Blind people browse the web using assisting software. But they are available only in developed countries. The cost of these softwares is very high and its very difficult for an average visually challenged Indian to buy and use.

Nethrodaya cyber cafe uses JAWS as the screen reader software to assist the visually challenged people to browse the web and operate other computer applications.

Sify has joined its hands with the cafe and provides free unlimited data transfer for this cyber cafe.

Nethrodaya is founded by C. Govindakrishnan. He was born with visual impairment. He founded the Nethrodaya Organiztion on October 2, 2002 with a vision to create a suitable environment for nurturing the abilities and talents of the visually impaired.

This is a great step and they are planing to launch similar cyber cafes in other cities.

Can you imagine a day without Internet? We use Internet for our assignments, projects, research and we learn more from Internet than reading books. But it is very difficult for blind or visually challenged people to browse the web as we do very easily. They have every right to access information as we have. These kind of initiatives will definitely help them.

If you are really interested to see how visually challenged people browse the web, see the following article.
Screen Readers and Web Accessibility: Must Watch Video by Yahoo Engineer

The bug is actually in the message displaying page. The messages in users inbox in Orkut are displayed using a GET URL. An example URL is given below.

http://www.orkut.com/Messages.aspx?msg=U0021321099%2FIB%2F0967206640%2FU0021321099&fld=IB&debug=&na=3&nid=U0021321099%2FIB%2F0966619098%2FU0032854730&nst=21

If you are logged into Orkut you can read a message I have sent to a community, just by visiting the above link. You can view the message till I delete it from my inbox or till the bug is fixed. This is the case for any of the messages in your Orkut inbox. If someone can get the URL of the message they can read the message even though the message is not from their inbox.

How did I find it?

One of the Orkut users has sent a message to his friends where he has put a link to one of my websites. When checking full referrer logs of my website I happened to see a URL something like the above mentioned one. Out of curiosity I opened it and was able to read the message which I am not supposed to see.

Ok, you might ask me how one can guess a complex URL and see someone else’s message.To make the issue simpler, the message URLs are actually stored in the history of the web browser, because they are simple GET requests from the browser. So, all the messages read on a particular computer can be accessed using the history of the web browser. You can read the messages using the links from the history even though the messages are not from your inbox.

Personally I think this is a serious issue that needs to be fixed. A lot of users in India use Orkut from public internet cafes. If the browser history is not cleared, then anyone can read the Orkut messages you have read on a particular computer. Though users may not exchange potential information using Orkut messages, this bug needs to be fixed because this is not an expected behavior for any website.

If we go into technical details of the bug, from my experience this happens when you don’t put a check on the message being shown is intended for the user who is viewing or not. May be for some programming ease Orkut developers might have neglected this.

What can we learn from this?

1. Every personal information that is shown to the user like messages should be validated. For example, in this case, you should check whether the message being shown is actually intended for the user or not?
2. Always remember that the GET URLs are stored in the browser history and its not safe to exchange any important parameters using GET URLs.
3. Always develop the code for security and not for the ease of development.
4. Finally always clear browser history if you are accessing Internet from a public computer.

I have notified Orkut about this and waiting to hear from them. I will update the post after I get the response from them and I hope they don’t sue for writing this article!

Link to the video: An Introduction to Screen Readers - Video by Yahoo Engineer

Victor Tsaran is an accessibility engineer at Yahoo! who focuses on developing best practices for the creation of websites that work well with screen readers.

Voila! Google again switches gears ahead of its competitors( did I hear you saying MicroSoft ). Google has released a new browser plug-in “Google Gears” on May 30, 2007, which will enable offline access to web applications.

This will address the main problem faced by web applications which can not be used when you are not connected to the Internet.

To put it in simpler terms, let us take an example.

Almost everyone of us use one or another email like Yahoo, Google etc. You can use any of these applications only when you are connected to the Internet. By using Google Gears now developers can develop these applications in such a way that you can read your emails even when you are offline. The messages are downloaded to your local computer and stored in a database. You can read and search these emails without an internet connection.

This new technology will change the way the web is used. First Google product to use this technology is Google’s RSS reader. If you have installed Google Gears, you can download latest 2,000 items so they’re available even when you don’t have an internet connection.

From Google Gear Blog:

“Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone. We also want to get early feedback, community involvement, and rapid iterations.”

So, Google Gears is going to change the way we use the web today. It will take some time to move out of Beta and open for developers to start using it in production environments.

I am going to experiment with it some time soon and publish an example article here.

1. Include a script just before the closing of the body element.
2. Create an image element and append it to the body. I have used an image with 223px width and 1px height. 223px is a random value. You can use any width of your choice but I suggest using a random number greater than 100.
3. Use some CSS to hide or pull the image away from view port.
4. Attach an onload event to the body to check the width of the image element we have created.
5. If the width is same 223px, we can conclude that images are enabled other wise images are disabled.

Example Page.

Following source code listing has inline documentation.

Download the JavaScript file.

