Slashdot Mirror
Do the Blind Deserve More Effort on the Web?
dratcw writes "An article was posted this week to ComputerWorld, detailing the frustrations faced by blind people struggling to use the Web. The piece shows how little progress has been made and the inadequacy of solutions such as Microsoft's Narrator screen reader. While the article generated many positive comments, one reader said the disabled should 'get a grip' and maintained they 'have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, as a diabetic, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used.' Should Web sites and software makers do more, or does the reality of today's economics dictate that the blind/disabled will continue to struggle and learn to live with it?"
If we work on the broader problem then we get better web sites for everyone, especially the disabled, without even making any particular effort for them. For example:
- A link to download a file should just go to the file, not some clever javascript crap that tells you to please wait while you're redirected, your download should start in a few moments etc.
- Quit breaking stuff up into dozens of tiny bite sized pages. My scrollbar works just fine thank you very much, and it lets me scan all of the content in an instant instead of having to click through it all. Yes, I know that some people do this to goose their ad revenue, but you see it other places too.
- Don't use clever little graphics and pop-ups for every link, text works much better.
- I don't need links to "print this page" or "email it to a friend".
- You don't need to know what region of the world I'm in before I can download a damned printer driver.
- Don't use ridiculous URLs that query stuff from a CGI with a zillion arguments just to serve up a static page.
I could go on all day... fixing any of those design problems would automatically improve accessibility, not just for blind users but for mobile devices as well.
Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that.
Next question.
I can't see why not.
There are so many websites that don't work unless you have flash installed.
I don't use flash because I just hate it, but blind people don't have much choice in the matter...
The biggest thing web designers do that breaks the web for disabled people is not include the alt tag in an image. I mean how hard is that?
That's what you get for jerking off to online porn!
Now, are you going to complain about hairy palms?!?!
Geeze!
On the other hand, people should know that if their web page is not available to a group of people, then those people will not get the benefit of the web page. In addition, there is a market for folks to create (and sell, if they so choose) products that help people who have problems get around in society. Thus, wheelchairs and hearing aids and braille and such. It's always been this way.
To say that everyone must be included in the class of users makes no sense; do you have to make music accessible to the deaf, or visual art available to the blind? Of course not. Should you have to change your personal web page that you use to post pictures for your friends and family to make it more friendly to some disabled user you don't know? Of course not.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I was going to RTFA but it seemed to be giving my screen-reader troubles!
My blog
... but perhaps someone who is a lawyer could comment on the results of the lawsuit a few years back asking for damages for websites that are not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, i.e., that don't accomodate the disabled. I heard about the suit but never found out how it ended.
I've worked as a web developer for years and can honestly say that it isn't hard to make an accessable website/webapplication but it doesn't happen because no one is willing to pay for it. Even the fact that there are laws in place in some countries that require certain standards doesn't motivate (most) clients into paying the extra 5% to have an accessable website; on top of this it doesn't help that your (dishonest) VP of marketing just pulls a number out of the air when they go after a project and you are (typically) heavily underfunded for the work you have to do.
I tried using Googlephone yesterday and I found it to work quite well. It had some trouble understanding my speech but it got the job done and it didn't sound like Stephen Hawking. Sure it's only a computer substitute for directory assistance but I don't see why this can't be adapted for use by the blind.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Should all newspapers and other printed material be required to be printed in braille? Don't think so.
If they want the web to be more accessible perhaps they should take it upon themselves to create a solution. To say that others should do it for them is to suggest that they are not as capable as others, which seems to be something they are quite adamant is untrue.
On the bright side, they don't have to put up with hideous flashing ads and popups.
This is akin to asking the question, "do the handicapped deserve more effort to aid mobility?" A user is a user, and there are plenty of ways to design a site such that the disabled can use it (text-only version is a very simple one). The problem usually lies in lazy designers and coders. The government mandates a standard (Section 508 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508) that mandates goverment IT accessibility. The truth is that no matter what anyone tries to do, accessibility is up to the author - and while care should be taken to address the needs of the disabled, it is far too often overlooked.
