[gui-talk] Fwd: Article: Are the blind in a bind?

[Steve Pattison]

>From: Susan Thompson susan at sthompson.net
>To: BITS LIST bits at acb.org
  Daily Herald, Everett WA, USA
  Sunday, February 11, 2007

  Are the blind in a bind?

  By Brian Bergstein, Associated Press

  An IBM initiative is making strides in helping decipher Web site
  information for the blind

  WESTFORD, Mass. - Cynthia Ice is blind and lives in the suburbs, so
  shopping on the Internet can make her routine easier. But it also leads
  her into odd dead ends - like the time a technical shift in a Web grocery
  site made its meat department inaccessible to her screen-reading software.

  "Everybody could go on the Atkins diet but me," she joked.

  Such troubles are especially common for computer users with disabilities
  as the Web takes on many features that make sites appear more like dynamic

  programs than static documents.

  While that design trend gives many people more engaging Web experiences,
  good old static documents can be much easier for screen-reading software
  to decipher and narrate to the blind. Such software has trouble
  interpreting newer "Web 2.0" features, such as text that pops up without a

  mouse click, or data that automatically update in real time.

  "The new technology being implemented poses even more of a threat to the
  small accessibility wins we have made," Steven Tyler, who heads disability

  access services at Britain's Royal National Institute for the Blind, wrote

  in an e-mail. "Around 80 percent of Web sites we estimate as having
  accessibility problems, some considerable."

  However, progress is being made on programming hooks that would help
  screen-reading tools grasp the new Web's advanced layers of content.

  Web architects at IBM Corp. have been laboring on a system called
  iAccessible2 that addresses some common scenarios bedeviling
  screen-reading software.

  For example, consider software "trees" where clicking on little plus or
  minus signs in boxes expands data or rolls it up. To the ears of someone
  using screen-reading software, the setup can present a hard-to-visualize
  jumble.

  To deal with this, iAccessible2 makes it possible for a blind user to be
  told where text on the screen lies in the tree. A bit of text might be the

  second item on a list of five, for example, at a "depth" of two - meaning
  it required a click to be revealed.

  Aspects of iAccessible2 are being integrated into the open-source Firefox
  Web browser. The technology also is entering IBM's Lotus and Workplace
  office-productivity programs. Ice, 48, who has been blind for 20 years
  because of diabetes, helps lead the effort in Lotus.

  A longer-term goal is to make it easier for blind people to deal with Web
  pages that offer complicated stews of changing information.

  IBM Web architect Aaron Leventhal pointed to basketball box scores that
  dynamically update dozens of statistics as a game progresses. A sighted
  person easily can zero in on the most vital information - the game score -

  and glance only occasionally at unfolding data of lesser importance, such
  as free-throw percentages.

  But how can a screen-reading program know to utter only certain stats as
  they are updated and not every single one?

  Leventhal and colleagues believe one answer is to encode parts of a Web
  page - in this case, certain statistics - as "rude," "assertive" and
  "polite." Screen-reading software could be programmed to vocalize "polite"

  information anytime and the "assertive" data less frequently.

  This concept is still in development, but Leventhal hopes it becomes part
  of Web production tools so site designers bake it in as they create pages.

  "We don't want accessibility to be the thing that limits what people can
  do on their Web sites," Leventhal said. "We're not trying to slow down the

  world. We're trying to say, take accessibility into account."

  www.heraldnet.com/stories/07/02/11/100bus_blind001.cfm


Regards Steve
Email:  srp at internode.on.net
Skype:  steve1963
MSN Messenger:  internetuser383 at hotmail.com