Shelly Brisbin writes about new media, cocktails, technology, and the world around her
I had the chance to join Chuck Joiner’s MacJury for a discussion of social networking in the age of earthquakes and late night talk show wars. We talked a lot about the earthquake, not so much about the late night TV. We spent a lot of time discussing Twitter’s usefulness, and its place in our respective social media diets. It was a great discussion, with some really smart people from the Mac community. Listen here.
Just now, I had a brainstorm. The 20-page PDF files I’ve been studying on my computer screen, as I work my way through an online learning program, could easily be transferred to my iPhone. From there, I will be able to sit in my most comfortable chair and hold the device at a most comfortable distance, with the text zoomed to a most comfortable size. I raced to my computer to affect the transfer.
This from a woman who devours audio books, and gazes worshipfully at the shelves full of old paper books I have acquired an read throughout my adult life. I love to read, and I love books.
What I’ve realized here is that the situational reading format,not the ereader, is the most exciting thing going for readers. Just as TV fans demand their shows appear on a computer screen AND on the living room HD AND on the smartphone AND, though the thought horrifies me, on the DVD players in their cars, book readers like me are finding it possible to hope (if not demand, just yet) that text appear wherever and whenever. It hasn’t all come together in our minds the way it has for video addicts, but perhaps we’ll get there. Perhaps the cave-in to publishers that prevented Amazon’s Kindle from offering universal text-to-speech conversion will one day seem as laughable as an artist not providing digital versions of his or her music. Maybe my beloved old books; the novels I love to read in paper form, can coexist with the cocktail books and other recipe texts that should, in a just world, all be available via ereader. A girl can dream, can’t she?
I’ve had the good fortune to appear on several podcasts lately, discussing iPhone accessibility. I’ve also recorded and written some stuff of my own on that topic. So I thought: why not just post all of those links in one place, for those of you considering the development of a 24/7 Shelly channel in your head?
Chuck Joiner graciously invited me to join him on MacVoices for a little explainer on iPhone 3GS accessibility. It was a lot of fun, and I felt like we covered the bases pretty well. I also had the pleasure of joining Josh and Shane on The Maccast for a discussion of similar subjects, with some extra history and Mac accessibility perspective.
Here are my own collected contributions to the iPhone 3GS discussion. I explained and demo’d VoiceOver, zoom, and black on white for the App Store Pundit audience, and wrote here and here about the new iPhone before I had even seen it. Adam refers fairly often in our Maccast conversation to the first of these posts.
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