Universalis is responsible for distributing criminal content on an international scale. Apart from places such as China and Pakistan, Universalis also helps anti-social elements in Malaysia to subvert the law, as this testimonial shows.

People using AvantGo to read Universalis on the Pocket PC have been complaining that AvantGo makes the Universalis page slightly too wide for the screen, so that you have to keep on scrolling left and right as you read each line.

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From time to time someone notices that a reading on Universalis is different from a reading in a book or on some other site. I thought I’d gather together the commonest reasons for this happening.

1. Mistakes

It’s possible that I have made a mistake or have typed something in wrongly. This becomes less likely as the years go on, because the readings are generated automatically from a permanent database: so if someone discovered an error back in 1999 and pointed it out, it will have been corrected in 1999 and will never occur again. But I am sure that there are still quite a few mistakes there that no-one has yet noticed or reported! If you think you have found a mistake then please let me know.

Other people can make mistakes too. For instance, this year one reader pointed out a difference between the Office of Readings psalms for the Friday after Ash Wednesday in Universalis (psalm 77(78)) and the printed “St Joseph’s Guide” (psalm 54(55)). In fact psalm 77(78) is used in Advent, Christmastide, Lent and Eastertide, and psalm 54(55) at all other times. The compiler of this year’s St Joseph’s Guide must have thought that Lent started only on the First Sunday of Lent: but both the Latin and the English breviaries agree that Lent starts on Ash Wednesday.

2. Allowable variations

On most saints’ days it is allowable either to use the readings of the saint or the readings of the day. The exceptions are (a) during high seasons such as Advent, when the readings of the day must be used, and (b) when the saint’s day has a high rank (feast or solemnity).

In most cases when there is a choice, Universalis uses the saint’s readings. Quite often parish priests take the opposite approach. This is one of the cases where you may find that Universalis and your priest disagree but both are right.

3. The third, fourth and fifth Mondays in Lent

On the third Sunday in Lent, the Gospel reading is of the Samaritan woman (the “living water” passage from John).

Because of the rule that all Sunday readings should change on a three-year cycle, this reading occurs only in Year A. Because it is such an important reading and should not be omitted even in Years B and C, the Missal contains “alternative readings” for the third week of Lent, which contain exactly this Gospel. It strongly recommends that the alternative readings should be used on one day in the third week in Years B and C, so that the “living water” passage is not forgotten.

Universalis follows this recommendation by using the alternative readings for Monday of the third week of Lent. Other authorities may do it on a different day in that week, or may not do it at all (since it is, after all, only a recommendation).

Exactly the same thing happens in the fourth week of Lent, when the Gospel for Year A is the story of the man born blind (the “I am the light of the world” passage from John), and in the fifth week, when it is the story of the woman caught in adultery.

This is another case where Universalis can disagree with other sources but both can still be right.

Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer have short scripture readings in addition to the psalms: these are now included in the Universalis pages for those hours.

The About Today page contains three short scripture readings for different times of the day. We have taken these from the hours of Terce, Sext and None. Those hours aren’t available on the web site yet, but it seemed worthwhile to give you the readings at least.

Adding these involved extracting and checking 487 passages from the Jerusalem Bible: as usual, this turned out to be a mixture of tedium and enlightenment!

Universalis now has the local calendar for southern Africa (thanks to prompting from Father Chris Townsend at the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference) and I've taken the opportunity to bring the Australian and New Zealand calendars up to date.

If anyone can get information about the local calendars for Canada, India and Scotland, please let me know!

If you are blind and you are using a screen reader to read this post, you will also be able to read the main Universalis web pages without trouble, but up to now you will not have had access to the downloadable Universalis, a version that saves you from constantly having to connect to the Internet to get the latest psalms and readings.

The downloadable Universalis can now work with screen readers. When the program detects that a screen reader is present it switches itself to a special mode that makes the Hours visible to the screen reader software. That mode is also designed to be easier to control if you can't see what you are doing. You can read the instructions for using Universalis in this mode here.

We have tested this mode with both the JAWS and Window-Eyes screen readers. We are grateful to Rebecca DeGeorge, whose questions about screen readers prompted us to add this feature.