vdebolt, Author at Web Teacher

The Future will be Captioned – On Your iPhone – Maybe

There’s a new free app called Clear Captions. It captions phone calls. It works with a phone and an Internet-connected computer, but it can also be downloaded as an app on iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone. When I heard about it and checked out clearcaptions.com, I thought it was worth a look. If it’s as accessible as the PR leads you to believe, it should be a great app.

I downloaded the iPhone app from iTunes and took a look. Here’s the sign up screen. I decided against Facebook, and created a new account. They wanted my full name and address and a password.

You enter the number you’re calling and your own number, and the call goes through a computer system. That part seems pretty obvious.

I got voice mail for the person I called, you can see the captioned version of that. Later I received a voice mail on my own phone that sounded like a recording of my call to the other number. When I talked to her a bit later, she said she also got a voicemail of her own voicemail message.

It wasn’t at all clear how to press 5 to leave a message, or even how to hang up. Plus, there was no way to put the call on speaker so I could hear and read at the same time. In fact, even with my ear to the phone, I didn’t hear a thing.

Since I considered the first call a fail – not because I got voice mail, but because I couldn’t operate my phone like I was on a call with hearing, talking, and using the number pad – I went to Clear Captions and looked at the Help information. Here’s their video on how to make a call.

That was what I did, but my results weren’t the same. Then I saw a Help video on making a call from a cell phone. Here it is.

Okay, so I need a bluetooth earpiece or earbuds. I got some ear buds ready. Plus, the call apparently should be made from the Phone app rather than from the Clear Captions app. I tried that – made a normal call. The person I was calling answered this time. The results were normal, no captions. I clicked the home screen during the call and opened the Clear Captions app while we were talking to see if there were captions, but there were not.

By then, I’d run out of Help videos from the site and still hadn’t made a satisfactory call that got captioned.

I didn’t try making a call from my computer using the Clear Captions web site.

I did go back to the Clear Captions app, thinking I’d try again with the app while wearing the earbuds. I couldn’t get rid of the screen showing the captions from the voice mail connection I’d made. I couldn’t enter new numbers to make a new call. I completely shut down my iPhone and restarted it after 5 minutes or so. After the reboot, the Clear Captions opening screen was the one where I could make a call. Rebooting the phone after every call is clearly not a satisfactory option.

After the reboot, I tried again from the Clear Captions app. The pesky screen was gone and we were back to the call screen. This time, when I hit call, it sent me to my Phone app and MY phone rang. When I answered it, it was my call going through to my friend. When she answered, a popup asked me if I wanted to view the call with captions. I said yes. There were captions, but if I were depending on them to make sense of the conversation, they would not have been satisfactory. You can see that it’s garbled. Parts of that are her statements, parts are mine. You can’t tell them apart. She said, “Is it working,” and “Paused” came out as Caused and many many words were left out completely.

After that I called my long suffering friend one more time. From my Phone app as the Help video says to do. This time, there was no pop up offering me the option to see captions and it went through as a normal voice call.

You can’t use it on an incoming call yet.

I don’t want to give up on this app, because I think it is important to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Nevertheless, I can’t report a good experience with it. It either doesn’t work as advertised, or the instructions on how to make it work are terribly inadequate. I support what they are doing at Clear Captions, and hope they will continue to make improvements.

My advice, if you really need it and want to start using it right now, is to ask the person you call to speak slowly and to reboot your phone after you install the app. Make the call from the Clear Captions app, not from the Phone app.

Useful links: Content First, Web Power Tales

Read this: Content First. Why? Because you’ll learn about current changes and trends in web design that are important to you.

danah boyd had a problem: Tumblr disappeared me. She wrote about it on her blog and within hours, Tumblr heard about it and responded.

Tumblr called me, apologized & restored my account. More details from our call on my blog: http://bit.ly/iwcUue More reflections tomorrow!Thu Apr 28 03:05:49 via webdanah boyd
zephoria

Stubbornella mentioned on Twitter that she would like a tool to automate CSS 3 Gradients. You’ll love her tale of what happened next.

ADDENDUM 4/29/2011: Today danah boyd posted a thorough and thoughful post about the rights to names/brands at A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space.

Phoebe Snow

One of the first web sites I ever made was a fan site about Phoebe Snow. I’ve maintained it for over 15 years out of love for her voice and her songs. I’m very sad to say that Phoebe Snow died yesterday. Here’s a brief tribute to a voice that inspired my earliest efforts at creating web pages.

Essential Resources for HTML5

If you’re learning HTML5 – or teaching it – here are some resources that can help you keep up with the latest news and learn how to make it work.

Check the Web Teacher Tips page right here for my posts on HTML5.

