we're being bombarded with accessibility at the moment.

Look at the default ,a href="http://www.wordpress.net" target="_blank">Wordpress theme.

ON the page, you have headings for everything. This makes it really easy to jump around the site when your using a modern screen reader that supports single letter navigation. For example, you can press h for headings, e for edit fields, b for buttons etc. Or, you can press 1 to cycle through the headings at level 1, 2 for headings at level 2 and so on. Heading and HTML element navigation has revolutionized the way that screen readers navigate the Internet.

Now though, we have headings and these landmark things. Look at this:

• banner landmark
• navigation landmark
• main landmark
• complementary landmark
• search landmark

Now, when you read the word press website, you hear something like this:
Each new line signifies a press of the down arrow button:

This is exactly what a screen reader user will hear when they read the word press page:

A picture paints a thousand words in the blog of someone | Just another WordPress site

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This is a test post.
Posted on
August 17, 2010
by
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This is a test post.  hopefully the gallery is shown.

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Posted on
August 16, 2010
by
someone

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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The screen reader user doesn't need to get all this information. Only some of it is really necessary. Some of it is only really important when they want to access the page quickly.

I think we're suffering from accessibility overlode at the moment.

I don't think this is the fault of the website developers though. Let me be very clear about this. They have done a fantastic job lately. I don't know one designer who doesn't take accessibility very seriously and they should be commended for this new responsibility.

There however needs to be more customized verbosity in screen readers such as Jaws for Windows to allow users to quickly disable notification of all this information so they can get the most from browsing as quickly as possible.

I would be interested in others thought's about this topic.

I've been looking around for a while but I've only found one recently.

I was looking for an image gallery that supported enlarging images, showing them as thumbnales and showing them in a presentation or slide show.

The interface for displaying these images had to be integrated into what ever theme I used or created and the process of uploading the images had to be really straight forward.

Finally, nextgen gallery for word press Is perfect.

Installing it is really simple as well. There about three steps to follow.

I'm not even a word press person. I'd have limited knowledge of installing and configuring it but even I was able to install it and have the module running successfully within less than ten minutes yesterday.

The only problem I had was actually that I edited the wp-config.php by hand and it wouldn't connect to the database but when I used the create-config.php script it did the same thing but it worked. I don't know if I was missing something really simple. I don't think I was...

The anti-spam in Exchange 2007 seems to catch about 50% of the spam I get every day. Not too bad, but surely there's something that can do better? When I use to host my Email on Google apps a lot more was caught. In fact, I could go weeks without receiving spam.

I've run a few updates today so lets see how that does. Hopefully it will make it better.

I'm going to set up a new server shortly to host forefront anti-virus. That will help with a lot of the crap I'm getting. Because it has databases and hooks into loads of other systems, I don't want to install it on another server. It should be on a dedicated VM.

I think this is just the best day ever.
So. Join me today for a pint to mark System administrator day

An extract from the Sys admin Day site reads:

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work -- to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin -- and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I love my job. I love when something breaks because I get the satisfaction of fixing it again.

Still though, could things only break between normal social hours like between 9AM and 11PM? That would be fantastic.
I got a text this morning at 4AM to tell me that one of the archival servers were down. Great. That's exactly what I want to hear at 4AM in the morning.

I keep forgetting that I don't need to be careful while pushing my chair back. He's not behind it any more.

I keep forgetting that when I get up in the morning he's not in the living room egar to get going.

I keep forgetting that when I'm leaving work, I've to give my self that little bit of extra time because he's not around to zip in and out of crowds.

I keep forgetting.
It's stupid.
When will this part end?
Coming up on two months now. seven weeks 3 days to be exact.

I hear that he's doing great. The people who have him keep telling me when they notice a personality trate that is really strange and new to them, but that is one that I'm a little lost without. I kind of wish that they'd stop talking about him.

Having a guide dog is great. Sending one into retirement is terrible. Even though I know he couldn't go on any more, I still regret the decision.

It's stupid.

I haven't caught up with you in ages!
How are things?
How's life treating you?
Are you having a good summer?
Any holidays planned?

There are a few of you who read this and lerk in the background. Don't worry. I can see you all. Yes. Even you down the south of the country coming over every week or so to have a read through loads of old posts. The walls have ears don't you know.
Even though you sneek around in the shaddows I hope your doing well too.

I got a few new readers last week from around the north of the country. A few from England too. Great to see you!