Theres a lot of disabled special interests. Beware any of you lot who think you can please them. Pleasing them means closed captioning, and more importantly paying each disabled consultant expert each time. CSS might solve the problem, that seems to have gone nwowhere.
It's not just the image in tags - it's also the graphical nature of some of the web functionality. The software I design, K-12 educational in nature, relies upon lots of visuals.But, it's truly hard to break those visuals down into representations for the blind.
Being educators, we do have a responsibility to make sure most reasonable educational needs are met through the software we've designed. It's easy to write. But, we're a long way from understanding how to make that happen, in practice.
--Dave
Pr0n... for blind people.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
The potential is there for the web (and the internet as a whole) to improve the life of people with physical handicaps. The same potential has existed for personal computers in general for over 20 years. I remember a co-worker whose father had a stroke some years ago. She was able to identify a few key things that computers - not necessarily the web - might do to help people like her father. I don't think there's a lot of money to be made there and that's why we haven't seen more (no pun intended).
Blind people may get some help in the future. Whether they deserve it or not is a different story. I tend to think nobody deserves anything except justice and there's already precious little of that floating around.
I'm not providing a taxpayer service with my website so I don't feel that I *need* to make changes to my existing architecture to accommodate a small percentage of internet users. That being said, I don't expect to pass accessibility tests, either. I don't have the resources to go back and re-engineer it. It's like asking a Mom & Pop store to provide a ramp and widen all their entrances to their store so as to accommodate wheelchair-bound people. I understand why you would want to, but you can't blame people for not wanting to spend the time/money.
I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy to compare what it's like being a diabetic to being completely blind. I don't think it's unreasonable to account for some access for people who can't actually see websites. I mean we have diet coke.
I have nothing compelling to say
you know, the "to hell with the blind let them fend for themselves" rhetoric is getting old. I mean really, the only arguments so far seem to be either along the lines of it's too expensive to introduce basic accessibility into web pages or that we shouldn't bother because you think it would be an inconvenience. that's... just... disgusting.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Based on the previous article, we may have a solution: cybernetic eyes
I don't know any blind people personally, but my deaf brother has benefited hugely by the mass appeal of the web, text messaging, and hand held devices. I would love to see the web be easier to navigate for the blind, as I imagine being blind has got to suck a lot more than being deaf, but I think the medium at the moment is very much situated against them. Text and graphics are what the web are based on. Now if you look back, regular phones and cellphones (without text) were great for the blind, but pretty much sucked for the deaf. So where am I going with this? Maybe in the next few years the web will make a transition to technology that is based around more video with audio (seems to be happening already with youtube, etc.), and this shift will help the blind. For instance, how many presidential speeches are in video form as well as written form lately?
For those who are completely blind, the research in the Brain-machine interface may allow them to 'see' artificially. In fact, this has already been done and will only get better with progress in technology http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html
If I were blind, I would want a direct $GenericVideoOutputPort-to-Optic Nerve link.
In fact, I don't think I would want this anyways.
A lot of the web's content exploits the ability to see. Whole websites are geared to nothing more than pictures and manipulation of them.
How can rules be applied that would not be biased against the content choices of the providers? If a provider wanted to provide full length movies that they did not originate would it fall on them to provide versions that lend themselves to one disability or another or all?
The simple fact is, not all aspects of life are enjoyable by all people. The primary limiting factor is loss or serious reduction of one of the senses, eyesight and hearing are the two primary ones that seriously alter one's methods of participation in the world.
Second, the internet is NOT A RIGHT.
Third, it is not a right to impose on someone your needs. I am so tired of people decrying their right to my stuff or someone else's, to include money, time, and or property. The web isn't a right. As such you cannot impose your problems on people who use it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They create a real problem for blind people. There are far better ways of filtering out bots.
Captcha codes are against pretty much every HTML design guideline anyway.
