Getting Dark Mode in Acrobat Reader

Here's a tip for fans of dark mode: how to get white text on a black background in Acrobat Reader. 

These instructions are for the latest (and highly enshittified) release of Acrobat Reader. 

1. Click the hamburger menu icon in the upper left.

2. From the menu,, click Preferences.

3. In the Categories list, click Accessibility.

4. Select Replace Document Colors.

5. Then select Use High-Contrast colors and choose White text on black from the High-contrast color combination list.

6. Click OK. 

In step 5, you could select Custom Color and then pick your text and background colours. 

I'm posting this because I cannot easily read PDFs with black text on a white background. The current release of Acrobat Reader changed whatever settings I had in the past to give me dark mode in PDFs, and it's been driving me crazy for a while now. 

Some PDFs may not work well with these settings;. for example, tables with shading will be a problem. I will have to experiment more to see if other settings in the Accessibility dialog will help.

If you know of a (preferably free) PDF reader that works well in dark mode, please leave me a comment.

 

First Impressions of iPad OS 26

This is the first of two posts about my Apple  tablets. Tomorrow's post will be about my experience with the iPad Mini. 

I put off upgrading my tablets to iPadOS 26 for a month, but finally decided that the Mini shouldn't have any problems running it. My main concern was the Liquid Glass interface, which looked to me like it could seriously compromise readability. The first thing I did after upgrading was to turn down the transparency and motion effects. Given that, I haven't noticed any readability issues that weren't also present before upgrading.

I did turn on the windowing interface, mainly so I could access app menus. I was worried about readability because they are very small at  the top of the window, but they expand to a reasonable size when triggered. One of my peeves about iPad OS in general is that the top-of-screen menus and icons are too small and there doesn't seem to be any way of making them bigger (unlike Windows). I did run into a problem in Play Books where the bottom controls (go to TOC, move the page slider) wouldn't' respond; I had pulled down the window a bit too far and switching back to the full-screen interface fixed it. (I haven't been able to reproduce that so it may have been a glitch). 

I was excited to hear that Apple had introduced the Accessible Reading feature.  Google's similar Reading Mode app is a lifesaver on my Pixel phone. Sadly, Apple's version is not up to the quality of the Google app. It's fussy to customize, it's not clear how to switch out of it to the standard interface, and sometimes it just hangs up. I'll have to experiment more with it and hope that Apple improves it in later OS updates. 

Battery life, which was not great to start with, seems to be a bit worse under iPad OS 26, even with the Liquid Glass junk turned down or off. 

I'm certainly not the only one who doesn't want to have anything to do with the Liquid Glass interface. N/g, founded by user interface experts Jakob Neilsen and Don Norman, have published an epic takedown of IOS 26 and Liquid Glass.

The interface is restless, needy, less predictable, less legible, and constantly pulling focus rather than supporting seamless access to content. Instead of smoothing the path for everyday tasks, iOS 26 makes users relearn basics while enduring a constant parade of visual stunts.

Apple may call it Liquid Glass. To many users, it feels more like a fogged‑up window: pretty from a distance, but frustrating when you try to see beyond it.

Apple seems to be feeling the heat. The latest IOS beta includes an option to turn off Liquid Glass, or at least reduce the transparency effects. (There are options that will do this under the Accessibility settings, but they are not prominent). 

 

Featured Links - June 3, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Springtime at the marina

