Category Archives: Operating Systems

CSUN 2025 conference notes

The CSUN ATC conference is one of the largest accessibility related conferences in the world. (It stands for “California State University in Northridge”, the conference name is actually “Assistive Technology Conference”.)

I’m going to give my impressions of the conference and talks in roughly chronological order, so read on if …

Debian upgrade logrotate issue

If you are upgrading a Debian server from 7 to 8 this might be useful: There seems to be a config error in rsyslog that prevents logrotate finishing, I found a solution that I couldn't find by searching.

Peak Appification

The commercial model for software on devices is for Apps. That works great when an app matches the task you have, but falls down when you have to cross one or more apps. Android has made some progress in getting around this (intents); iOS is starting to create corrals of apps (e.g. passbook); and Facebook has created the people-centric 'Home'. Have we passed the peak of importance for apps?

Stackoverflow dev day London – Roundup

I’ve just gotten back from a great day at the Stackoverflow Dev Day, I didn’t take my usual copious notes, but I thought a flavour of proceedings would be good to get down. For those who don’t know me, I have to add the caveat that I’m not a …

Window click throughs and scrolling

John Gruber recently expounded on the problems with click through, which put simply: is when you click a control on a window / application that’s in the background, it works. This is something that ‘got me’ when I started using Macs (that generally don’t allow click through), as it …

Google Chrome market share

I've seen a few articles recently about Google's Chrome browser market share, some sites seem to have had quite a lot of visits from people using Chrome, which then fell off again. However, these sort of stats are probably missing the point, what sites is it that people are most likely to use Chrome on?

Voiceover 2 – a WebDev’s guide

VoiceOver has undergone a major update, this article looks at the new functions, and what that means for people browsing websites. I am not looking at VoiceOver in general, just how different aspects of web pages affect the experience when using VoiceOver.

Voiceover HTML navigation updates

There were quite a few updates to the VoiceOver screen reader on OSX Leopard, not least of which was the new, very smooth voice "Alex". What will be of interest to developers is the new commands to help people navigate HTML.

SharePoint 2007 accessibility

I attend my first Microsoft (MS) oriented user group meeting yesterday, the SharePoint User Group on search and accessibility. Unfortunately our developers werre either too busy or on holiday, so I got volunteered.

DRM degrading Windows

Mark Pilgrim had linked to "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" by Peter Gutmann, but until I heard people talking about it on a podcast, it really hadn't clicked as to why The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.