At least in the US, it's the law that you have to use well-known and available methods to allow handicapped people into your place of business. For example, you don't have to provide access for someone in a ventilator, because that would be impractical, but you do have to provide access for someone in a wheelchair, because it's really not all that hard. The EXACT same principle should apply to the web. Providing access to the blind on the web is probably a lot easier than providing wheelchair access in a bricks-and-mortar store.
If you code your website with CSS, and format the raw information in a sane way, you're already a long way ahead in this game. Instead of alt="" why not use it to describe the element, as is intended? This does not have to be a major problem. Narrator type programs, combined with disabled CSS should work on most websites coded "the right way(tm)".
Enough is enough. The web is fine the way it is. We don't need to cow down to who thinks they are special an deserver special treatment. Life isn't fair. If you blind, deaf, or mute then that is the way you are.
This is the same kind of thinking that got us crap like ADA. Making it illegal to have a round door knob any more. Mandating that private business put aside special parking places and entry ramps. While all those are good for business no law should REQUIRE a private business to have them.
What happens if laws get passed that require you to have handicapped accessible webpages? Then the web will wind up getting dumbed down to and bogged down to fit a specific minority of people. Business that don't do this will be opened to lawsuits by predatory disabled lawyers and generally everyone suffers.
I'm sorry you can't do all the things I can do but I should have to be made to suffer because you can't. A line as to be drawn somewhere.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
On any number of projects where I've provided a web interface, I've been told in no uncertain words that I was to make pages that were tailored for exactly the browser and screen that the project's manager uses.
Thus, I've often been told that the pages must be forced via things like width= attributes to be exactly N pixels wide, even when there's nothing in a page that is dependent on any particular width. I've been ordered to present some data in pictorial form, even when simple text data was easier to understand and took less screen space.
So very often, managers explicitly order their developers to produce web pages that are inaccessible to anyone other than people exactly like them.
There are some ways that one can fight this. In a few cases, I've found that I can "go over the boss's head" by showing a higher-up something that they find useful. I happen to know that they have a Blackberry or a Treo that they love and use all the time, and my boss's declared page structure won't work on their machine, so eventually orders come down to make the web interface usable on the higher-ups' favorite little handheld gadget. While doing this, I can also sneak in things that make it more accessible to the disabled.
But this is a passive-resistance approach, and it's not always successful. I like to also try to get across the idea that you, yes you, may find yourself handicapped by this time next week, in a way that you can't predict. The sensible thing would be to guarantee that your minions' efforts are usable even after that accident or medical emergency has left you restricted in what you can see or read.
But few managers are willing to take such a long-term view of the situation. So all too often, my pages aren't as accessible as I know how to make them.
It would be nice to learn of other ways that we developers can fight such management intransigence.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Being sighted, and not having access to a screen reader, designing a site to be blind-friendly is just too much effort for most designers, and since there's generally nothing in it for them (no extra money, no extra kudos, etc.) it's hard to justify making an effort to do it.
I think if there were a really easy addon to firefox that said "render for the blind" that didn't actually do the screen-reading part of rendering, but did dump all graphics, render things in "order" rather than how they show up visually, etc. there might be more effort made. I think people just forget to add alt tags, or forget that on-screen order isn't what you get out of a screen reader.
Having said that, I've heard that one of the biggest problems blind people face is that as far as CAPTCHAs are concerned, they're spambots.
This is classicly bullshit reasoning. The poster can certainly buy a wide variety of low-sugar products, many at the same grocery stores used by everyone else. There is no comparable set of conveniently accessible options for blind people who want to use, say, a social networking site.
Technology can open so many doors for people with vision problems, but it may actually be closing them. To me, solving this problem is at least as noble as say, promoting Open Office.
But to a degree the ADA forces a lot of companies hands to make sure that their products and services can be used. It's not unreasonable to think that as a disabled person that I should have access to the same products and services as my non-disabled peers as long as the accommodation's would not cause undue strain on a company.
