Hi, Shannon:

My bad. You seem to run several different websites, and your domain
looked like a corporate entity, so I assumed you were running your
online tools as a full-time company. I found Chat Catcher in the
wordpress directory, and didn't know anything at all about Whitley
Media or yourself. So when I received a personal communication re:
the service, rather than a corporate one, I was deeply confused and
bothered. Sorry for any offense I caused, and please remember that my
comments all arose from the clash between what I believed you to be,
and what, it seems, you really are. I was evaluating your comments
and actions against what I would expect from the CEO of a company with
several online media holdings. For one guy, you're doing pretty well.
This all goes to show the importance of managing user expectations.
For another company that failed spectacularly at doing that (from my
perspective as a former user) look up the history of ma.gnolia.com.

Not really; it only took me the afternoon.

Oh, and I changed the way commenting works, too.

@Andreas: I had never even heard of wuala, before I wrote my article and chose my solution. Perhaps I was using google to search for the wrong keywords, or maybe your google pagerank isn't yet high enough. Anyway, this looks ideal for my needs! I will try your service tomorrow, when I don't have 5 beers in me, and either write a new post or update this post with my findings. Thanks for letting me know about your service.

@sam: thanks for the tip! I never thought of that. I'm so used to just tabbing through links, that I often forget the list links feature exists. That's a really good idea, even if it is kind of a work-around, and doesn't solve the underlying interface problem.

@David Zhao: thanks for the info! I think my confusion about ZumoDrive came from the fact that I was visiting the website, and doing my first tests, on a Windows computer. So it only made the Windows download obvious, to me. Perhaps if I had made my first visit on OS X, your server would have detected the user-agent, and shown me a mac download. But only seeing a Windows download link on the front page, and reading about the IPhone app in the list of features, I just assumed OS X wasn't an option. Good to hear linux support is on the way! Unfortunately, the payment structure just doesn't fit my needs, though. One month I might need 500 gigs, the next month 10, the next 50, and the next 1. It all depends what we're doing. A pay as you go model fits that structure better; I don't have to constantly change plans, and I don't need to try and predict how many gigs we're going to need each month. Perhaps if you had an option where we could start with the lowest plan, and automatically get bumped up to a higher plan if it was needed for that particular month, things would be better. So on a month where less than a gig is used, it would be free. But if 400 gigs were used, it would just know to charge for 500 gigs that particular month. But none of that really has anything to say about security. The ZumoDrive website doesn't really talk about it, either. With Jungle Disk, the only people who can see the contents of my Jungle Disk are people with the software installed, and the correct key. Jungle Disk doesn't even offer web access by default; that way I am absolutely sure the Jungle Disk folks have no information about what I'm storing. A section of the ZumoDrive website discussing how ZumoDrive secures user's files might also help. Heck, Jungle Disk doesn't even know how much data I have; Amazon bills me for that. And Amazon has absolutely no way of knowing what my data is, even if they know how many gigs it takes.

