Jared Rimer’s Technology blog and podcast

WAKEFIELD, Mass. — August 4, 2008 — The Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), a coalition of leading information and assistive technology companies dedicated to enabling developers to more easily create accessible software, hardware and Web products, welcomes the addition of two new steering committee members: Doug Geoffray of GW Micro and Richard Schwerdtfeger of IBM.

The five-member Steering Committee guides the AIA in its mission to improve the lives of people who can benefit from accessibility technologies. The AIA accomplishes this by encouraging the enhancement of current technologies, creating new technologies, and promoting the implementation of APIs and specifications across platforms and the accessibility industry.

“We are very pleased to have Doug and Rich join the AIA leadership team. They both have a pragmatic understanding of the technical and business challenges facing the accessibility industry today, and have a long history of working across boundaries to advance the state of the art in accessibility,” said Rob Sinclair, Chair of the Steering Committee and director of the Accessibility Business Unit at Microsoft. “Their technical expertise and long-standing relationships with members of the AIA make them highly valued additions to our Steering Committee. We look forward to working with them in this new capacity.”

Richard Schwerdtfeger is a Distinguished Engineer, the IBM Software Group Accessibility Strategist and Architect, Chair of the IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board, and a Master Inventor. His responsibilities include guiding the overall accessibility architecture and strategy for IBM Software Group and he participates in numerous W3C standards efforts including HTML, WAI Protocols and Formats, and Ubiquitous Web Applications. He chairs the W3C WAI-ARIA subcommittee accessibility effort for Web 2.0 applications as well as OASIS and IMS GLC Access for All accessibility standards efforts.

Doug Geoffray is co-owner of GW Micro, Inc. and leads the software development and product support groups. Geoffray has been developing assistive technology for more than 25 years. He currently oversees a team at GW Micro that focuses mainly on Window-Eyes, a leader in Windows screen readers.

About the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA)

Initiated by the accessibility industry, the AIA is a group of leading Information Technology (IT) and Assistive Technology (AT) companies, content providers, and other key engineering organizations, working to collaborate on the creation of solutions to long-standing compatibility problems that hinder the development of solutions for people with disabilities. Since its founding in 2007, AIA members have worked together to develop accessible technology for customers with disabilities. Founding members of AIA include Adobe Systems, BayFirst Solutions LLC, Microsoft, Novell Inc., Claro Software Ltd., Dolphin Computer Access, GW Micro, Inc., HiSoftware Inc., Madentec Inc., Texthelp Systems Inc. and QualiLife. More information about the AIA can be found at http://www.AccessInteropAlliance.org.

I will definitely give Shaun Everess something to listen to as I release Podcast 71 of the technology podcast series. get your 49mb file here. We talk about beta testing we talk about E-mail edocate, and a whole lot more. Feel free to contact me, contact info is in the podcast and also on our about page on this blog. Have a great one!

From the blind access journal We find this interesting article entitled Lotus ‘Safe & Sound’ system makes hybrid,electric vehicles audible which is a very interesting read. I haven’t read the article that Blind Access links too, but the post itself is very interesting and thought you should see this too. I wonder what we can do about this one.

WordPress 2.6.1 is now installed for optimal security.

trend micro 57 is here. Read the full newsletter, lots of good info.

Well,
I’m borrowing the E-mail posting facility to let people know whats been
going on. I was telling Shaun about the fact I was having issues with some
of Window-Eyes features. Now, i’ve been beta testing for a very long time,
and know that it can cause issues that may not be desirable. Today, I was
installing the latest scripts for Winamp from Script Central, and it
prompted me to turn off debug mode. I had sent off an E-mail to Jeff,
letting him know something I had forgotten. This is getting very
interesting.

