Global Accessibility Awareness Day: May 17, 2018

 The Seventh Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is May 17

 

The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access, inclusion, and people with different disabilities.

The third Thursday in May is set aside to celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day.  This year, it is being celebrated on Thursday, May 18.  Global Accessibility Awareness Day originally came about when a couple of webmasters had an online discussion.  They realized that few web developers really knew about what they needed to do to ensure web sites and apps were usable by folks with all kinds of disabilities, and compatible with a wide range of Assistive Technologies.  

The original celebration was aimed at backend developers. It challenged them to test their site for accessibility and make at least one improvement.  It directed them to resources they could use to check a site from a person with a disability's point of view.   It tried to ensure developers knew about technologies such as screen readers, alternative input devices, and principles of universal design.

In subsequent years, the effort expanded to encourage greater awareness of assistive technology, as well as how the digital world could do a better job of ensuring things worked for those using adaptive equipment.  Despite the fact there is legislation compelling an accessible digital world,  a lot of barriers remain.  Few developers are well versed in mandates, nor do they know how to comply. GAAD hopes to change this. 

Today, GAAD continues to focus on increasing awareness.  If developers knew more about how physical and cognitive limitations affect usability, and possibly exclude millions of potential users, they'd be more prone to address them. GAAD helps to facilitate this.  Events are planned to spotlight and demonstrate assistive technologies, both online and offline.  

How Can I Participate in Global Accessibility Awareness Day?

The Facebook Kerfuffle and What it Means For You

The Facebook Data Scandal and What it Means for You and Your Personal Information

How to Protect Your Facebook Information,
and How To Download Your Facebook Data

For the last week or so, Facebook and its data-sharing tendencies have been in the news.  "Delete Facebook" campaigns are proliferating the Web, and a lot of folks are wondering what really happened and how worried they need to be.  Today, we're going to look at the Facebook controversy, discuss how users were actually complicit in this breech, and talk a little about the ramifications. We'll also look at how to protect yourself in the future, as well as explain how you can download a copy of your Facebook profile so you can understand what the data miners really obtained.

What Happened with Facebook and My Personal Information?

In a nutshell, an individual created a rogue quiz app.  This particular quiz was a Personality Test, and of course, it encouraged you to both share your results and to invite friends to take the quiz.  Almost immediately after launching, over 10,000 Facebook users had taken the test.  After it went viral, over 270,000 people downloaded the quiz app, and even more used the web-based version.  Folks ignored the app's permission requirements, and willingly gave the app permission to access their information, as well as that of their friends.  Soon, the quiz had harvested the Facebook data of over half a million users.  Many of these folks had never accessed the quiz personally, but rather had their data mined through a "friend" giving the app permission to basically take what it wanted.

The Quiz Creator then sold all the information he had collected to a data mining firm. That firm repackaged the data and sold it to Cambridge Analytics.  Cambridge Analytics then used the data to profile people politically, and to "reach out" to folks in order to manipulate their thoughts during the last election.

Convert a PDF or Scanned File into Editable Text, Using Google Drive

Apply OCR to Previously Saved or Scanned Documents;
Easily Convert PDF Files into Editable Formats

 

The articles in this blog are inspired by real life issues.  This weekend, I received a call from a less-skilled user. All of his electronic files had "disappeared" from his PC, and he was busy trying to recreate them from hard copies. He had already scanned a bunch before he discovered the scanned files were not editable.  Rather, he had a bunch of files that had basically been scanned into giant graphics. Was there anything he could do?

We discussed that, in the future, he needed to look for a "Scan to OCR" option in his scanning software. Most scanners include a Scan to OCR plug-in. (We also had a long conversation about disappearing files, and what that might mean, as well as setting up cloud backup through Backblaze to prevent these issues in the future.) But believe it or not, all was NOT lost. It is NOT too late to convert those scans. There is an easy way to apply OCR to saved files, using Google Drive and Google Docs.