Redesigning a web page may or may not fall under undue strain... I'm betting not. Then again not all pages are in the US and would be subject to something in the ADA.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
My uncle is blind (after a recent landscaping accident - seriously). We just convince him that the internet is full of visually-disturbing crap and isn't worth using anyway; he seems to accept this idea. My cousin once teased him that he couldn't see Britney Spears' crotch, which, at the time, was being posted all over the internet. (He lost his vision around the time she was about 17-18 and still desirable) My uncle's head almost exploded in frustration.
It amazes me that we live in a commerce-driven society where the CEO's can essentially tank a company to make their $100mm bonuses out of pure greed and yet others cry about how the web should be re-written for the vast VAST minority of people.
And worse, it's the same gov't tards allowing the first as crying for the second. Someone kill me please.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Should everyone wear a sterile suit and mask so that people with immunodeficiencies do not have to live inside a plastic bubble?
The problem is the shitty readers, a reader should be able to read any webpage that a person can see, but because of all the javascript, flash, and images that are prevalent now they probably don't work too well. They need to just render the page as an image, then put it through a OCR program, then read that, then the reader program works as a person does, by seeing and reading the page, not by hacking through the HTML.
Have the blind tried using mobile pages? They are much simpler and would be much easier for a reader I would think.
Until the blind come together and put their money where their needs are and build a program that works, the demand doesn't justify the cost. No soup for you I guess.
I have looked into developing for screen readers in the past, but the biggest problem I've run into is the software being used by the disabled.
1) there are great disparities between how the screen readers interpret things.
2) the most popular screen readers are expensive, and offer no free versions for developers.
The Microsoft Narrator didn't hit my radar. I don't know anything about it, but if it's free and of high quality, that's a major step forward.
to create something to assist themselves. I don't think society owes them anything, and if they really want a change, I would invite them to do so in a way that doesn't infringe on the rest of community to do something for them.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Just like the blind programmer from Sneakers had!
Nobody owes them anything. They are free to create content in the way they like, create web browsers the way they like, and pay for it themselves.
It's called market economy. Get used to it.
Ya, he does have a right to demand sugar is used alot less. Let's face it, collectively, we consumer about an order of a magnitude more sugar than that which is good for us. The more people that bitch about it, the better off we, collectively, would be.
Same goes for the blind. YES, they should attempt to raise awareness as much as possible. It really is in the best interests of all parties to make the web as accessible as possible.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I think it's great to have knowledge and awareness of HOW to make web pages more accessible to the disabled. As people have already pointed out here, some of the "stumbling blocks" are very simple to remove, often by doing things that make a site cleaner and easier to navigate for EVERYONE. (EG. Take out the unnecessary pop-ups or extra screens telling you that your requested file transfer is "about to begin". We KNOW that, since we clicked the download link already!)
But LEGISLATING more "accessibility" is a big shove down the slippery slope of government interference. I think, perhaps, *government* web sites should have certain accessibility standards, depending on their audience. If the blind are still among those who have to deal with the IRS, for example, then I'd expect the IRS web site to accommodate their needs.
On the other hand, if I'm a business selling hi-def televisions, I doubt I have a whole lot of blind customers interested in my product offerings. A blanket law FORCING me to obey rules to make my page friendly to visually impaired customers would be pointless, at best.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Fuck definitely no.
My brother is blind, and he does just fine.
Never has bitched about being blind.
Sits down in his 1.something GHz computer, with the 1GB of RAM (I built, sometime ago), and uses windows with JAWS.
JAWS is a screen reading software that's really, really popular amongst blind people.
As another poster said: Fuck Flash.
Fucking dumbass Flash welcome screens, menus, etc.
The blind are hardy as hell (fuck, you try walking with your eyes taped shut for a mile).
I know they're not asking for "special" treatment... just "common sense".
I'll never forget the Bank of America TV commercial, where a blind woman walked into a martial arts studio, practiced her moves, kicked some shit, walked out, used BoA's ATM machine, then walked off... end of commercial.
The best part?
There wasn't ONE spoken word in the entire ad.
