This will be a very quick post, but one that relates to something that I am very interested in, which is the enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Today a federal court in the United States ruled that paper money, such as one and five dollar bills, are not compliant with the ADA. While the issue has yet to make it to other courts, and the ruling will probably be appealed, it’s an important ruling that ties into some of the other ADA issues that I have been following.

First off all, an explanation. The ruling has to do with the fact that if you are a blind American, there is really no way for you to determine the difference between a one dollar bill or a one hundred dollar bill. It seems like such a fickle thing, but since the government is required to make accommodations for Americans with disabilities, it makes sense that it came to light. I’m sure that there are opinions out there on both sides of this one (passionate, irate opinions), but my primary focus is on the laws as they stand today.

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I wrote a post a while back about the Web 3.0, and how in my opinion such nomenclature could be defined as “the emergence of inter-related services”, if I am allowed to paraphrase in such a way. Partially in defense of my previous post, and partially out of sheer admiration, I wanted to post about the reCAPTCHA project being run by Carnegie Melon University.

First of all, if you aren’t sure what a CAPTCHA is, they are the (somewhat annoying) graphics that appear in some web forms that force you to type in a group of characters to prove that you are human. The idea being (originally) that if you could correctly enter the words that are displayed in an image (which are not readable by robots) then you are a human and your contribution, be it a comment, a forum post, or something like that, should be allowed. The problem is that spammers catch on quick, and OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, software has come a long way. There in lies the problem, or problems, that the folks a Carnegie Melon have gracefully begun to tackle with reCAPTCHA.

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This one is actually quite funny, albeit not terribly related to ecommerce. I had an issue with my iPhone today where the headphones didn’t seem to be registering correctly with the device so that it didn’t seem to know when they were connected and when they were not connected.

The symptoms of this are that the phone would not send any audio signals to the headset speaker or external speakers, and would not pick up input from the headset mic. Rather, it thought that the headphones were still connected to the iPhone and was sending output to and expecting input from the headphones. Kind of problem since you can’t do anything with it then, and it was getting frustrating. I wasn’t sure if it was related, but I had just done a software update, and I also noticed that the headphones didn’t seem to go all the way into the jack, if even only by a tiny bit.

So I set off to Apple’s website to find support, and ran through the routine. One of my favorite suggestions, which is actually backed by Apple, is that you plug in and remove the headphones about ten times, which seems to solve the problem. Actually, this is kind of related to the actual solution, but I don’t suggest this as a viable option. Then there was the classic reset the phone, turn if off and on, and a few other steps that didn’t yield any results.

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So I have been banging my head against a wall lately trying to figure out how exactly an ecommerce merchant, or anyone for that matter, determines whether or not they are required to abide by the Americans with Disabilities Act with regard to their websites. We have done some articles recently on accessibility, and it remains one of my interests. With that in mind, and having read as much as I think I can about it, here is what I have come up with. Keep in mind that this is not legal advice, or anything close to it.

First of all, the ADA provides protections for Americans with disabilities, ensuring that they are not denied access to employment and services based solely on their disability. For the most part, every employer is aware of their obligations under the ADA with regard to their employees, and if you aren’t, the I highly recommend giving the ADA a read. However, I am more interested in how websites play into things. Particularly since the highly publicized lawsuit brought against Target because their website was not accessible. Most recently the lawsuit was given class-action status which sets one of the first legal precedences in this matter. I suspect that there will be many more, based on the following.

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I had to do it. I have been looking forward to the new version of OS X for some time, and I as pretty excited on Friday when a shiny copy showed up with the FedEx man. I couldn’t wait to throw it into my laptop and get started playing with the new features and seeing how it works. To start, I want to say that the upgrade is great, and Apple has again made Microsoft look pretty low-end when you compare Vista to Leopard. After all, Vista just released earlier this year, and from I can tell during the small amount of time I have spent playing with Vista, took most of its feature cues from OS X version of old. That being said, and ubiquitous to all operating system upgrades, I had some anxiety moments over the weekend as the bugs started to surface. All in all, nothing too big, and for the most part expected for a new product. However, here are my experiences.

The first thing that I did was install Leopard onto my Intel MacBook Pro, which went fine. It is not a fast installation, although if I remember my Windows days it did not consume an entire work day. In fact, the install went very smooth and besides taking an hour or two, everything went fine. As I pulled the DVD out of my laptop, I was already playing with Cover Flow and the new Finder. My smile was intact as I placed the disk into my dual G5 PowerPC tower, which is a few years old, but has plenty under the hood. After waiting for the install, my computer restarted to display a blue screen, and nothing else. Subsequent restarts (a bunch of them) ended up the same way, and I have to admit to having that moment of “what have I done” as I imagined not being able to get at my music, files and other junk that lives on that computer.

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Sorry about this, I know that I was supposed to put a post about expiring caches in Rails, and I will. I have been busy with other things lately and have not gotten much past changing my ways to reflect the RailsEnvy cache sweeper methods that I posted last time. Alas, this will be a small post, and a diversion, but I had to put my two cents in about the iPhone. I recently received mine, and there are a couple of things that I wanted to chime in about as a web developer. (more…)

It’s about time I used this blog for something useful, like finding out what kinds of things our readers want to see Video Tutorials about. As some of you have probably noticed, we’ve been trying to ramp up the amount of video content on our site, starting with video tutorials. Our goal is to provide helpful, instructional material that people can actually use.

That being said, I am soliciting ideas. I’ve done this before, and gotten some responses. Since we just had a two-part CSS layout tutorial, and there is another CSS tutorial on the way, I wanted to see if the developer-types out there have any ideas? For the most part, anything that presented a challenge when you were learning, or is presenting a challenge right now, could be suggested and I’ll do my best to get something up about it. The reason that I put that out there is that there are a ton of topics at various skill levels and I would like to cover as many as possible. Some tutorials won’t be for everyone, but hopefully we can offer something for everyone eventually.

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A few posts ago I mentioned that we had put in a CAPTCHA verification thingy on our article comments form. For those that are unfamiliar with CAPTCHA, the acronym is one that the folks at Carnegie Melon University decided was a good name for those verification images that have a string of letters and numbers (often distorted) that you must type into a form to prove you are human. In case you are wondering, the acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Those not utterly fascinated with large, geeky brains should know that Alan Turing was a computer scientist that did research into ways to tell the difference between humans and computers back in the 50’s.

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We posted an article not too long ago that attempted to clarify some of the nomenclature being tossed around lately about “the Web 2.0″, and even “the Web 3.0″. My goal in the article was to try and convey the ideas that people are talking about when they use these buzzwords, although it may have caused more confusion. At the very least, it seems to have at least sparked some passionate replies by a few visitors.

I wanted to follow that article up with a post about a web browser called Flock, as some of the things that make this browser unique help to really illustrate the differences in websites. (more…)

We published a new video tutorial on our site this week covering some Photoshop techniques for removing product backgrounds. The response was fantastic, and I wanted to express our appreciation to everyone that commented about the tutorial. For the most part, our video tutorials have been experiments, as we know very well that in order to remain competitive as content distributors, we’ll need to be providing MUCH more video content. On the plus side, it seems from the response to this last one that our readers would not be too upset about more videos. Which leads me to the point of this post.

Shameless promotion and solicitation! That’s right, every once in a while you have to just step out there and shamelessly use a weekly blog post to ask for ideas. And not just ideas, as that implies that I would then have to plan, record, and publish said idea into a shiny new video. Better yet, I’m soliciting videos!

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