Tips For Choosing A Search Friendly Domain Name

domain names

One thing that many people do not think about when they choose a domain name is whether it is search engine friendly. However, if you are starting a business then you will need to ensure that your website is easy enough to find. After all, the easier the site is to find the more potential customers you are likely to receive.

The good news is, there is very rarely a terribly bad domain name. Some may be a little more search friendly than others, but even if you have chosen a more difficult one then it isn’t the end of the world. There are things that you can do to improve how easy it is to find. Most people opt for a brand-specific domain name. However, you could also choose a keyword driven domain name instead.

Choosing a Keyword Driven Domain Name

Ideally you want to choose an exact-match domain name. This means that a URL has a character for character match of a certain keyword. These types of domain names are pushed high up the search engine rankings. In order to produce an exact match domain name you will need to follow particular criteria. These include:

No Hyphens
Have a .Com .Net or .Org Domain Extension
Identical Spelling and Word Order

You will find that extensions which feature do-com are far more popular than others. They are considered to be more credible and if you plan on selling the website it will have more value than other extensions too. If you use extensions such as .US, .Info or .Edu then they will not always produce high SEO results.

When you are creating a domain name you should try to avoid Hyphens. A domain name which features a hyphen is not an exact match domain name. If you find that the domain name that you want is taken then there are ways to make it unique without placing an hyphen between the words. For example, if your exact match domain name would have been Redial.Com, you could add words such as “Top” or “Best” to increase its popularity and to make it unique.

You will also need to make sure that the spelling of the domain name matches the keyword. For example, it should have the same spelling and be in the same order as the keyword that you are targeting. HairdressingTools.com for example will target Hairdressing Tools. If you were to choose a domain name such as HairdresingTools.com then the spelling error would affect your search engine ranking.

Finding the Best Keywords

One of the best tricks that you can use to get a good exact match domain name is to search for relevant keywords. You can do this through Google Keywords. Use the keywords that you want to target. Once you have typed those keywords in you will be able to see which ones have a .org, .com or a .net extension. Next you should download all of the keywords into a Excel document. Under the keyword tool you should find the word “Download”. Select all from the list and an Excel spreadsheet will open.

Once you have the keywords you can use the most popular ones in a bulk domain search tool. This will tell you which keywords you should use for your domain that is currently not already taken.

Overall creating an exact match domain name can be frustrating but it will help you to improve your search rankings. It is important to make your site as easy as possible to find. Why not follow the above advice and create an exact-match domain name now?

This guest post is by Lior who is an advisor to an applicant tracking software company and also works with an MA in Israel program.

Hypermile your CSS

Have you heard these rules for best practices in web design?

Keep your HTML as lean as possible – stick with plain old semantic HTML (POSH)
Put all your presentation rules in the CSS

Well, it’s possible to do #2 while failing at #1. That’s because of a condition known as classitis. Classitis is a condition in which your HTML is cluttered up with multiple classes when just one would do the trick. Classitis happens when the class attribute gets attached to the wrong element in your HTML.

An example of classitis

Look at this code. The purpose is to style the contents of a blockquote to look a particular way.

<blockquote> <p class="pullout">Yakkity yak, don't look now but this is classitis.</p> <p class="pullout">Yakkity yak, don't look now but this is classitis.</p> <p class="pullout">Yakkity yak, don't look now but this is classitis.</p> </blockquote>

Notice the class applied to each paragraph in the blockquote? That’s a bit of overkill that adds a class rule into your HTML in three places, when only one would be enough.

Hypermile that class

You can make the same thing happen more efficiently and with leaner HTML. Here’s how.

<blockquote class="pullout"> <p>Yakkity yak, this blockquote is lean and mean.</p> <p>Yakkity yak,this blockquote is lean and mean.</p> <p>Yakkity yak,this blockquote is lean and mean.</p> </blockquote>

Apply the class to the parent or container element – in this case the <blockquote>. The results will be the same as if you had applied the class to every individual element within that container.

The same kind of thinking would apply if you were styling a list. Apply the class to the <ul> or <ol> element, not to each individual <li>. If you were styling text in a <div>, <article> or <section>, apply the class to the parent element rather than to child elements like paragraphs within a div or article.

Looking for advice on the WordPress Automatic Updater Plugin

I use the WordPress Automatic updater on this blog and it works great.

I’m trying to install it on another blog and it just completely hoses the site every time I try it. I know the developer has some sort of setup where you can ask questions, but everything about the developer’s devotion to this plug-in looks out of date. Suggestions from my web hosting company only made things worse.

The new blog is on the same type server, installed in the same way, with similar settings, permissions, etc. Can anybody with some WordPress expertise offer some advice about what my problem might be?