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Google has announced a new initiative to increase accessibility for visually challenged users on its major Web services. In advance of the upcoming school year, Google is rolling out accessibility improvements to Docs, Sites and Calendars. Google is hosting a live webinar for enterprise customers - which include educational institutions - on Wednesday, September 21 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific time.

The enhancements include new keyboard shortcuts and enhanced screen reader support. Google says it has "worked closely with advocacy organizations for the blind to improve our products with more accessibility enhancements" over the past few months, and that more changes are on the way. "We believe that people who depend on assistive technologies deserve as rich and as productive an experience on the web as sighted users," says T.V. Raman, Google's technical lead on accessibility, "and we're working to help that become a reality."

There is a lot to be learned from our tweets. Laugh if you will. Go ahead. But Twitter has become an important historical and cultural record. It's a site for real-time news and information, to be sure. The stuff of history with a capital H. Politics. Natural disasters. Revolution. It's a site that records our cultural history as well (is that history with a lower case H?). Ashton Kutcher. Charlie Sheen. The Oscars. Lower case or capital H - these 140 character exchanges have created an invaluable record for researchers looking at history, politics, literature, sociology.

Such was the argument that Twitter made when the startup donated its archives to the Library of Congress. Tweets are important. They should be preserved, archived and accessible to scholars.

But Twitter's recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars' ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.

President Obama signed into law today the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, legislation that will help people with disabilities access and participate in the digital world.

The law establishes federal guidelines that will require the telecommunications industry to make sure that the devices they build and programs they transmit are accessible to those with hearing and vision impairments. The new law requires a number of measures including an improved UI for smart phones that includes verbal commands, captioning for online TV programming, and compatibility between Internet telephone calls and hearing aids.

We noted last year, that many believe U.S. President Obama's push for governmental transparency has been a failure. Whether that's true, the overall tendency toward access continues to gather momentum.

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

One of the lingering problems with adoption of cloud computing has been the issue of facilitating access - both for the end-user and for the IT professional.

In a move that addresses these concerns, Amazon Web Services announced yesterday that it had added support for Bucket Policies. These policies will provide a single mechanism for managing access to the Amazon S3 buckets and for the objects stored in them. These policies are expressed using Amazon's Access Policy Language, which will centralize and refine permissions management.

Journalism has always been about reporting facts and assertions and making sense of world affairs. No news there. But as we move further into the 21st century, we will have to increasingly rely on "data" to feed our stories, to the point that "data-driven reporting" becomes second nature to journalists.

The shift from facts to data is subtle and makes perfect sense. You could that say data are facts, with the difference that they can be computed, analyzed, and made use of in a more abstract way, especially by a computer.

France's highest court, the Constitutional Council, ruled that access to the internet is a "fundamental human right" this week in striking down a controversial "three strikes" anti-piracy law called Loi Hadopi, according to a report today from the UK Daily Mail. Were such an opinion agreed upon by other governments around the world, the implications would be striking.