This is the Liturgy of the Hours for December 31. Your local date is .
Divine Office Catholic Ministry announces today that a new set of web pages is available through the DivineOffice.org website, optimised to be accessed by blind and visually impaired people.
The new accessible website features the same award winning audio production of the Liturgy of the Hours, the universal prayer of the Catholic Church, served in a bare-bones set of pages.
Some time ago, one of our community members contacted us telling that our website was very hard to browse through a Screen Reader software. We immediately reviewed the accessibility guidelines and promptly revised our home page code.
That resulted in the announcement we made some time ago, that a new version of our home page and prayer pages were available. Then, we decided to take this one step forward and created a whole new set of pages that removes all the unnecessary, distracting elements, that should work like a charm with screen reader software such as Apple’s Voice Over (which you can enable it from the System Preferences > Accessibility panel).
When the VoiceOver software loads a webpage, it will start reading through the page, from top to bottom, and will specify if the element you are on is a link or some other form of interactive content.
So we added a link at the very beginning of the page that will read “Please load this Link to access a Screen Reader Optimised Version of This Website”. This way, anyone accessing the website from such a system, will be invited to get to the accessible version of our website as soon as he/she lands on our home page.
We hope this will work for all visually impaired people in our community and would like to invite them to give us their feedback using different screen reader software applications so we can increase the usability of the service further and advance in our mission: to bring more people in prayer, always and everywhere.
You can visit the accessible version of the Liturgy of the Hours at http://divineoffice.org/accessible
For Fr Ray…… [email protected]
Robin, a priest in England, he recorded on CD the offices of Readings, morning and evening prayers from the Catholic breviary, included also are all the feast of the year, the 33 weeks of ordinary time, advent, Christmas, New year, Lent period, easter, Pentecost, etc. I purchases the discs from him and if you are interested, I can send them to you because I have copied all the offices on my Olympus digital voice recorder which I use every hour of the day when I say the various offices of the Liturgy of the Hours. These discs also contain special files to enable the user to navigate the files on a Victor reader player used by the poor vision person.
[email protected]
Ray, my friend, a Franciscan priest, has lately become severely vision impaired. Could you be so kind as to sanneoflanagan770end me a copy of your recording. He is 90, and wants to coninue to pray the Breviary. [email protected].
Thank you SO much! I am not visually impaired (beyond having nearly 60 year-old eyes!), but I do find the main site too “busy” and it can be very distracting while I am trying to pray.
I also found it hard to print out a page of the prayers for use during Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament as I have no wifi access in the Church for my Kindle and I keep my phone turned off.