@Science News

New Jersey, USA. October 26, 2009. Following significant interest of the EPUB standard at the recent Frankfurt Book fair, Dolphin Computer Access is delighted to announce support for unprotected EPUB publications* in its latest line of alternative format solutions.

The Braille Authority of North America has announced that it is making plans for the evaluation of the recently completed Nemeth
Uniform Braille System (NUBS).

According to its developer, Dr. Abraham Nemeth, NUBS is an updated version of the Nemeth code, which has been in use since 1972. The new system has been in development for ten years and is capable of rendering both literary and technical texts.

The May issue of Freedom Scientific podcast FSCast discusses the use of the social networking site Twitter in conjunction with JAWS® screen reading software and PAC Mate Omni™ accessible Pocket PC.

Jonathan Mosen speaks with Shannon Reece, Pratik Patel, and Mika Pyyhkala, who actively use Twitter with Freedom Scientific products. They discuss what Twitter is, how to sign up, and some third party applications and services they use to make the most of it.

Thanks to a JEM Thematic Network script, available here, you can now embed MathML 2.0 markup in your posts on the @Science Thematic Network website!

Follow the instructions on how to publish MathML here.

Since last Sunday, the @Science has set up an account on Twitter, under the nickname aScienceNetwork.
We are currently following more than a hundred people, support services, accessibility experts, conferences, and other accessibility/education related Tweetterers.
What's amazing is the quantity of followers we gained in only a couple of days: almost 30 people!

Vibuntu, the customized version of Ubuntu designed to meet the needs of visually impaired users, has been developed by Anthony Sales of the RNCB - Royal National College for the Blind, in England, UK.

According to one of our users' experience, Ubuntu is one of the most accessible Linux release. Anyway, Vibuntu is the first Linux distribution to be fully accessible to blind and partially sighted users.
Vibuntu can be used as

Because of the economical crisis, also accessibility strategies have to be modified.
Rich Schwerdtfeger briefly reports about IBM strategy as for WAI-ARIA.
He also tells about browsers producers and about making Linux more accessible via assistive technologies.

Read this interesting blog post here.

Keele University experienced Tactile Talking Tablet to produce accessible material for all 3 years of the Biology and Neuroscience courses.
Read further on the TechDis website.

On the Design Science Inc. website the paper Daisy 3: A Standard for Accessible Multimedia Books published in IEEE Multimedia (2008, Volume 15, #4, pp28-37) is available for reading.
This paper introduces the DAISY format with particular attention to mathematics. It also reports comments about what DAISY readers think.

Thanks to the work undertaken by the Knowledge Adaptation and Reasoning for Content group at Jacobs University (Bremen), more than 200,000 papers in the ArXiv repository are now available for reading as XHTML+MathML files.
MathPlayer was successfully used to read them by speech, Braille and large size characters.