.S. judge ruled that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech protects Yahoo from liability.

Google’s battles
The Harvard report comes as Google is becoming increasingly embroiled in international political disputes over copyright and censorship. China blocked access to Google last month.

Google was criticized in March for bowing to a demand from the Church of Scientology to delete critical sites from its index. In a response that won praise, Google replied by pledging to report future legal threats to the ChillingEffects.org site run by law school clinics.

As Google has become the way more and more people find information on the Internet, it has also become an increasingly visible target for copyright complaints about cached information and allegedly infringing links. ChillingEffect.org’s Google section lists 16 requests or legal threats the company has received in the past three months. One Google competitor and critic even suggested that the wildly popular search engine be transformed into a government-controlled “public utility.”

Check out the complete article and Google’s response here.