Nice going dipshits... a blind person watching (ok, listening) the commercial has no fucking idea what the hell just crossed his TV screen.
The net has provided a HUGE world to blind people... and the more stuff gets "plugged" into the web, the better it'll be for them.
PS: When the hell is a mobile phone manufacturer going to produce a USEFUL phone for the blind?
It needs tactile feedback, maybe a line or two of Braille characters, and THOUGHT OUT Menus.
As you can guess, a small screen would suffice (they do need a screen, as people with sight might need to look at their phones for xyz), a camera does almost nothing for them as well.
Finally, the CAPTCHAs are really shitty.
Even the "mp3" ones.
Something should be done for those.
My 0.02 =)
Sure free market but sometimes society, in general, needs a bit of a push in the right direction. I don't know about your part of the world but here public buildings need to be accessible to those in wheelchairs. I'm pretty certain the "free market economy" would not have driven that change without a push from regulations.
Well, not to be a ass, but if they could jack in, I don't see a problem.
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
Make sure you tag all your images with descriptive text, these folks have to imagine it all, help 'em out
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I have written about this twice in the last couple of years (http://markwatson.com/blog/2007/10/it-is-important-to-check-web-sites-and.html and http://markwatson.com/blog/2007/03/being-good-web-citizen.html).
Using lynx (a text only browser) is useful to check text-only navigation. Lynx also makes me nostalgic for the web as it was back in 1991.
The last web site project I outsourced had accessibility as one of the requirements. For Section 508 tasks that could be done by simply designing the site correctly the first time, my client was willing to pay.
Not a single web design agency we talked to had any idea what we were talking about. One of them wanted to charge us $1200 for a day of work so they could "research it."
So it's not just Pointy Haired Bosses that are causing the problem.
It seems everyone is focusing on websites in general . Having your website accessible to individuals with impairments is not optional. I'm not talking about your blog, the vast majority of people can live without that. This is about the functions related to your job and life that are only easily accessible from a web page. You have all of these enterprise resource systems that take care of accounting, benefits, retirement, attendance... the list goes on and on. All of these systems are moving to web only accessibility, and are required to carry out your activities related to work, school, your children and so on. If you need a website to carry out those required activities, it is not optional to make them accessible to all people.
many people want to browse the web using mobile devices. The speed is there now, but the web pages make themselves difficult to use. I find most pages read okay until the stylesheet loads.
Badgers?
BADGERS?!?
We don't need no stinkin' badgers!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Making the web more accessible to blind people doesn't address the root problem. Blind people can't see! We should fund more research on bionic eyes; make it possible for blind people to see again, and that would fix a lot more problems than just visiting websites.
Well, everyone who doesn't think a website should look like a sophomore art magazine and work like an experimental X11 application from 1988.
I hope I don't have to elaborate on this further (though recent evolution in the slashdot user interface makes me wonder).
... but some kind of sites are going to have more challenges than others.
For example, I publish a few webcomics (at Ubersoft.net). A webcomic is an image file (in my case, pngs) which are flat-out useless to the blind. Now, there are specifications about how graphics should be used to make them useful to the blind (i.e., include a complete description of the graphic within the img tag -- using "alt" I think, though I'm not sure) but this seems counterproductive. Webcomics as a whole are somewhat useless to the blind because they are a visual medium. Granted, my art is lousy and static but it is still presented visually.
So how much trouble should I, a publisher of a medium that seems to fundamentally work against a blind man or woman's browsing experience, put into making my site accessible to them?
As it happens, I do try some, though I am unfamiliar with the latest accessibility guidelines. I use css and xhtml (as best I can) to tag the site properly and make it navigable to a screen reader. This is a bit challenging since the publishing system I'm using (Drupal) makes it difficult for me to sift through everything, but I'm making slow progress. I've also started transcribing my comic archives -- primarily to make them searchable by my site's search engine, but one of my readers pointed out that it also allows a blind visitor to actually read the dialog.