I'm in a great mood. I got in early this morning and got everything done over half an hour before work was even due to oficially start. I'm also enjoying a little bit of a cafeen buz so my fingers are skimming over the keyboard. Hay, my iPhone has just played the same track twice. Why is that? That's irritating. Let me go fix that.

Right. Done...

What else is happening. Oh, in a few weeks, Emma and I are heading off on holiday for two weeks off to a hotter country. Well, it wouldn't be hard to find somewhere hotter than Ireland. What's the story with our attempt at a summer? I want good weather! for at least a month. Is that really too much to ask? People say we're lucky this year that July wasn't a complete wash out. Are we though? Where was the sun. Overcast skys do not make for a summers day.

I'll write more about the holiday closer to the time. I wouldn't want to tease you. hahaha. Who am I kidding. I'll love teasing you. :)

A lot has happened since my last major update. So, here's a brief breakdown.

• I'm still in the job I was promoted to a few months ago. Ok. There's been a bit of a change in that role lately but I'll not go into that much. At the start, I experienced a lot of accessibility related issues. There was a lot of push back from other members of the team as they didn't believe I could do the job. They were convinced that the job was too visual. This is nothing new though. For people who can see, they can never see an allternative to using their eyes even if that alternative may even be more efficient. I'll write about that little point at another stage. There are certain things that are still not very accessible however I'm making up for that by taking a lot of other work that is a little more suited. It means that in the long run, I'm taking more than I should but it all balances it's self out. It's a constant that any person who is blind will most likely relate to. No matter what your doing, or how good you are at it, there are always times when you'll need to proov your self more than others who you work with to those who cant see far enough past the end of their nose to see that your doing the job to the same level as anyone else. Now that I've jumped through that extra hoop, things have settled down and accessibility is no longer such an issue.
• I purchased a new server just over a month ago. It's a 2900. There's around 4TB of usable disk space in it, 16GB of ram, 2 quad core processors at 2.1GHZ. It's a huge beast. In fact, I'm going to have to look at storing it somewhere else as where it currently lives is not suitable. This server generates more noise than any other I've used in the past and it can be heard almost anywhere in the house. Plans are a foot that will solve this within the next month or two. The server is currently hosting virtual machines. These are hosting My domain controler, exchange mail server, linux web server, and a lot more. There are around 8 virtual machines in total on it and there is space for more to fit easily. Over the past few months I've been porting everything over to it. It's been a very slow and difficult process but I'm very near the end now. In the past six months I've updated our home network substantially. As some of you will know, when we baught the house, I wired every room with a number of network points with Cat5E cable. Origionally, this was all connected together with an access point going to a 100MB switch. Wireless functionality was provided by the ADSL router. Now, the patch panel connects to a 48 port 1GB managed switch with POE. the broadband connection is provided by Irish broadband and I couldn't praze them highly enough. Their really fantastic. the broadband is connected directly to the server removing the need for an external router. The server contains a customized Linux installation running on Debian that only contains the required services for routing and the firewal. The wireless is now provided by a dedicated 802.1N access point. Thanks to Blueface the house now has VOIP instead of an actual phone line. This is considerably cheaper and allows international calling without needing to even consider the implications in terms of the cost. Internally, the server hosts a trixbox virtual machine. This routs calls internally to either my self or Emma depending on who the caller wants to speak to. Messages left on the answering service are even Emailed to one of us so we can respond even when we're out of the house. Thanks to the softphone software we have installed on our PC's this integrates nicely with the contacts saved on exchange. We also have a cisco VOIP phone in the living room. I've also removed the old server running Windows 2003 and created a virtual domain controler running Windows 2008. That's only scratching the surface. I've also implemented a VLAN just for servers that has IEEE-802.1X authentication installed. I've a management VLAN that has access to remotely manage and monitor the servers internally and then I've an unsecured VLAN that allows Internet access. It's all a little bit over the top for a home set up but it's been a great learning experience.
• In terms of music, I've not done a hell of a lot. I've had a at least one gig a week and I've been learning some new stuff that's not necessarily traditional. My weekly radio show Mad For Trad is still going strong on a Tuesday from 7to 9PM in Ireland.

That's all for the moment. There was a lot of technical rubbish in there too. Sorry about that. I wanted to write about that at some stage but I didn't really mean to include it in this post.

QNotifier seems to be a cool application that can report changes that may impact the performance of your Linux server right to your iPhone. If for example, the apache daemon goes down, QNotifier can be configured to notify you of this.