• What are ultra-processed foods, really? "We dug into the research and answered your questions."
• The MAHA Report Is a Health Hoax: RFK Jr. Just Cited Studies That Don’t Exist. "America’s top health official tabled a report filled with fake science, dead links, and ChatGPT hallucinations. This isn’t policy—it’s malpractice by executive order."
• Predicting and Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease. "With all the advances in both the science of aging and artificial intelligence (AI), we are in a propitious position to accurately and precisely determine who is at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease years before signs of even mild cognitive deficit."
• 5,000-Year-Old Bread Recipe Recreated in Turkey—and Locals Can’t Get Enough. "A bread made from ancient grains is rising again in Turkey, and it's a big hit." Not only does it taste good, but it's made from drought-resistant plants.
• HellCaptcha: Accessibility Theater at Its Worst. "hCaptcha's "Accessibility" Mode Is a Fucking Cookie. And it's wrapped in a maze of broken promises, bad design, and outright user hostility."
• Massive security blunder: Russian nuclear site blueprints exposed in public procurement database. "Russia is modernizing its nuclear weapon sites, including underground missile silos and support infrastructure. Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database."
• Changing of the guard and Best laid plans. "What does a change in ownership for the genre's legacy short fiction magazines mean for the SF/F community?" The science fiction magazines, especially Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, were my gateway into the genre.
• The Radical Development of an Entirely New Painkiller. "The opioid crisis has made it even more urgent to come up with novel approaches to treating suffering." Finally there’s something effective." This article gives real insight into the complexity of developing a new drug.
• ‘My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six’: Alan Alda on childhood, marriage and 60 years of stardom. "Best known as Hawkeye in the TV series M*A*S*H, the 89-year-old actor, director and writer has another hit on his hands with a revamp of his 1981 movie The Four Seasons. He talks about his Parkinson’s disease, Woody Allen – and what he really thinks of Donald Trump."

Using the Windows 11 Magnifier

I just discovered that Windows 11 has a magnifier function that you can enable under Settings > Accessibility. Once enabled, you open it with the Windows Key + Plus Key combination. 

By default, it gives you a 200% magnification of the full screen. I don't usually need that much so I have set it to 150%. You can set it to magnify an area around the mouse cursor if you prefer. I now have it set to turn on when I log in and have pinned it to my taskbar. 

Full details on all of the Magnifier settings are on the Microsoft website.  

Update: As I noted in the comment, the Magnifier interferes with the reverse colour mouse cursor that I prefer to use. It turns out that starting the app manually from the task bar will also cause this to happen, though it may not happen immediately. So I am not going to use the app for now. I may take another look at this in the New Year to see if I can find a permanent solution, because it is a handy tool. 

Featured Links - September 30. 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Seagulls at the beach

• iPhone, Android Users Warned After 50,000 Message Email Bomb Attack. It doesn't sound like a common problem, but it could be really messy if you get hit by it.
• The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself. "The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away." I am appalled at the way big business is attacking the Internet Archive. 
• Physicists Reveal a Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time. 'A decade after the discovery of the “amplituhedron,” physicists have excavated more of the timeless geometry underlying the standard picture of how particles move.'
• "The fall of Kodak wasn't because of digital cameras" says History in the Dark.  "The once-mighty camera giant was actually an early pioneer of digital tech, and if it wasn't for the iPhone things could have been so different."
• The Tragically Hip: The small-town band that united Canada. If you don't know about The Hip, you are missing something special. The new documentary about them on Amazon Prime is wonderful.
• Marvel and DC lose trademark on "superhero". "Marvel and DC have jointly held the trademark for the word "superhero" since 1980, but no longer. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, in response to a petition from Superbabies, Limited, has canceled the trademark. Anyone can now produce works using "superhero" without fear of a lawsuit from either of the entertainment behemoths." Another blow against the evil empire.
• 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web. CompuServe was my introduction to online life, sometime in 1985. 
• Canada’s Leaders Must Reject Overbroad Age Verification Bill. "Canadian lawmakers are considering a bill, S-210, that’s meant to benefit children, but would sacrifice the security, privacy, and free speech of all internet users." It seems that legislative ignorance and stupidity about the internet is not limited to the US and Britain.
• Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability To Walk After Manufacturer Refuses To Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton. "traight's experience is a nightmare scenario that highlights what happens when companies decide to stop supporting their products and do not actively support independent repair. It's also what happens without the protection of right to repair legislation that requires manufacturers to make repair parts, guides, and tools available to the general public."

