Last week, the National Federation of the Blind settled out of court with Target Stores Inc. regarding access for the blind and visually impaired to its website and online store for an amount in excess of $6M.

In an insightful entry to their blog, Disability Nation points out the shortfalls of this settlement, particularly where the NFB stands to gain. Most notable to VoiceOver users on the Macintosh platform is that this settlement only pertains to access to the Target.com site with Jaws for Windows from Freedom Scientific. This fails to take into account the millions of visually impaired users of alternative access solutions such as VoiceOver, GW Micro’s Window-Eyes, or any number of other commercial or open source screen access products.

Check out the entry by clicking here. Let us know what you think.

Through the unconventional medium of a comic book, Google announced a new open source web browser called Chrome. The browser is scheduled to debut on Wednesday, 03/September, and it uses the same HTML rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser. That engine is the open source project WebKit.

Although no details on what platforms the browser will be available for, it is very possible that this browser will be compatible with VoiceOver, as it will be sharing key components with Safari, if it is indeed available for Mac OS X.

Google and Apple have a history of strong ties, so we do expect a Macintosh version of Chrome to be available.

As soon as we know whether or not it is accessible with VoiceOver, we will report. The browser, along with additional information, will be available later from www.Google.com/chrome

Over the years, Audible.com has made some changes to its site. SOmetimes these changes have improved accessibility. Sometimes, they have not. One of the changes in the last couple of years was to change the sample clips of their audio books to play in an Adobe Flash Player plugin. It is, sadly, not accessible.

Here’s a way to work around this problem with VoiceOver. It isn’t the most elegant solution, but it works.

• Search for the audio book you wish to sample at Audible.com
• Navigate with b>VoiceOver to the "Listen" text within the search result entry for the audio book of your choice.
• Press VO-Command-F5 to move the mouse to the VoiceOver cursor.
• Turn off cursor tracking with VO-Shift-F3. THis is not required, but will eliminate some potential problems.
• Turn on control-option lock with VO-Semicolon. This is not required, but will make the next step much easier.
• Using the physical mouse or the operating system’s Mouse Keys feature, slowly move the mouse to the left, checking your progress with the VO-F5 command. If control-option lock is on, you need only press F5.
• Repeat the previous step until VoiceOver announces "Scroll Area". This takes a little practice, but is easy once you have the hang of it. If using a MacBook trackpad, use the top edge of the mouse button to insure you are moving straight to the left and not wandering slightly up or down. You do not need to move far to reach the Scroll Area.
• Press and hold the Control key, and click the physical mouse, or press the center key of the numeric keypad if using Mouse Keys.
• A menu will appear with many options. Choose the "Play" option to start the playback. Remember if Control-Option Lock is on, you will need to press space to activate that menu option.

We hope this helps you use Audible.com more effectively with VoiceOver.

The popular Opera web browser has been updated to version 9.5, and includes VoiceOver support. Our initial findings show some areas where Opera excels, but several problems as well

The first positives are the fact that Opera appears to be able to move focus to any item on the page, presumably eliminating the Safari issue that causes focus to jump back on a page as Voiceover reads further down. The way in which tables on web sites are handled is spectacular, borrowing from the table views we’re used to in applications like iTunes or Mail. Apple, are you listening? THis is how tables should be done.

But there are some show-stopping problems.

Using Group mode to navigate HTML content seems to change very little in Opera aside from scrambling the order of the elements, a huge drawback to those who depend on VoiceOver’s ability to group elements on a page. Even in DOM mode, elements are not always in the order you would expect them to appear.

Popup buttons, (AKA drop down menus), do not read properly with VoiceOver either. THere is no way we can determine to select an item from one of these common elements.

Still, Opera has clearly put a lot of effort into accessibility, and the browser could be a very powerful alternative to Safari for VOiceOver users once the kinks are worked out.