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Author Archives: Cory Bohon

May 23, 2012, 8:00 am

Create Markdown Documents in the Cloud with WikiPack

By Cory Bohon

Wikis are great tools to share and collaborate, but many of the wiki services are far from user-friendly, and sometimes you don’t want to share your wiki with everyone. If only there was a wiki tool that could create pages using the awesome Markdown language, and store the documents in Dropbox for safe keeping. Luckily, a new tool called WikiPack can do just that, and then some.

WikiPack uses Markdown and WikiWords to create a private wiki that is stored and accessed from your Dropbox account. The easy to use and powerful Markdown language lets you easily create and edit your pages without knowing any strange wiki syntax.

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May 14, 2012, 8:00 am

Tweetster for WordPress and Omeka

By Cory Bohon

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published several posts about WordPress and Omeka, two great content management systems designed to make it easy for you to publish and organize your online content. How you let readers know when you publish new content, however, is up to you. One strategy is to use social networks like Twitter to send out short blurbs about new posts. However, managing an online profile and manually sending out these updates can be time consuming. While some Twitter plugins already exist for WordPress to Tweet automatically a link to a new post, I haven’t found one that worked especially well. And as far as I could tell, there was no such plugin for Omeka. Until now.

They say that if you want something done right you should do it yourself. So I created a Twitter plugin for WordPress and Omeka and called it Tweetster.

Tweetster was born out of necessity. Managing multiple …

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May 9, 2012, 8:00 am

Digital Distraction: Honey Badger Don’t Care

By Cory Bohon

As the end of the semester is upon us, it is important to take some time and refresh your mind. This weekend, having just this last week completed my undergraduate studies, I’ll be doing that by playing the “Honey Badger Don’t Care” game for iOS.

By this point, you might have already seen the YouTube videos in which Christopher Gordon provides comedic narration over National Geographic videos of wild animals. His most famous video, “The Honey Badger” (NSFW language), has over 43 million views.

This video has became so popular that there is now an iPhone/iPod Touch game called “Honey Badger Don’t Care.” The premise of the game is to see how many days you (as the honey badger) can survive in the desert by hunting various animals and completing tasks, such as eating 25 mice or scorpions in a single level (or “day”).

Honey Badger Video Game Screenshot

You accomplish the tasks by moving the honey badger around…

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October 17, 2011, 8:00 am

Accessibility Features of iOS 5

By Cory Bohon

Apple users have long known about the company’s commitment to accessibility in most (if not all) of its devices.

In iOS 5–the latest version of the operating system used by the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod Touch–Apple has provided even more accessibility features for their mobile platform. Apple’s attention to built-in accessibility features allows people with disabilities to use these products right out of the box instead of needing to purchase costly accessibility software.

With the current release of iOS 5, Apple has added the following features:

  • Text Size Changes
  • Speak Selection
  • Hearing Aid Mode
  • Custom Vibrations
  • LED Flash for Alerts
  • Mono Audio
  • Incoming Call Route
  • Assistive Touch

The last of these new features is really amazing, so let’s take a look at Assistive Touch in a little more detail. These accessibility features really can help anyone, not …

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August 15, 2011, 8:00 am

New Accessibility Features in Mac OS X Lion

By Cory Bohon

LionApple has always made accessibility one of their top priorities when it comes to the Mac, and more recently the iPhone and iPad. As a Mac user would come to expect, when Mac OS X Lion was recently released, there were a few new accessibility features that made the upgrade process even better for users with motor, visual, and hearing impairments.

In Mac OS X Lion, Apple has added over 11 new features that allow individuals with disabilities to use their computers more easily.

Built-in Voices
VoiceOver (Apple’s built-in screen reader) now includes new built-in voices that can speak 22 different languages: Arabic, English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Turkish, Cantonese, Mandarin (China), and Mandarin (Taiwan).

In addition, …

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June 14, 2011, 11:00 am

Omeka Gets Access Keys Plugin

By Cory Bohon

Just a few months ago, I wrote a post introducing a plugin I developed that allows anyone to make their WordPress site more accessible and easier to navigate. [Note: like almost all WordPress plugins, this one works if you're hosting your own site but not if your site is hosted by WordPress.com.] This plugin–which is listed in the WordPress.org plugin directory–makes it easy to specify keyboard shortcuts for built-in WordPress functions and for access to other internal or external pages.

Access keys, as you may already know, are an example of universal design: they make a site easier to navigate not only for people who are blind or have low vision but for all people (provided they can use a keyboard).

But I couldn’t just stop with WordPress. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working to create a plugin with the same functions for Omeka, a content management system for…

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May 13, 2011, 11:00 am

Microsoft Bing Brings Voice Search and More to the iPad

By Cory Bohon

A few weeks ago, Microsoft ventured into iPad apps for the first time with the release of Bing for iPad. Bing, Microsoft’s ever-growing search engine, is definitely one of the most well-designed and beautiful search applications on iOS devices. It’s been around for a while on iPhone and iPod touch, but brings something new to the iPad: Voice search.

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April 21, 2011, 11:00 am

The Pomodoro Technique: A Student’s Point of View

By Cory Bohon

Task List ImageLast month we wrote about the time-boxing method of time management called “The Pomodoro Technique.” The basics of this technique are that you break all of your work sessions into 25-minute chunks, separated by regular short breaks (and, less frequently, a longer break).

Following this post, we decided to test out this time management technique to see how (or if) it worked for us. George has already tried it out from a professor’s perspective, and in this post I’ll be letting you know how it went from a student’s point of view in this post.

Here are some observations that I made when I first started using The Pomodoro Technique:

  • Like George, I discovered that my tasks often don’t fit into 25-minute sections.
  • Many times, a student is faced with getting an assignment completed in one sitting, which makes the Pomodoro Technique useless.
  • And finally, as a student, you don’t…

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April 12, 2011, 8:00 am

How to Create Accessible Microsoft Office Files

By Cory Bohon

Accessible Office Documents PictureWhenever you are creating content for mass consumption (be it students, co-workers, or the Web), you should consider the accessibility of what you are creating. For example, if your content has audio, have you created a transcript or captions so that deaf people can access it? If your content has important visual information, have you formatted this information in a way that is compatible with the assistive technology used by people who are blind or have low vision?

Microsoft Office files are the predominant document types handled by individuals in both academia and the corporate world. Files with .doc/docx, .ppt/pptx, and .xls/xlsx are a proprietary format, so how can you guarantee the accessibility of these files when sharing with others? As it turns out, the newest versions of Office are accessibility-friendly, allowing you to create accessible content. Furthermore, these versions …

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March 29, 2011, 8:00 am

Access Keys: A WordPress Plugin to Improve Accessibility

By Cory Bohon

Over the past two years, Dr. Williams and I have been working on research concerning accessible design and digital resources. Accessible design is what makes it possible for people with disabilities to use digital resources as fully as people without disabilities do. Just over a year ago, I started development on a few plugins for Omeka, the content management system for scholarly collections (and a ProfHacker favorite). My goal has been to create plugins that would make it easy for administrators of Omeka-powered collections to increase the accessibility of their sites for end users.

One of these Omeka plugins, called Access Keys, allows site administrators to specify access keys (or keyboard shortcuts) for navigating around Omeka. People who are blind do not navigate Web sites through a graphical user interface; they usually rely exclusively on their keyboard. Access keys are…

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