Featured Links - August 6, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Cover for Torus 3 by Taral Wayne

• Taral Wayne (1951-2024). A tribute to the late Toronto fanartist from Mike Glyer at File 770. Taral provided several covers to my fanzine, Torus, when I was publishing it in the late 1980s. His cover for Torus 3 is above. 
• The Indomitable Covid Virus. An overview of where we stand with the current COVID wave (it's getting worse) and vaccine development (the research is promising but the development is far too slow). 
• Consensus.app. This is an AI-powered search engine that gets its answers solely from published scientific research. It looks like it will be very useful for certain search topics. Find out more about it in the Cool Tools newsletter.
• More of America’s homeless are clocking into jobs each day. 'Homelessness, already at a record high last year, appears to be worsening among workers." It's happening here in Canada too.
• The missing introduction to A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown. The book will be published later this month. Brown says: "This is the most personal work I have written, a distillation of a lifetime of outdoor exploration, reading, and living into a manifesto for rethinking how we live in the world and care for it—and for each other."
• How I learned to use my PC with a broken wrist. "After fracturing my wrist in a recent fall, I had to figure out how to use the accessibility features built into Windows to work and write."
• Surprising element found in traces of Tycho Brahe’s alchemy lab confounds scientists. "While Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is best known for his celestial discoveries made in the 16th century — before the invention of the telescope — he was also an alchemist who brewed secret medicines for elite clients. But what exactly Brahe worked on in his alchemical laboratory, located beneath his castle residence and observatory called Uraniborg, has be
  en something of a historical enigma."
• Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum. "I visited the fantastic exhibit about Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Its collection of Mad original art and artifacts is absolutely amazing." I would love to see this exhibition. I wonder if it will be travelling to other galleries?
• Take your dog on a "sniff walk". "I recently learned how important sniffing is for dogs, and it's changed my entire approach to dog walking for the better!" Our dog is a small dog, close to the ground, and spends most of her time outdoors on "walks" sniffing everything she can get close to. It obviously matters to her a lot more than to us.

Featured Links - July 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Summer clouds

• Here’s why SpaceX’s competitors are crying foul over Starship launch plans. "Competitors have tried and failed to keep SpaceX from establishing launch sites before." It's not all jealousy and sour grapes; the Cape is getting crowded and Starhip/Superheavy will have a significant environmental and logistical impact.
• How to Stop Fascism. "Five Lessons of the Nazi Takeover." Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
• Vatican excommunicates Archbishop Viganò for refusing to recognize Pope Francis. "In a rare trial, the Vatican acted against Carlo Maria Viganò, a former ambassador to the U.S. and one of Pope Francis’s most vociferous internal critics."
• Magnifier App on Google Pixel Makes Fine Print, Faraway Objects Easier to See. "Here's how to get and use the app." This is one of the most useful apps I have on my phone. 
• Amazon Kindle e-readers cannot access Overdrive Books anymore. Amazon seems to be having a lot of problems with it's Kindle ecosystem. I now do most of my reading on Google Play Books, mainly because it gives me better control over font sizes than the Kindle app. 
• John Mayer and Mickey Hart of Dead & Company Talk About Their Big, Strange Sphere Trip—and the Future of the Band. 'Mayer goes long on the creative process behind the Sphere show, the influence of Star Tours and Titanic, Egyptian bats, “utilitarian nausea,” the 2001/"Monster Mash" spectrum, and what it's like to play in the world's most science-fictional venue: “I mean, it's a duet, right? There's the band and then there's the Sphere, and we are duetting every night.”'
• How Influencers and Algorithms Are Creating Bespoke Realities for Everyone. "Disinformation researcher Renée DiResta's new book lays out how people’s realities are shaped not by facts and evidence, but by black boxes, niche celebrities, and online communities."
• Microsoft’s climbdown over its creepy Recall feature shows its AI strategy is far from intelligent. "The tech company’s new Windows machines can take constant screenshots of users’ every action – quelle surprise, it’s a privacy minefield."
• Missing Bats: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball. Because it's baseball season. 