There are other types of sites -- political discussion sites, news sites, sites like Slashdot -- where accessibility would be far more useful. The web was originally primarily text, and on sites where the content is still primarily text there's no reason it can't be designed to make that text more easily accessible to the visually impaired.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Good accessible design benefits everybody. It does not take much extra effort to make a web page accessible. In fact, it takes more effort to make it inaccessible.
There are laws, like the ADA, which mandate accessibility. They should be respected. They give us good stuff like ramps and big bathrooms and closed captioning that all sorts of people use.
Furthermore, they are an economic stimulus because they allow more people to both work and consume. The problem is that some companies are so convinced that they need to limit all of us, that they exclude enormous numbers of people and in the end hurt themselves.
I was just about to launch my new website ... BrailleTube!
Actually, diabetic or not, we should all be demanding that sugar not be used.
That pretty much includes 80% of every customer I ever had to deal with. Though a web app made with ExtJS looks a heck of a lot better than most -modern- desktop application
The problem hardest (in fact, impossible) to tackle for my blind friends, have been flash websites. None of the readers can cope with them.
So if you are a webmaster for a company that offers services that could be useful to blind people as well, please do not design them with flash - they won't be able to read them.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Isn't the series of tubes is slow enough already?
Does the highway have a lane for BLIND drivers?
NO! It would slow everyone else down to an unacceptable level.
So why should the information super highway?!?!
if you're not blind?
What kind of software do they use to view sites? Is it freely available for developers that are not blind?
Although I have wondered if my sites are easily accessible for the disabled, I haven't really done anything because I have no idea how they view the site in the first place.
there's a very simple reason for making websites and pages accessible: it benefits all, not just the disabled.
think for example of wheelchair access ramps for buildings vs. stairs; while non-disabled persons generally have no problem using stairs, they also have no problem using wheelchair access ramps. in fact, it's in many cases easier for them to use the access ramps. it requires less effort. disabled persons, however, may not be able to use stairs while being fully able to use access ramps.
We live in a time when handicapped are at an advantage over us non-handicapped. The technology exists to allow handicapped people live a nearly an unhindered. They don't deserve any more or less than non-handicapped.
www.homestarrunner.com. That can stay.
Flash has it's uses, but it is strictly a visual format.
I will agree that when it's used as the primary display method for a business website it annoys me to no end.
So with all of these poor accessibility practices, Google is going to have difficulty indexing your content, aren't they? How well does google index text in an image? How well does it handle links in javascript? Don't you think alt tags might help?
I'm not up on all the accessibility guidelines, and I'm inclined to say a lot of things should be accessible, but I think accessibilty can only help your googlejuice.
'In knowledge is power, in wisdom humility.'
It is unfortunate that the authors chose to ignore Apple's work in this space with their excellent VoiceOver (VO) accessible technology which gives full access to the OS and applications. Because it's built in to every OSX 10.4 and 10.5 machine a blind user can set up everything themselves without sighted assistance. This also makes it a screen reader with the largest installed base; more than Jaws or WindowEyes. In a classroom setting there is no longer the need for the "special" machine for the "special" student, enabling a more mainstream approach. The on-screen feedback also lets sighted and blind users collaborate more easily because the visual user can see what the blind user is doing via the keyboard. Got a USB braille device? Just plug it in without having to install drivers. Got a lot of VO preference settings? Save a profile to a thumb drive and then instantly activate those settings on another machine by just plugging it in.
As mentioned in the article, accessibility technologies such as screen readers are not cheap. Getting a Mac with VO can easily offset the supposed premium price of this hardware. Alex, the VO speech synth is really one of the nicest sounding ones out there with simulated breathing and clear annunciation. Anyone can give it a try by hitting Apple-F5 on a current OSX machine.
"Although major operating systems usually have built-in screen readers for accessibility by the blind, they are rudimentary at best."I guess OSX is not a major OS or VO is just rudimentary, or the writer is just wrong.
There was a nice rebuttal on Lioncourt.com
Apple's innovations are not constrained to the iPhone/iPod/MacBook/OS realms. Sure it has it's quirks and glitches, but to not even get a mention is a serious error of omission.
