*Site News Deals, Sales, and News

Blind Bargains will be attending the 9th annual Assistive Technology Industry Association conference in Orlando, Florida and providing news and interviews throughout the conference. Check back through the week for product announcements, hands-on impressions, and audio interviews with some of the biggest names in the assistive technology arena. Watch Blind Bargains for much more as the conference nears. If you represent a company and will be attending ATIA, please contact us if you would like to be a part of our podcasts. The ATIA conference runs from January 30 through February 2.

We're always looking for new ways to help you find the best deals and learn about products and services. Now, you can visit and post in our forums to do that and more. Post reviews of your favorite hardware and software, request information on products or deals, or post interesting news. Registration is completely free. Use the link on this post or the forums link on the top of any page. There may be a few kinks, so let us know if you have any problems.

The deadline is fast approaching for nominations for the first ever Blind Bargains Access Awards. You can submit nominations for any or all of the ten categories ranging from best new product or innovation to best website for the blind (Blind Bargains isn't eligible). Nomination submissions are due on January 14 at 5 PM Eastern.

You can now subscribe to our RSS feed directly from Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox. In Firefox, for example, use the subscribe to this page option from the bookmarks menu. Thanks to Wayne Merritt for the tip.

From all of us at Blind Bargains, have a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and a festive holiday season. We'll be celebrating along with you over the holidays, so updates will be a bit less frequent. Thanks for a great year, and we wish you the best for 2008!

We've fixed some validation errors with our RSS feed, which especially affected Internet Explorer 7. If you've been having problems with our feed, please try it again. This exercise also reminded us of Feed Validator, a free RSS and Atom validation tool for webmasters. We've linked to it from this post. Thanks to Michael McCarty of the Fred's Head Companion for the heads up.

As a reminder, you can subscribe for free to our Daily Deals email newsletter. You'll receive a daily message with our latest deals including links to jump directly to the site. We've now moved the list to new software for more stability and improved the format based on user feedback. You can subscribe and unsubscribe at any time. Follow the link on this post to join the list. Of course, if you're reading this in our newsletter, you've got nothing to do except tell your friends.

Thanks for visiting us during our Black Friday coverage. Our site saw a huge spike in traffic on Friday, making it the single most popular day ever for the site. But, it's not over yet. Cyber Monday sales are on now,and we'll be sure to post the latest and greatest online sales as we learn about them. Happy holidays.

We've had some questions from people looking for our Daily Deals newsletter. If you wish to subscribe, we've added the link under the other features list on the home page. Or, just select the link on this post.

We've added a new page with information for advertisers. If you represent a company
or organization and wish to advertise on Blind Bargains, check out the new page for
more information.

Are you a person that loves to scour the net for deals and news? Do you want money? Since you probably answered yes to both of these questions, check the link on this post for information on our new Best Deal contest, where you could win a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate. The contest ends November 15.

If you use a screen reader, we've changed the way to jump between headlines. Formerly, you would use the H key to jump from heading to heading. We've now changed this to the A key for next and previous anchor. Why? Because we feel that the H key should be reserved for actual headings. Our subsections like "Most popular Deals" and "other Features" were hard to get to because they were buried amongst many headings. Hopefully you should now be able to jump through the list of deals or the headings on the page, all with simple commands. If you have any ideas for accessibility improvements, let us know using the link on this post.

We're testing a new page which lets
you search the entire inventory for many online stores from one page. Go to our new
merchant search portal to find search boxes for several online stores. Let us know
what you think.

We've created another way for you to keep up with the latest deals and news posted to the site. Subscribe to our Daily Deals email newsletter. You'll receive a daily message with our latest deals including links to jump directly to the site. You can subscribe and unsubscribe at any time. Follow the link on this post to join the list.

Thanks to all who applied for our position post from Saturday. We'll have more updates soon. Thanks again.

As you've probably noticed, we've been quite busy lately, which has sadly left this site without many updates. So, we're hiring. We are looking for a person to write deals for the site. You will be responsible for posting roughly 3-5 deals a day and may be asked to help with other projects. The ideal candidate must possess excellent writing skills and pay attention to detail. We will provide you with tools for finding deals to post and help you along the way. If interested, use the contact form on our website and include your name, age, location, contact information, and why you think you would be good for the position. We will follow-up with further questions. We look forward to hearing from you.

We would like to apologize for the lack of posts over the past week. In a word, exams. We hope to return to a more regular schedule later in the week. If you have any deals to submit, please send them in and we'll consider posting them.

Watch Blind Bargains through next week for coverage of the Center on Disabilities 2007 Technology Persons with Disabilities Conference (CSUN). We don't exactly have money in the budget to fly there ourselves, but we'll keep you updated with the latest product announcements, company news, and demonstrations. We'll also link to the most interesting content provided by other sources, the ones that will actually be there. If you are planning on attending and wish to help with our coverage, or if you have CSUN news or press releases to share, please contact us. CSUN is March 19-24 in Los Angeles.

We have added a new feature to the site which lets people sell their used high-tech and low-tech items. Check out the Attic, the first store in the Blind Bargains Flea Market. Included are several notetakers, a braille embosser, and speech synthesizer. More items will be posted in the coming weeks.

Starting Monday, it's the Blind Bargains Phone Week. Each day, we'll feature a different accessible cell phone. Since most of our readers already have a cell phone plan, we'll be featuring unlocked versions of these phones, meaning that they do not require a new contract to activate. There are now many accessible cell phone options to choose from, so check back all next week to help make your decision a bit easier.