Dock – for the cased iPhone and iPod!

June 25th, 2010 Posted in design, iPhone
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I have decided that Apple is preventing me from purchasing more of their products by not allowing their iPhone and iPad docks to to work with their cases.

When I bought my iPad, I was extremely happy that I had the opportunity to also purchase their case. it’s a glorious, wonderful case that does everything I need, and more. My aim was to also purchase the iPad Keyboard Dock, which I did buy, but had to immediately take back and exchange for a bluetooth keyboard. The simple reason is that taking the iPad out of the case to put it into the dock was just too much of a bother. The iPad case is designed in such a way that you should never have to remove the iPad from it, and my thought was that I should be able to just drop my iPad into the dock and it would just work. Well, the snug fit of the iPad dock is great when you only have the iPad, but even putting the thin iPad case on the iPad is enough to make it too thick to fit the device.

While I wasn’t real happy with the situation, I understood and I moved on. That was 3 months ago. Now that I have my shiny new iPhone 4, and the ever awesome bumper case, I find myself upset that even though our 1st gen iPhone dock will fit the iPhone 4, (as reported by TUAW) I find that I do not want to remove the case just to put the device into a dock. I asked at the store if the dock that they had in stock would fit the iPhone 4 with a case on it and was told no, it was a snug fit to the device. I understand why, and the simple answer is that it keeps the connector pins from bending and breaking.

So now we come back to the question. If Apple took the time to create this awesome device, with a cool bumper case, then why did they not create a dock with a removable insert, something like those provided by iHome so that the iPods fit? Granted, those inserts are also made for the device itself, and in general cannot be used with a case, but making it work with an apple case (the only one sold) seems like it should be a given!

I love what Apple has done with their devices, but a little more thought to this minor detail for the next product would allow me to both have what I want, as well as fund the company that little bit more. In short, Apple should not prevent me from spending the money I want to spend on their products :D

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Refreshable Braille and the Web

June 29th, 2009 Posted in browsers, design
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Refreshable Braille and the Web came up as a search result when I was looking for CSS language accessors and IE. While it’s not what I was looking for, I took a few moments and watched the video. I know there are screen readers out there, as well as language translators and more, but this was very compelling to me. I did not know that there was a braille reader which is essentially either a keyboard or an attachment to a keyboard which allows the reader to read just as if they were reading a book. Instead of reading lines of braille, there is a single line at a a time which is available.

Articles like these remind me of why great HTML markup is SO VERY important to accessability, and forward thinking. One of the points which is made is that the HTML outline is used by the screen readers to not only describe where the reader is, but also describes the importance of that information which is being read. Ironically, I do not believe I have ever worked for a company which specifically targeted their audience which may require the accessability standards which are now in place. Just like you and me, people who need the accessability standards work, shop and play online. It is important to make sure that we test not only for the vast majority of our users, but we also test for those who may need that extra little push of our time at the end of the day.

I hope that you find the video as compelling as I did.

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