Installing QNotifier is a little tricky as the installation instructions are very brief.

the following commands will get QNotifier running on your Debian system. I assume this will most likely also run on Ubuntu.

Install Ruby.

apt-get update
apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev libzlib-ruby rdoc irb libopenssl-ruby rubygens

Install the update to Rubygens.

gem install rubygems-update
cd /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin
./update_rubygems

Update ruby dependencies for Qnotifier.

gem install hoe rexical racc rubyforge nokogiri archive-tar-minitar sup rails --include-dependencies

Install the QNotifier package.

gem install qnotifier

Run the package to set it up. Get the registration key from the iPhone.

/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/qnotifier

There are configuration files that can be tweeked to make the package report different information and these config packages are refereced in the short installation guide available from the QNotifier package after you install it to your iPhone.

This year Listen and learn Recordings brings you indepth coverage of Visit the Sight village 2010 page on Listen and Learn Recordings via this link.

Continuing to grow and evolve, Listen and Learn recordings now has a channel on Youtube. This allows the posting of video introductions and tutorials in a format that anyone can access. This link opens a new window in your browser.

The first video on Youtube is from sight village and introduces the Iveo hands on learning system that uses touch and sound to deliver material. It is found that using multable senses makes learning faster. This is a perfect example of this in use.

Use this link to watch the demonstration of the iVeo hands on learning system on YOutube.

The video is here for ease of access:

If you don't leave at least one comment a week,
I'm going to send jim to get you.

You don't want Jim to come.

He's dangerous.

Jim is one of those bad men you were told of when you were young.
You know. Young????????? That time when cars, electricity and the wheel had yet to be invented?
Yeah. way back then.

Weeeeeee! strong coffee is really good.

And before any of you wonder if I've completely lost my mind,

Yes.... Yes I have...

I'm standing there, just casually making a coffee.
It was actually the second coffee I'd made today but I was too busy this morning and I didn't get time to drink the first one before it got stone cold!

So... It's half three, I'm in work, making a coffee when someone comes in. We talk casually for a few minutes. During a gap in the conversation, while I'm poring from the kettle I notice he moves around to my right. Probably to get a better look to see how I'm doing it.

I know he wants to ask how do I know when I've pored enough but he doesn't. Instead, he waits until I put the kettle down and after a second, he resumes his side of the conversation.

It's kind of funny.
Of course, I don't mind anyone asking, but you know, some days, I just want to make a coffee without someone asking questions that I've answered a million times in the past. So.... Thanks. I appreciate it.

I know. I'm a terrible representative of people who are blind aren't I?

Screw it.
I don't care.

Ask if you want. Seriously, I don't mind. But I'll be just dandy if you decide to leave me too it.

I know. I'm a grumpy old fart aren't I?
Ha!

Hay. see that? it's twenty five past 4! that means I've 35 minutes left before I can leave this place.

What are you doing at 5? coming for a pint?
I asked a friend earlier but he sounded very worse for ware. OH, and then, as well as him having a hang over, his daughter woke him up at half 6...
All I can honestly say to that it.

Wait for it..........
It's nearly there.

HA!!!!!!!! ------------ HA!!!!!!!!!!

Someone asked me a Braille related question this morning.

It was hard to answer fully in Twitter so I decided to use the blog instead.

Each letter in Braille is six cells. A is one dot or cell, b is two dots, c is two different dots, d is three dots. I'll explain this in the table below.

You can see from the above table that dots 1, 2 and 3 are on the left and dots 4, 5 and 6 are on the right.

The letter d for example is made from dots 1, 4 and five as shown below:

The _ was used to show a cell that no dot has been punched through.

The space in Braille is simply a blank spot.

Here you see that dots have been punched through all six cells. The space has had no dots punched through.

Yesterday morning, the alarm went off at 6AM as usual.
I sprung out of bed, lept down the stairs with thought's of grabbing a nice coffee, having a decent shower and making the early train to work. I was going to have a nice relaxed morning while also getting into work early and catching up on a few things. The day was going to go well.

I got to the kitchen, grabbbed a cup and spoon, put the coffee in, boiled the kettle but then things took a turn for the worst.

I stood there, with both hands on the counter listening to the kettle come to the boil.

The click notified me that it was ready but my brain just couldn't wake up enough to initialize it's self and remember that Water must now go in the cup.

It was the weirdist feeling ever.