My 2023 in Tech

2023 turned out to be a big year for tech upgrades here at Chez Soltys. That was partly due to getting some money from parents' estates and partly due to aging equipment needing replacement. 

• I bought a Kindle Fire HD 8 tablet primarily to use as an ereader because I'm finding it harder to read on the Kindle Paperwhite. It works well as an ereader, but it is underpowered for any use other than web browsing and Amazon's proprietary O/S is limiting compared to stock Android. 
• I upgraded my ancient HP desktop PC to a custom-built system with an AMD processor, an Nvidia 3060 TI video card, and SSD drives housed in a large and quiet Fractal Designs case (no RGB lighting, thank you). I've had no issues with the hardware but I'm finding Windows 11 to be a mixed bag. Paul Thurott's Windows 11 Field Guide and Stardock's Start11 have been a great help.
• I was happy with my Pixel 4a phone but Google stopped providing updates. I upgraded to the Pixel 8 Pro and so far I'm very happy with it. The cameras are spectacularly good and have made me reconsider my investment in Fujifilm's X-S10 camera.
• At my doctor's suggestion, I bought a FitBit Sense early in the year. Then Google offered a free Pixel Watch 2 with the pre-order of the Pixel 8 Pro, so I moved to that. It doesn't have the battery life and real-time arrythmia detection of the Sense, but it's superior in every other respect. 
• After upgrading my desktop PC, it became clear that the gaming experience was less than ideal because my Lenovo 28" monitor couldn't keep up with the video card. I bought a very nice LG 32GP750-B gaming monitor on sale. It is basic in features (speakers and USB ports would have been nice), but otherwise is just fine with excellent picture quality. 
• When I retired five years ago, we treated ourselves to a Vizio P55 TV. It was great until a couple of years ago when the active backlighting started to exhibit problems and Vizio no longer provided firmware updates to fix them. We decided it was time for a new and larger TV and bought an LG C3 65" OLED set. This is a vast improvement in picture quality and we are very pleased with it despite some minor issues noted in my first impressions post. 
• On the smart home front, we bought a smart plug for the backyard lights, that Google Home saved from the recycle bin,  and an Aosu video doorbell, both handy little devices. 

Next year should be quieter on the tech front. We have to start dealing with some long overdue household renovations which will not be as much fun. 

Using the Accessibility Features in Windows 11

I've made no secret here of the fact that I'm very nearsighted. I'm sitting in front of a 32" 1440p monitor. I couldn't use a 4K monitor even at this large size. Even then, I scale up the text size to 150 percent. That works for most things I do on the computer.

As well as adjusting the font size, I use a large inverted-colour mouse cursor and a keystroke command to help me find the mouse, which I tend to lose when it's near the edge of the screen. But Windows has many more accessibility features to help users with special needs and not just vision. 

In Make Windows 11 easier to see, hear, and use the Ask Woody newsletter explains Windows 11's vision, hearing, and interaction features to help people with disabilities or limitations. It's a good article with clear explanations and lots of screen captures. I found several things that I didn't know about, despite having looked at the Accessibility settings several times. 

Windows has improved a lot in this area over the years, though there are a few things that still don't work the way that you would expect. Scaling of UI elements is one; I tried increasing the scaling size but had to go back to the default because of inconsistencies and issues with text overlapping fields and the like. Applications, even Microsoft's, need more work. I can zoom an Excel spreadsheet but the entry field below the ribbon doesn't zoom. Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom are horrible, even after using the limited scaling they provide, and lack the ability to control the colour or contrast of UI elements. 

I hope these limitations will be addressed in the future. We've come a long way but there's still much room for improvement. 