What is OCR

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. OCR takes electronic information stored in an image format, (like GIF, JPG, PDF, or PNG,) and converts it into characters your programs can understand.  When you copy or scan something, basically a device is taking a picture of whatever you lay on its bed. Electronically, it saves a series of dots, rather than a series of letters and numbers. If you wish to edit a scanned document, first you MUST convert it back from a bunch of dots to characters software can recognize and understand. This process is called OCR, or Optical Character Recognition.

Most popular scanners come with OCR software.  If you are scanning a document, and you will want to edit it later, you should look for the “scan to OCR” option in your scanning software.  (It may also be called "Scan to Doc.")

If you have a document that has already been scanned to an image-based format, you will need to convert it using OCR BEFORE you can edit it.. This is also true for files you have stored on drives and other media.

OCR Using Google Docs

Google Drive contains a free and easy way to convert image-based files to editable text.  This is especially handy for PDF files, as well as files received as e-mail attachments. Google Docs has hidden OCR capabilities. You can open a file stored in Google Drive with Google Docs, and run it through an OCR plug-in while you're doing so. The steps are outlined below.

Poll and Survey Services: A Review (With Samples)

Create Polls and Surveys, for Blogs, Web Sites, Social Media, or Marketing Campaigns

This is the end of our series on Internet Quiz Services.  Folks love to take quizzes, and they can be great traffic-drivers. But many quiz hosting services do nothing but mine data, and their sketchy terms tell you little about how they will use the data they are mining. 

This series began by discussing the negatives of many quiz sites.  Then it went on to identify two quiz hosts who do not mine data: QuizRevolution and Polldaddy.  Earlier posts reviewed quiz creating and hosting services at these sites. Today, we end the series by looking at Polls and Surveys. Both Polldaddy and QuizRevolution offer poll and survey hosting, as well as tests.

Quizzes vs Tests vs Polls vs Surveys

At QuizRevolution, you can create surveys and quizzes. At Polldaddy, you can create quizzes, tests, surveys, and polls.  What are the differences between these?  Well, for all intents and purposes, a quiz and a test are the same thing.  Both offer a series of questions with right or wrong answers. Both are scored upon completion. A test or quiz usually assesses knowledge of a particular subject area.  On the Internet, however, quizzes tend to refer to silly, fun lists of questions, and they may or may not actually reflect knowledge or mastery.  Internet quizzes are more often centered around personality traits.  They may not be based on any sound theory at all.  On the Internet, tests tend to be more serious and more learning-focused.

A poll is a single question that asks one's opinion on something. It's generally multiple choice.  A survey, by contrast,  allows you to ask multiple questions across a wider range of question types.  It may include "scaled" questions, open-ended questions, and/or multiple choice. It may also collect demographic and/or personal information, such as name, sex, address, etc.  But there are no right or wrong answers, and no passing scores with a survey or poll.

A Review of Polldaddy and a Quiz: How Facebook Savvy Are You?

Polldaddy: A Privacy Conscious Web Service for Polls and Surveys

If you have been following this blog, you will have read our series on the Dangers of Internet Quizzes.  The first articles discussed the dangers of taking these types of quizzes, as well as the privacy ramifications.  We then moved on to safe quiz sites, and the differences between the good hosts and the data miners.  Techlaurels promised to review two quiz hosts that were good for both bloggers and quiz takers.  Our last posts discussed one of these hosts: QuizRevolution.  Today, we are going to review the second site: Polldaddy.

To start, Techlaurels migrated the quiz from Part 2 of the series over to Polldaddy.  That quiz is embedded below. The review of Polldaddy follows.

Quiz: How Facebook Savvy Are You?

If you have read through our series, you should be able to ace this test with no problems!

This quiz is hosted at Polldaddy.  Polldaddy respects your security and does NOT collect or share your data.  It is perfectly SAFE to take this quiz.  NO data is being recorded at all, and you do not need to log in or register to take the test.  You do NOT need to connect any social media accounts either.