In October, Apple announced the Apple Watch. The blind all wondered if it would have some version of VoiceOver, the screen reader which they have on all their other products. The demo showed interaction with Siri, but Apple never made mention of accessibility, and apparently no journalists thought to ask. Since all of Apple’s other products have accessibility built in it seemed logical to conclude the Apple Watch would as well.
This summer I spoke at EuruCamp. It took place in Potsdam, Germany. I spoke twice, participated on a panel, and made some new friends. Watch the video. I also had a miserable time in Paris. http://media.eurucamp.org/eurucamp/2014/AustinSeraphin
I just had a little service outage. Sorry if anyone tried to access a file and couldn’t. As it turns out it has an interesting story that deserves attention. And as so often happens, the cause of the computer problem goes back to Microsoft.
I just spoke at #inspect2014, the second annual RubyMotion developer’s conference. The first one happened in Brussels. This year’s happened in San Francisco. I gave a talk, and presented the new version of motion-accessibility, which features automated iOS accessibility testing. My brother and his wife accompanied me, and I shared a room with Mark Villacampa, one of the other speakers. We had quite a time.
We have done some amazing things with the touch tour program at the Penn museum. I started training last August. We made it into the AP, and on WHYY. And tonight Art Reach honored us by presenting us with the Commitment to Cultural Access award. The elegant event took place in the lower Egypt gallery, home of the sixth largest sphinx, fourth largest outside of Egypt. We gave mini touch tours and I gave a speech.