Introducing the CLC World "Blog"

This is the official "blog" for CLC World. This is my personal "blog". The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

If you are wondering why the word "blog" is in quotes, it is because I am purposely trying to make this as different from a normal blog as possible.

Sure, it will have informative announcements about new releases for Fire Vox / CLiCk, Speak / other stuff from CLC World. And never fear, I solemnly promise to stick to the great tradition of infusing blogs with as much megalomania as possible (although admittedly, not as much as I would like as my sense of self-importance is completely justified).

However, this will also be used as a platform for doing cool stuff.


As an example of cool stuff, consider the first post. At first glance, you will think that it is nothing more than a random XML text dump which I must have posted by accident. Take a closer look and you will see that your first impression was entirely wrong. It is in fact a non-random XML text dump which I posted on purpose.

Why would I post something like that?

Because it's the CNR for reading blogs on Blogspot.com. In addition to being delightfully self-referential, it's a real CNR that can be run on your system!

CNR stands for Content Navigation Rule. CNRs are a part of AxsJAX. They allow web developers, web hackers, end users, and in short, anyone interested in accessibility, to define a set of simple rules for navigating a particular web site.

These rules not only make it much easier for blind and visually impaired users who rely on assistive technology to navigate complex web sites quickly and efficiently, they can improve the usability of such web sites for anyone who could benefit from fast keyboard navigation.

The mental model for using CNR is that a page is composed of lists of items. Users can traverse through the lists and through the items in the current list. As they traverse these lists and items, they will get a very brief earcon confirming their action, hear the current item/list being by their assistive technology, and the current item of interest will be automatically magnified. If you would like to learn more about CNR, please see the CNR reference and the tutorial on creating AxsJAX scripts.

For pages where the navigation behavior is relatively straightforward (such as Blogspot), a CNR file by itself can provide tremendous benefit. To make it easier to create and distribute CNR files for such pages, I am trying an experimental mode for delivery that is based on blogging.

To try it out, you should be using Firefox 3 and the latest version of Fire Vox or whichever ARIA-aware assistive technology you prefer. Make sure you have Greasemonkey. If you are setup correctly, all you need to do is install the CNR Loader script. Whenever you go to a web page, if you hear "The CNR for this page has been loaded.", it means that a CNR for that page exists and has been activated. You can type ? (question mark) to hear a list of available commands for that page.

This is a very early experimental release. I plan to have direct integration of this with Fire Vox soon so that end users will not need to install a Greasemonkey script, and to make improvements so that CNRs can be written, posted to blogs, and used as easily as possible.