[nfbwatlk] Fw: As Web evolves, blind left behind

Fri Feb 9 22:46:51 CST 2007

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "News related to blindness" <blindnews at blindprogramming.com>
To: <BlindNews at BlindProgramming.com>
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 5:28 PM
Subject: As Web evolves, blind left behind


> Chicago Defender, IL, USA
> Friday, February 09, 2007
>
> As Web evolves, blind left behind
>
> By Tim Spangler
>
> The last time Ray Campbell tried to buy Cubs tickets online, Tickets.com 
> asked him to enter the text in a distorted image in order to prove that he 
> was not a robot programmed to automatically buy tickets  for scalpers. .
>
> The only problem: Campbell couldn't read the text in the image. In fact, 
> he couldn't see it at all - he's been blind his entire life.
>
> "All I want to do is buy tickets and I can't do that, because there's this 
> verification and they have not provided an audio link to it," Campbell 
> said.
>
> For America's nearly 2 million blind or visually impaired Internet users, 
> problems like these can prevent them from taking advantage of all the Web 
> has to offer.
>
> "The two challenges with Web accessibility are not just being able to 
> access the site, but being able to use the site," said Leah Gerlach, 
> director of counseling at the Diecke Center for Vision Rehabilitation in 
> Wheaton.
>
> Gerlach said the growing use of multimedia video on Web sites creates a 
> significant accessibility challenge, saying that Internet video can 
> confuse the screen reading software that blind and visually impaired 
> people use to browse the Internet.
>
> Blind Browsing
>
> Blind and visually impaired people use special software called screen 
> readers that "speak" to them in a synthetic voice what is happening on the 
> screen.
>
> When browsing a Web site, a screen reader examines a page's code and 
> determines how the page is laid out and what links are on it, then reads 
> the content of the page to a user.
>
> Screen readers rely on explanatory text, defined by webmasters, to 
> interpret images. Because of this, the World Wide Web Consortium, which 
> sets Internet standards, requires developers to define alternative text 
> for every image on a page.
>
> Multimedia content, like Adobe Flash, is unintelligible to screen readers 
> and is skipped entirely when the page is read. Sites that rely heavily on 
> Flash should be sure to offer accessible, text-only versions of their 
> pages.
>
> Screen reading software uses text-to-speech conversion, machines that 
> translate on-screen text to Braille or a combination of both to present a 
> Web page to a blind or visually impaired user.
>
> The challenges
>
> Campbell is a technician at the assistive technology help desk at the the 
> Chicago Lighthouse, an organization for the blind and visually impaired. A 
> former software engineer at Lucent Technologies, he now takes calls from 
> blind and visually impaired people across the U.S. and Canada and helps 
> them solve computer problems and navigate Web sites.
>
> Campbell identified what he said are the Web's three major accessibility 
> problems: graphics without descriptive text, required plug-in 
> installations and visual registration tests, called captchas, an acronym 
> for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans 
> Apart."  Captchas are particularly troublesome when it comes to 
> accessibility.
>
> Why captchas?
>
> Many major sites require users to verify that they are actually human - 
> not automated robots. By presenting the browser with a captcha - an image 
> of distorted text that is difficult for a computer to decode - and asking 
> the user to enter the text they see in the image, robots can be blocked 
> from the site while human users who can see the text are given access. 
> Campbell said that captchas can be made accessible by using audio clips in 
> addition to images to verify users as human. Some sites, like 
> LiveJournal.com, already do this.
>
> What works, what doesn't
>
> Blogging, a growing Internet phenomenon, is still largely text-based and 
> tends to be more screen reader friendly than other applications.
>
> "My experience has taught me that [blogging] is pretty accessible," said 
> Campbell, who keeps his own blog on LiveJournal.
>
> "Screen readers can handle a lot of the current techniques that are being 
> used in Web design," Campbell said, as long as designers take extra care 
> to make their sites accessible. These include avoiding the use of images 
> to display text, providing audio narration for videos and offering 
> text-only versions of pages with multimedia content.
>
> As interactive, multimedia Web sites become more prevalent, blind and 
> visually impaired users might find themselves behind the curve as 
> designers forgo accessible pages for glitzy ones and screen reading 
> software lags behind, said Leah Gerlach at the Diecke Center
>
> "We don't drive change. We have to follow it and keep up with it," Gerlach 
> said. "We're always six months behind cutting edge because we have to be."
>
> Tim Spangler is a reporter for the Medill News Service.
>
>
> http://www.chicagodefender.com/page/local.cfm?ArticleID=8439
>
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