1. if( document.getElementById && document.createElement ) {
2. //Create and append an image element.
3. var img = document.createElement("img");
4. img.id = "detect-img";
5. img.src="images/tiny-detect.gif" mce_src="images/tiny-detect.gif" ;
6. document.body.appendChild(img);
7. }
8. function checkImagesEnabled() {
9. //Check the offsetWidth of the created image element
10. if( document.getElementById("detect-img").offsetWidth == 223 ) {
11. alert("Images are Enabled in your Browser Settings.");
12. } else alert("Images are NOT Enabled in your Browser Settings.");
13. //Remove the image element.
14. document.body.removeChild(document.getElementById("detect-img"));
15. }
16. /* Adding onload funcions. Learnt from Dom Scripting book. Thanks Jeremy For such a wonderful book. Website http://domscripting.com */
17. function addLoadEvent(func) {
18. var oldonload = window.onload;
19. if (typeof window.onload != 'function') {
20. window.onload = func;
21. } else {
22. window.onload = function() {
23. oldonload();
24. func();
25. }
26. }
27. }
28. // If the image is created add an onload event to check whether images are enabled or not.
29. if(document.getElementById("detect-img")) {
30. addLoadEvent(checkImagesEnabled);
31. }

Finally the css for the image is as follows.

1. #detect-img {
2. position: absolute;
3. top: 0px;
4. left: -200000px;
5. z-index: -1000;
6. }

Tested in: Windows: IE5.5, IE6, FireFox 2, Opera 9.10

I would love to hear from you about the technique and I am sure we may refine it further.

Believe me, I have read this book in a single day. Once I started reading it in the morning, I couldn’t stop in between and read the book from end to end.
I think this is one of the best technical books I have ever read.

The author Jeremy Keith has a solid approach to make sure that you learn the fundamentals of DOM and then shows you how DOM can help you in increasing the usability of your website. He explains you how to separate structure from behavior. Once you have completed this book you will never ever write “onclick”, “onmouehover” “javascript:functioncall” and etc… in your HTML markup.

You don’t need to know much about JavaScript to understand this book, there is a refresher chapter on JavaScript too.

He explains all the concepts in DOM using Photo Gallery script. In every chapter you will refine the code written in the previous chapter and at the end of the book you know how to build a real world Photo Gallery script. You will wonder how easy it is to produce simple animations in JavaScript with few lines of code.

Stop, Hey did I hear you saying “JavaScript is not accessible”?…. If you read this book you will learn how easy it is to make JavaScript accessible.

Book’s Website: Dom Scripting Book

I would give 10/10 for this book.

After reading this book I have implemented a small widget for this blog. You can see it in action on the home page. This widget will create a list of links to all posts on the home page and gives the user a quick way to jump to the interesting post. A simple JavaScript hook has done all the work for me. No extra markup or no need to change the structure of my xHTML markup.
Hope you enjoyed reading this review.

I always used to browse the net using my unlimited GPRS connection and never bothered about the bandwidth I am consuming. But I had a broad band connection with 1GB/Month data transfer limit at home for about two months. During that time, I realized that the widgets on every blog consume some bandwidth for me which is a point that never bothered me when I was working on an unlimited internet connection.

There are so many good things about these widgets as they really help you to explore the web for similar content or helps you to find people with similar interests. But what if I don’t like a particular widget and I don’t want to see it on any blog or web site I visit. Wouldn’t it be good and save some bandwidth for you?

These days lots of blogs are using preview widgets which will show you a preview image of the actual page or home page of the web site when you hover on a link in the blog? Wouldn’t it be nice if you provide the user with a way to disable this? Of course, I noticed in TechCrunch that the Snap preview tool uses a clever technique where it adds a small icon kind of image right to the links, and when you hover on this image you will get a snapshot image of the link. As long as you hover on the text of the link you don’t get a preview. I really like this method where the user has more control over the widget and can see the preview if he wishes to.

These are my random thoughts about the widgets. But I strongly feel widgets really help us a lot in exploring the web, but there should be a way to turn them off if the user doesn’t like the widget. Of course why should my browser be forced to download some JavaScript files and images which are of no use for me?

What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts about the widgets and I know I may not be the first blogger to write about this topic.

Have you ever wanted to see how your website looks for a mobile phone user? You might actually wanted to see it but could not get a right mobile phone with internet access. No problems!! You don’t need a phone to see your website’s look and feel for mobile users!!There are online emulators to do this task for you. Just enter the url of your website or any other website and you are done, you can see a complete mobile version of your site and you can navigate through your pages as if you are using an actual mobile phone. You should use a java enabled browser to get this functionality working!

There are two emulators Nokia n70 and Sony Ericsson K750i available at .mobi website.

Link: Mobile Emulator at .mobi website

OperaMini is the web browser for small screen devices. You can download it and install on your Java enabled phone. You can visit OperaMini website for more details and mobile phone support. If you don’t have a mobile which can work with OperaMini, you can simulate it online using their simulator.

Link: OperaMini Simulator

The image shows WebGeekBlog in OperaMini Simulator. WebGeekBlog mobile is Beta right now. I am planning to develop a complete mobile version using XHTML mobile profile.

There are few other emulators which you can download and install on your computer to test your site.

Personally I feel mobile web is going to rock in the near future. So be prepared to take your sites mobile!