Featured Links - December 11, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Cement graffiti

• The Stormy Age of SFF Magazines by Neil Clarke. "When people proclaim that we’re experi­encing a ‘‘Golden Age’’ for short fiction, I tend to look at them sideways. While we’ve seen an explosion of new markets over the last two decades, it’s never been a particularly healthy time for the overwhelming majority of them. For print editions, increasing postal and printing costs are eating away at profits. Those publishing online struggle face steeper challenges and often have unpaid or steeply underpaid staff."
• Behind the Scenes of the Most Spectacular Show on TV (gift link) "Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment." I hardly ever watch football (and if I do I prefer the Canadian variety), but I still found this article fascinating. 
• Google Rolls Out New Accessibility Features to Make Daily Tasks Easier. "New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily."
• Here's a primer on the far-out sounds of free jazz. Some way out there music as an antidote to the onslaught of syrupy Christmas music I'm being bombarded with everywhere I go right now. 
• The High Life and Shocking Death of Beatles Sidekick Mal Evans. "New bio 'Living The Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans' tells one of the the strangest stories in all of Beatles lore." I have been watching Get Back and wondering what happened to him after the Beatles.
• There’s a crisis in the Yukon River. "Flowing from British Columbia through Alaska to the Bering Sea, the nearly 2,000-mile-long Yukon River used to teem with Chinook and chum salmon, sustaining a culture of harvesting fish to feed both Alaskans as well as sled dog teams vital for transportation during the winter. Now those salmon runs have turned into to a trickle, as climate change and other factors weigh against the fish. The result is a drastic cut to local food supplies in a region where store-bought food, shipped in from thousands of miles away, is expensive."
• Opinion: This is a pandemic of attrition. "It’s time for our society to admit that we’ve made a mistake and change course. The COVID-is-mild experiment, despite the wishing and the hoping, has been a tragic failure. We aren’t just accepting ongoing hospitalizations and deaths to protect the economy, but also ignoring the social and economic costs of continuing high levels of acute infections. Worse still are more cases of Long COVID, a condition that takes many people entirely out of the workforce. And with every wave, the staffing attrition worsens."
• Electric vehicles are better than gas-powered cars in winter—here’s why. "All cars lose range when the temperature drops below freezing, not just EVs."

Some Language and Writing Resources

Here are links to some articles and web pages about writing and language resources.

• From Nature, an article aimed at researchers and academics: Poor English skills? New AIs help researchers to write better. "Machine-learning tools can correct grammar and advise on the style and tone of presentations — but they must be used with caution."
• From the Queen's University Accessibilty Hub, a web page with advice on creating accessible documents in several formats. "There are many forms of documents which are used during a learning session. These may include; Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft PowerPoint documents and PDF documents.  All three types of documents can be used electronically, either during presentations or by offering students electronic versions of the documents to store and review.  They can also be used in print format - as handouts during a session, for example. These documents may also include equations, charts, graphs, infographics, and tables which need to be accessible for all."
• From the American Geophysical Union, Writing Plain Language Summaries. "A Plain Language Summary from a technical abstract may seem link a daunting task, it can help to expand the reach of your science by putting it in the hands of new audiences in language that they understand."
• The Grammarphobia blog. "Grammar, etymology, usage, and more, brought to you by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman."
• The Conscious Style Guide. "The first website devoted to conscious language. My mission is to help writers and editors think critically about using language—including words, portrayals, framing, and representation—to empower instead of limit. In one place, you can access style guides covering terminology for various communities and find articles debating usage. We study words so that they can become tools instead of unwitting weapons."
• So, it’s the OED update, obvs. From the OED's blog, a post about their January update. It's kibble for word nerds.
• English is picking up brilliant new words from around the world – and that’s a gift. "English is picking up brilliant new words from around the world – and that’s a gift."
• A Twitter thread by Mushtaq Bilal, PhD. "6 incredible resources developed by top universities to help you become a proficient academic writer — totally free:"

Google Reading Mode Is a Wonderful New Feature for Android

Google just made my day yesterday. They have added a dedicated Reading mode to Android. It installs through the Play store (look for Google Reading mode) and hooks into your phone's accessibility features, displaying a small widget to open the mode. When you trigger it, it overlays your screen with a new window that displays just the text of what you are reading and lets you control the text's typeface and size, line spacing, colour, and background. It can also read the text back to you. 