I spent what seemed like ages, just standing there trying to remember how to make a coffee.

Sleep deprevation really doesn't do me any good.

I'm glad I'm finishing this back log of work. It's starting to effect my........ What was I writing about again?

The phone keeps ringing.

ring ring.
ring ring.
Ring Ring.

But it's not you?

The phone shows:
You have
6 missed calls and
4 new messages.

But none are from you?

How can a phone that's so busy not get the one call I'm despritly waiting for?

It's stupid I know. but every time I get a call or see that I've missed one, I hope. Just for a second before kicking my self back to reality.

I hate this.

Without a guide dog to make mobility so much easier, i'm using the cain and the KSonar.

Problem is, it's actually a little more complicated and a little harder.

So, while walking with someone, it's getting too easy to just avail of their assistance.

That's not like at all. No matter who I'm with, I rather walking independently. I.e, without sighted guide.

I've been slipping lately and this has to stop.

With the last day of June, I am saying good by to this month and to this onset of lazyness.

Next month I'm going to Bermingham. It will be the first time in a very long time I've done a particularly hard journey in terms of mobility and accessibility without the dog. During no stage of this trip will I even consider taking sighted assistance. I'll follow someone, if I@m in an area that I don't know but I will not grab their elbo.

For the non-blind readers of the sight, Blind people use a technique called sighted guide when being guided by someone who can see. It basically involves holding the persons elbo. With this technique, the blind person can feel when the sighted person moves left or right or when he or she goes up or down a step etc.

So. That's it.
I will no longer be lazy.
I will reaffirm my confedance while using the cain.
I will beet people over the head who don't get out of my way.

This weeks Mad For Trad as wel as all the others can be found on the

This weeks Mad For Trad is devoted to the living memory of Clarissa Cotton. A wonderful person who's life ended far too soon.

Remember, you can subscribe to the Mad For Trad podcast using the address http://www.mushroomfm.com/madfortrad/feed Just paste that into your podcatcher of choice.

From what I gather, authenticating with an AD domain is actually not that difficult. You just need to use one reasonably straight forward command in the CLI.

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-auth --enablead --addomain mydomain.local --addc vserver.mydomain.local --krb5realm=mydomain.local --krb5kdc servername.mydomain.local --krb5adminserver vserver.mydomain.local --enablekrb5

Then just create the user and it will be authenticated against Active directory when you log in with that account.

Leave the root account intact in case you ever need to log in without your domain for some reason.

Oh. that reminds me. If you use system center but you have this machine virtualised, you will have problems if you have ESX clustered. However and your main ESX server goes down. However, if you have it set to run a number of VM's automatically when the server starts up, you can mitigate against this being a major problem in your DR plan.

I've done a few websites over the past few years. Some are coded from scratch but more recently, I've focused on drupal and even wordpress as they've catered for peoples needs.

Here are a few of the sites you can have a look at:

• Emm'as site. Actually, don't go here. she hasn't done anything with it. it's a work in progress and has been for three years now.
• Nicky Kealy. He really needs to blog more. but his website is a nice clean wordpress blog and information source.
• The Visually Impaired Computer Society of Ireland. That site took ages to create.
• Mushroom FM. The station that currently hosts Mad For Trad.
• The legend online radio station.

I've also done work such as adding the podcast feature to the website for Stuart Lawler and I've written a CMS to make it easier for the folks over at National Vibration Monitoring.

That's not an exaustive list, but it's a few to get started.

The words used were: and I quote, "Don't come unless your bringing your pipes.". So... I did.

You were expecting a big story about the weekend weren't you? Ha! tuff!

Greetings,

While installing Exchange 2010 on a Windows 2008 R2 X64 server over a remote desktop session, Jaws freezes after the first screen of the Wizzard.

No speech is heard.
The keyboard becomes unresponsive as it is like the alt key is continually pressed. this seems to relate to a previous bug that I reported in that regard.

I enlisted the assistance of someone wh can see to close Jaws however the alt key acted like it was still stuck until the jfw.exe process was stopped via the task manager.

All other applications behave correctly via mouse control when Jaws causes this issue.

Note, the wizzard for the installation of Exchange 2010 is not unlike the wizzard used for 2007. this issue can not be reproduced during the earlier version of Exchange.

The client is running Windows 7 X64.

All windows patches are applied.

The version of Jaws in use on both machines is the most recent available from the Freedomscientific web site.

I look forward to your response in relation to this.

Darragh Ó Héiligh