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Computer Access for the Blind

subgenius

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Oct 11, 2002
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My oldest brother (first of nine) is a genius. Blind since birth.
Trial lawyer for 25 years. Electrical, electronic, mechanical genius.
Put himself through school repairing engines, has bred exotic birds eveyone say can't be bred in captivity. Legal guardian to a quadriplegic woman left by others to vegetate. Has taken her to a major league ballgame (no small feat).
Problem is there is virtually nothing being done to make computers more accessible to the blind.
I know, from using voice recognition software extensively, that this is not rocket science.
Computers can and should easily be able to handle screen reading and voice commands, and yet virtually nothing is being done to make this a reality.
None of the existing programs are designed by people who actually have to try to use them, and therefore are woefully inadequate.
You can post links to programs but I'd be surprised if we haven't tried them all and found big problems in their usability.
Not asking for anything specific, just trying to raise awareness of the problem.
 
I agree. My limited use of screen readers (just from interest) shows that, even when they read well and properly, the problem is that they read everything. In order.

At least half of the problem, of course, at least as far as reading web pages, is the design of the page, rather than the software reading it.

Using (nested) tables for page layout, using images (without alt) as text, using image alt text as anything other than description or purpose, using flash for anything other than animations and games, and so on, all make a page utterly unintelligible.

CSS2 makes very good allowances for designing a page one way for screens and another way for readers. It's not hard to learn.

I believe that in the US, some types of pages are legally obliged to be accessible to screen readers, and I hope this expands.

So may websites I visit now are actually designed entirely in flash. This is just laziness in at least 99% of cases.

Sadly I can't recommend specific readers, as I have little experience with them.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
Oh yes, flash sites - my favourite!! Ten minutes to load on my 56K dial-up to see an animated gnome!
Here in the UK, it's already illegal for commercial organisations not to have accessible websites - it counts as discrimination against the disabled. (You can read about the relevant sections of the UK law here. ) However - quelle surprise! - nobody has yet been prosecuted for it.
I have moderate vision problems, but I wasn't really aware of the need for accessible web design until I took a computing class a couple of years ago; one of my fellow students was totally blind and he made his opinions on the matter very clear! I now design websites and I make sure they conform to accessibility guidelines.
It's important to remember that "accessibility" doesn't just mean making sites easier for screen-readers to read. You have to think of those sighted people who have colour-vision problems (and you think you have problems reading red text on a green background?), or who just have extremely limited sight. You also have to think of those who cannot grip a mouse and have to use the keyboard or some movement-assistive technology. And the deaf and hard-of-hearing need consideration too.
It's going to take years for it to get through to anyone building a website that not everyone has their level of sight, hearing, movement, screen resolution, internet access, etc etc, Maybe if, say, M$ made its FrontPage package (so beloved of amateur websters) produce code that conformed to accessibility standards, we might start making progress. In the meantime, we can only keep nagging at the rest of the design community about it.
There are many good web resources for accessibility - two of them are: Accessify Forum and Tunna Resources .

ETA: Just found this article. Says exactly what I feel about modern web design!
Unfortunately, we have hired a generation of web designers who don't know anything about computing, or the principles on which the web is based, or the reasons for its success. In fact, most of them are not web designers at all: they are graphic designers, or print designers, who have strayed into an area they don't understand. They are just painters and decorators with keyboards.
The worst web designers of all are the trendies who think things should be "cool" rather than functional.
Click to expand...
 
Well I try to make any web page I write accessible to the largest number of people possible. I don't know, and never have, any blind people. But I don't feel I've done my job if the 'tools' are available and I don't use them.

I am colour-blind. I tried emailing snopes.com to tell them that their red-bullet-for-true/green-bullet-for-false system was useless to me and 10-20% of the male population. Their reply, however phrased, was basically that it wasn't a problem for most, so it wasn't a problem.

I use the CSS rules to specify screen-reader differences if I think the website or page in question is ugly or unreadable to a screen-reader. In much the same way, I'll use the CSS print rules if the print layout of a page is important.

I've not used wysiwyg web design tools very much, but I'm not sure that it's practical for them to make a page that's good for screen readers. Any editor will only produce what you tell it to. It doesn't know, and can't really know, what is readable to a human. The human using Dreamweaver, or whatever, needs to know what he wants to present. But agreed, the toolmakers could make it easier to design these features, and more obvious that people should.

I agree, sophia8, with everything said in the quote you provided. Our work website is the most clunky ugly thing in the world, and I suspect is utterly unintelligible to screen readers. It was designed by our DTP person. I suspect that it may look nice (though I think not), but it is unusable and useless to a screen reader. My complaints have fallen on deaf ears. We're trying to impress commercial clients, not the general public; so if it works well in IE at 1024x768 at full screen, then that's all that matters. In a business context, then that's hard to argue with, though I've tried.

Anyone wants to look at it, it's stephengeorge between www and co.uk. I have good reasons for not wanting to give the address in full. If someone can tell me the results from a screen reader, I'd be glad to hear the results.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
I appreciate the thoughtful comments.
I'm not just talking about access to the internet, but the operation of the computer itself too.
I used to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking and it had a function to open programs, etc. with voice commands. There were great limitations but it struck me as not that hard to make the leap to making computers operate more fully with voice commands.
I think the powers that be are missing a big opportunity here because I think sighted people would also enjoy just telling their computers what they want them to do.
 
ratcomp1974 said:

Anyone wants to look at it, it's stephengeorge between www and co.uk. I have good reasons for not wanting to give the address in full. If someone can tell me the results from a screen reader, I'd be glad to hear the results.
Click to expand...
Rat, you're much more likely to get an answer if you go to the Accessify forum that I posted about - I know that several members there use screenreaders. And some of them will probably be able to point SubGenius in the right direction over voice recognition software and the like.
I agree, that site looks pretty awful, even in terms of simple graphic design.
 
Is Randi Accessible?

Just out of interest, I put www.randi.org (the home page) through the accessibility validators at Cynthia Says
It failed the page on both 508 and WCAG, but only because most of the img and other non-text elements lack alt tags or labels. otherwise, it was OK. It also validated with just a couple of errors in HTML 4.0. So some congrats to the webmaster - just take care of those alt tags!
 
our campus uses Jaws, and it does a pretty good job IF the webpage is 508 compliant. What others have you guys used?
 
My brother uses Windoweyes. He just went out and bought a USB numeric keypad for his laptop because he needed some more functions in order to quiet a portion of the screen that was reading the connect time to the internet.
Windoweyes is around $800!!! I don't understand why its that expensive. I guess Jaws is around $1000!!!
I had downloaded a free thingy called PWWebspeak and sent it to him. I wish I kept a copy because it seemed pretty neat from the little trial I gave it.
With the amount of money Gates makes I'm still appalled that they don't develope some effective accessibility tools.
Hawking must have some awesome stuff.
 
i'm pretty sure hawking uses a mac.
(and so do i, in the interest of full disclosure.)
 
there was in the past--not so sure now. but the macs have always been a multimedia system, and for windows, sound and useability has always been an add on option.
i can turn on text to speech, and choose between about 20 voices to have read to me. (some of them are silly, though.) There are several voice to text programs that are about $300, or were last i looked. i have not upgraded to panther, since i am happy with OSX and would rather use the $90 for something else :)
 
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