@markduchevsky: I'm going to have to disagree strongly with a number of your points. First off, the fact that google is writing little in-browser programs, with built-in magnification, is a good thing. I already know how to use the stuff I've got. If every web developer could build his own screen reader or magnifier, tuned to his particular application, that would not make me happy at all. The same goes for violating the user-interface standards of web pages. I already know how to use a web page. If it's in my browser, it needs to either: 1. behave exactly like a web page. 2. Give extremely clear warnings, with lots of explaination, about how it is different from a regular web page, and why. Google failed at number two. It changed the interface on google news and google reader, and offered no clear explaination of how or why. The changes may be obvious if you can see them. But for those of us who cannot, they're confusing and pointless. They don't allow us to do anything we couldn't already do, and add confusing new terms and links to the interface. I have spent weeks and months learning how to use my screen reader technology. I have spent even more months customizing things to work the way I like them. I resent the idea that I should have to learn something new for every single website, when I could already do what I wanted before this new standard. It might sound kind of harsh, but I submit that if you're uncomfortable with your magnifier, you should consult your product manual to help you customize the software to work the way you want, or learn better ways of doing the things you're struggling with today. When I first began to use a computer, with Jaws For Windows, I spent six months on the included training tapes alone. I didn't move on until I understood everything from the interface, to the advanced settings, to the scripting language. I started using NVDA at about the time of the first snapshot release, in combo with jaws, so I could learn the way it worked. As NVDA is now my primary screen reader, I'm working my way through _Dive Into Python_ in order to learn how to patch the things in NVDA that bother me. I'm taking journalism, so programming isn't my primary interest, but I have always been told and believed that independence is one of the most important things any disabled person can achieve. In order to gain computer independence, you need to understand as much as you can about how and why your technology works, including the basics of computer programming. That goes for everything, not just screen readers. I wouldn't host my own wordpress blog if I didn't understand the basics of HTML, mysql, and PHP. But now that I do understand these things, I can host my own website, and am no longer held hostage by the whims of some other developer, who may, at any time, put in a CAPTCHA, delete my blog, or change the interface to be less accessible. I only wish I could do the same with facebook; they seem to change the home page once a month these days, and that breaks my greasemonkey scripts rather badly sometimes. Don't depend on google, or anyone else, for your accessibility; they will only let you down. Instead, understand your technology, and what you can do to make it work with inaccessible websites. If you can't make it work at all, like with the wikipedia CAPTCHA, stop using that particular site.

@Jennifer Sutton: That may well be the case. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that one; getting Freedom Scientific to do anything these days is getting more and more painful. One of the many reasons I'm no longer a JFW user. I'm seriously considering drafting something on the NVDA-project.org wiki, and see if I can get it accepted as part of the official docs. Unfortunately, I'm probably the least qualified person to do it. I suspect google's ARIA links came as a surprise to everyone; maybe if people had more notice, they could've done something to reduce user confusion about the technology before it went live on a major website.

@Shawn Henry: This seems clear enough, but it's a document for web developers. To me, the user, this is all just theory. What should probably exist somewhere (and maybe does? Google doesn't index everything.) is a page describing websites using the technology, discussing what differences it makes for users (like interaction with google chat, the pop-up menus in gmail, etc), and what screen reading and browser combos support this technology (the only one I've got working thus far is firefox 3+NVDA; Freedom Scientific says they support it, but something must be broken on all three of my windows boxes because I just can't make it work). The people who should probably write this kind of user document, in fact, are Google. They've suddenly presented all screen-reader users of Google News and Google Reader with a mystery link about "ARIA," (a link that our sighted counterparts apparently can't even see, so we get strange looks when we ask about it) and failed completely to explain anything at all. When people search for information about ARIA on google itself, it seems they wind up at either web developer resources, year old discussions of google reader, or my blog, depending on what keywords they use. IMHO, the way to do this would be to present a kind of "ARIA information page" the first time the user clicks the ARIA enhanced link, explaining what software they need to be using, and what extra functionality ARIA ads to the page. Pressing questionmark for help, while an interesting interface enhancement, is just so far removed from anything I would ever think of doing on any normal page, that I won't try it unless prompted with a "press questionmark for help" message. Otherwise, I'll go hunting for a help link. Because that's what you do with web pages: you click links on them.

Unrelated PS: groovy! I just upgraded to the firefox beta. The spell checker now works with NVDA.

@Marco Zehe: thanks for the information. By the way, I love your blog; I could wish I had found it earlier. I do all my real work on OS X, and use the NVDA nightly builds on Windows for entertainment (OS X is better for Word processing, note taking, email, and journalism stuff, while Windows is still much better for browsing and gaming). I'm not purchasing screen readers anymore; university costs enough already. We (or at least I) hear so much theoretical discussion of accessibility technology, that it's nice to find a blog that focuses on practical applications of all this new stuff, and hints at where we can play with it. I completely missed out on the gmail ARIA, because mine defaults to basic HTML, so I hardly ever think about the features found in the regular interface. If you need user testing for something, feel free to drop me a line; I don't use Windows for anything critical, so I don't really care if things get broken for a while.