It's not a Pixel-only feature. I was able to install it on my wife's Samsung phone. For Samsung, once it is installed, go to Accessibility > Installed Apps > Reading mode and turn on the app. It will add a star to the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. 

I haven't been able to figure out how to take a screenshot while it's working, but this article will show you what it looks like.

It's not perfect: It sometimes refuses to work for an article (usually scrolling down a bit will fix that problem) and the widget can get in the way of a button onscreen (you can move it around). Font choices are somewhat limited. 

Minor issues aside, for someone like me, who has trouble reading dark text on a white screen or text that's too small or lacks contrast, this is a wonderful feature. 

Windows' Built-In Accessibility Features

Although many people consider Apple to be the leader in accessibility, Microsoft Windows does have a wide-ranging set of accessibility features. I use some of them daily, including larger fonts, dark mode, a large inverse mouse cursor and the "sonar" setting my mouse that displays an animation where my mouse cursor is when I hit the CTRL key. But there's much more, as this article from the Ask Woody newsletter points out. 

Windows’ built-in accessibility features are found in Settings. For Windows 10, look for Ease of Access. For Windows 11, the panel has been rebranded Accessibility, with a new icon shaped like a person. Regardless of its name, you can get directly to the settings with the keyboard shortcut WinKey+U, a shortcut that has been around since at least Windows 7. (See the Microsoft support article Windows keyboard shortcuts for accessibility for all the keyboard shortcuts associated with accessibility in Windows 7, 8.1, 10, and 11.)

Even the Windows sign-in screen has accessibility support. On the screen, three icons appear in the lower-right corner. The center one, which differs in appearance between Windows 10 and 11, brings up a menu of features you can enable to assist your sign-in.

Windows 11 has one more way to get to Accessibility settings. By default, the taskbar has a group of three icons representing connectivity, sound, and battery status. Clicking on the group (the individual icons are not clickable) pops up a small dialog that includes a button for Accessibility.

Featured Links - October 17, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

Fall colours

Building a better hurricane ‘cone of uncertainty’. "How can current ways of depicting uncertainty in hurricane forecasts be improved?"

Xbox’s Accessibility Showcase is such an important initiative. "Hosted by Canada's Steve Saylor, the second-annual event is an enlightening look at the importance of accessibility."

Firefox Relay gives you a burner phone number to give out online. "Relay's phone number masking can help protect your privacy."

The Ultimate Guide to Wondrous Independent Bookstores. "We think book havens are heaven." I would love to visit some of these.

Reading Freely. Yet another library caught in the sighs of the wacko right-wing Christian fascists. 

Space-Age Magus. " From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?"

Microsoft takes AI image generation mainstream, strolling into ethics minefield. "Microsoft sidesteps AI-powered art debate, embraces image generation as a tool for creatives."

Featured Links - April 25, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:

• The Fake Federal Agents Case Baffling US Intelligence Experts. "Guns. Luxury apartments. Duped Secret Service personnel. Did the FBI uncover a foreign plot, or something more ridiculous?"
• Is AliExpress Legit and Trustworthy? Is It Safe to Shop There? "What is AliExpress? Is it safe to shop on? Are there any security risks? We shopped there several times and here's what we found." I have never used AliExpress myself, but have friends who like it.
• Blue Origin re-evaluating if Pensacola ship Jacklyn will be used for rocket landings. "The fate of the Blue Origin ship named Jacklyn appears to be up in the air as Jeff Bezos' rocket company is re-evaluating if it will use the ship for booster rocket recovery."
• Nasa invents ‘revolutionary’ material 1,000 times better than state-of-the -art spaceship alloys. "Alloy GRX-810 can be used to build better rocket engines capable of withstanding far harsher conditions."
• Pouring it on: Climate change made 2020 hurricanes rainier. "Human-caused climate change made the record-smashing 2020 Atlantic hurricane season even wetter."
• India’s Inadvertent Missile Launch Underscores the Risk of Accidental Nuclear Warfare. "Complex weapon systems are inherently prone to accidents, and this latest launch is one of a long history of military accidents in India."