Hi.
this is in responce to the new article just posted.
As I have always said, it depends.
Ever heard of the saying, that if you eat to much of a good thing…
Security itself is not secure.
Its secure at the current time but later on it can be broken.
How secure is secure?
Ok so you want a serious model of wat security should be.
Locks on all the doors, secured computers and everything.
Ok what if you forget your keys?
Or they get stolen, or well if something really bad happens you can’t control and the datafile for all the passwords and records is now a useless piece of crap, say you have a fire and most everything is destroyed.
As supposed to having everything in plain site of everyone that notices.
Find a medium ground.
My ground is having the week windows firewall on, the router firewall on, an antivirus scanner, an antispyware scanner and an antispyware protecter.
The scanners and virus system are sit at minimum values so they don’t introod on my use or performance.
passwords, internet and other info including banking info are stored in text files on a flash drive which is always by the desk with another used for actual data, this stuff is backed on 2 hard drives and a few cds for backup.
Is it secure?
No not really, but then is anything secure.
I am secure from casual hackers well most of them.
I check mails for spam or unusual things and remove attachments I don’t know about.
I can scan files if I so choose and often do.
my isp has spam and virus protection.
Even so I still get a load of spam.
about 2-5 a day which over all is not much in the scheme of things.
I do clean my cache out every few months.
I concider this secure, and believe me i have tried things.
Also every payed thing ie banks, the net, etc has its own password, however just about everything else is locked to a standard username andpassword.
is that secure?
No not in the scheme of things but its as secure as I need.
I have had issues where to much security had me having to manage the stuff on systems because of stuff that wouldn’t run because of it, I’ve even had the situation where windows itself was locked on 3 systems and actual lagit things were bard.
Ofcause its a different story if someone is managing security for you.
In that case you can be as secure as you like, you can do whatever you want, even install norton on a system.
if someone else manages it then well you don’t need to worry, this is my view and my view only.
Do I want to be more secure than I am now?
Yeah I do, if only I didn’t get headakes, ie lagit programs and mail lost, corruption to things and bugs requiring reformats of everything.
A nice and accessible way to manage things.
a way to remotely do things and a way to manage passwords so that if anything happened there was a way to fix it.
maybe have backup files.
But as it stands I have no desire to go back to what I was doing 5 years ago.
Half my time was spent maintaining security software as well as user work with it.
the rest of the time was split up on trying to use what I had and reformatting the systems because of extra preasure put on em by security software and other things.
Am I secure?
No but I am confortable.
Most security is comman sence.
If you don’t open unknown attachments and are carefull then thats most of the issues.
A spyware blocker and scanner should be installed as well as some sort of cookie viewer/killer.
you also should have a good antivirus scanner, this doesn’t neccessarily have to have residant protection.
if you have broadband you should use the hardware router that can keep most things out.
if not don’t worry, if you are hacked your ip changes all the time when you dial.
not a big issue is it?
Ofcause its not as clear cut as that, there are dumbasses among us and sadely most of us are in one way or another, even I am not imune from this.
There are still some things not known about security always will be.
Do you need a firewall software?
If you want to moniter things and like that by all means.
Do you want a suite of things.
only if you are going to use everything in that.
How secure is secure?
if you set all your security software on medium protection then you should be ok.
this includes getting the latest sun java instead of ms java although you will still need that for some things.

Is Security Over or Under-Estimated?. This is a great question, and I’ll be definitely read the article within this one. What do you all think?

Hi all.
well thanks to jared this is my first email post to the blog.
this enables me to freely get things and well means that I can give more info faster.
So whats going on.
Finally softwarepatch.com has released security updates for vista, ie and xp as well as the new directx august release.
This version has updates to dx9 and 10 xact and all xna related materials, also direct 3d.
I wander how long directx will be updated for, there is not much really being changed on standard directx if the files tell of anything.
Yesterday I finally got firefox at least on a secondary role on the workstation my dad uses, so he could connect to the network at his work.
At which point there were issues to solve I have no clue, its for his company to bother with.

Tip!
This is a tip for jaws users or other readers.
Sometimes especialy with the latest updates jaws will crash semi sort of after ie loads a site.
This seems to be caused by some sites taking a while to load in ie.
if this happens restart the system.
type in the site you want to go.
the trick is to wait till jaws says 100 % and then hit escape.
most likely the site will be up.
if not hit control f5 and it will come up.
this looks to be site spassiffic.
thats all for now, this will be delivered when I finnish my mail, because I need to run the script for that.
later all

Editor’s note: This was posted to GW Micro’s E-mail lists on August 14, 2008. I’m posting that very E-mail from their own lists. Thank you.
Fort Wayne, Indiana, August 15, 2008 — GW Micro, Inc., a Fort Wayne, Indiana-based company dedicated to providing high quality adaptive technology solutions for blind and visually impaired individuals, announced today that it has received notice of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Freedom Scientific, Inc., the self-described “world leader in technology-based solutions for people with visual impairments.” The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court, Middle District of Florida, alleging infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,993,707 for a “Document Placemarker.” GW Micro has reviewed the claim and believes it is overreaching and not consistent with what Freedom Scientific told the Patent Office when obtaining its patent. GW Micro intends to defend itself vigorously and expects to prevail in court.

“As many of our users know, our screen reader — Window-Eyes — has had the capability of returning to a specific line within a webpage since version 3.1, which was released over nine years ago, well before Freedom Scientific’s alleged invention,” said Dan Weirich, GW Micro’s Corporate President. Weirich went on to note that, “The implication in a recent Freedom Scientific press release that GW Micro is ‘benefit[ing] from [Freedom Scientific's] investment at no charge’ is simply not accurate nor in line with GW Micro’s tradition of success and fair play.” Finally, Weirich concluded, “We will aggressively defend both our legal position and our place in the assistive technology community.”

Daniel R. Weirich
GW Micro, Inc.
725 Airport North Office Park
Fort Wayne, IN 46825
ph 260-489-3671
www.gwmicro.com