An App to Help Users with Tremors

Users with tremors caused by Parkinson's or other neurological diseases can have trouble using phones and tablets. If you use an iPad, there is now an app called Staybl that can help by using the device's accelerometer to detect tremors and move the screen in the opposite direction to stabilize the field of view.

Other improvements made to the Staybl app that help make it more accessible and useable for those dealing with hand tremors were the removal of swipe and slide gestures required for navigation, enlarged buttons made easier to press, a higher contrast interface, and the use of the Atkinson Hyperlegible sans-serif font developed by the Braille Institute for improved legibility for readers with visual impairments through a design that makes individual letters easier to differentiate.

The app is currently only available for iPads but the developers hope to create versions for other devices and platforms.  

Featured Links - November 29, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked. "For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake."
• How experiences growing up in the Sault led to Roberta Bondar's mission in space. "A virtual gala will be held in January on the thirtieth anniversary of Bondar's eight-day space flight."
• This Company Tapped AI for Its Website—and Landed in Court. "Under pressure to make their sites accessible to visually impaired users, firms turn to software. But advocates say the tech isn't always up to the task."
• A Weekly Dose of Red Light Might Improve Aging Eyesight, Study Finds. "People given the low-cost therapy in the morning performed noticeably better on tests of their color vision."
• One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball. "Mo Pinel spent a career reshaping the ball’s inner core to harness the power of physics. He revolutionized the sport—and spared no critics along the way.
• Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the Roots of Frank Herbert’s Dune. A long and somewhat scholarly article that take a deep dive into Frank Herbert's Dune.
• A Burp or a Blast. "Seismic signals reveal the volcanic blast to come."

Accessible Payment Terminals

Being visually impaired, I sometimes have trouble using payment terminals. Some of the new models are OK, but older ones with low-contrast LCD screens are very difficult for me to read.

Moneris has introduced a new line of Moneris Core terminals with accessibility features designed to make it easier for people like me to use them. Users can touch the accessibility icon (a circled A) or the 5 key to turn on the features, which include a high-contrast screen and voice prompts. 

Here's a short YouTube video explaining how to use the accessibility features. 

I'm very glad to see that at least one terminal vendor is thinking about accessibility and I hope to see more include these features if they haven't already. 

 

2020, The Year In Space

I can't resist doing one more year-in-review post, this one about space exploration. It was a busy year with some significant milestones. 

Despite a worldwide pandemic which affected agencies around the world, 2020 featured many significant achievements in spaceflight. In total, 114 orbital launches were attempted, including deep space missions like Solar Orbiter, three missions to Mars, and the Chinese Chang’e 5 lunar sample return mission. Also this year, the United States regained domestic crew launch capability with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, and SpaceX launched hundreds of new satellites for the growing Starlink constellation.

Next year promises to be even busier and more exciting, with the arrival of three missions to Mars, the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the possible orbital launch of a SpaceX Starship.  

Advice on Writng Literature Reviews

Although writing scientific literature reviews is a specialized area usually reserved for practicing scientists, it is a form of technical communication. Nature has published an article offering advice from practitioners on how to write literature reviews, and much of the advice is very similar to advice I was given as a technical writer. 

The advice is grouped into these sections:

• Be focused and avoid jargon.
• Have a process and develop your style.
• Timelines and figures make a huge difference.
• Stay updated and be open to suggestions.
• Make good use of technology.

All of these apply to some degree to what we usually consider technical communication.