Free speech, and all that. Do they have the right to expect it, is the question. And, yeah, I kinda think they do.
Fully Flash-based websites are obnoxious no matter how you look at them. (MyCokeRewards.com comes immediately to mind, but only because it's so slow to run on my 6-year-old desktop computer.) There's all sorts of reasons to have some sort of text-only access to any website, and screen readers are only one of them.
Fact is, this is just another facet of the persistent "IE-only" problem the Web has had for years. Developers, or more likely their managers or marketing departments, either don't know about the other 10% of the web, or don't care. But we have laws requiring stores to be accessible to wheelchairs, and employers to buy reasonable equipment for disabled employees; I think it's only a matter of time before laws exist requiring commercial websites to better accommodate blind visitors.
maybe the answer is not to help the blind "see" a website by having software try to parse out the text, but rather focus on a hardware solution that could "see" the page. maybe something attached to the monitor that could read text?
... if so many developers weren't so goddamned arrogant in their refusal to take even basic steps to make sites accessible, then perhaps there would have been no need for government to create things like the ADA to legislate it.
Three Squirrels
Why should I make my website blind enabed? Maybe my blog is for family and friends but none of them are blind. Maybe I talk about visual stuff on my news site but clearly none of my viewers are blind. There's mechanisms in place to make stuff sort of work a bit for blind people, but if none of my target audience is then whats the point?
This is just PC bullshit.
ADA being the Americans with Disabilities Act. In a nutshell, all "public accomodations" (such as restaurants, movie theaters, etc.) must comply with certain architectural requirements that make them accessible to the physically disabled. While there's currently no provision for non-brick-and-morter public accomodations, I could certainly see that being added. Of course it would only impact the websites of businesses with a presence in the United States, but that's still a big pool. Note that this would almost surely not cover personal websites that aren't related to any commercial activity. So the guy who hacks together a page of photos for his extended family wouldn't be affected by this legislation.
http://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm#anchor62335I'm a huge proponent of REASONABLE accommodations. Expecting a double-cost change is silly. Expecting simple, standard practices is community-beneficial and because we do not live in isolation; perfectly ethical IMHO.
A browser is a tool that reads the code and delivers it visually for the sited reader. What is needed is a browser specifically designed to read that same code and deliver the content audibly for the reader. You don't need to redesign the web and force every webpage to comply, beyond some kind of tag for images that is. Most images could have a simple (unnecessary image) as the tag to tell the blind boy browser that the image is not required to understand the page. In fact that could be the default for most images. Whomever managed to come up with such a browser would probably make a bit of money as Microsoft and Apple would both want to bundle such a browser to show what good people they are.
Deserve? Would you ask the same question about the mute, deaf, physically disabled? Or people from different ethnicities? Do they 'deserve' better webdesign???
That's the most brainless and condescending headline I have read on Slashdot for a long time.
A real businessman would take this as an opportunity to offer web proxy/portal services to the disabled that would modify pages for them, and tailor them to the needs of specialty equipment.
Or, if you read the previous slashdot story, just get the Japanese to hook you up with a high-quality full-sensory neural-feedback implant, and then you will be able to see and hear. Problem solved, no webpages need redone, etc.
It's about being proactive to overcome difficulty, or being a lazy whiner and demanding everyone else conforms to your desires.
I am legally blind... I'm 20/800 natively and 20/200 best correction from optic nerve problems and I use the computer all day long, in fact, I'm an IT professional!
I can say first hand that I would love to see better computer resources for the visually disabled, as well as for other disabilities! And, more so, better pricing on the resources that are available! For instance, a Zoomtext for Windows is almost a thousand bucks. Where the same features are built into the Mac!?!?!? But Apple charges $2,000 for their 30" display where a Dell is only $1,000!?!?!
I wouldn't dream of pushing my computer platform on anyone but Apple seems to have gotten the support for low vision working better than others. I run three monitors, 24L, 30C and 24R. The two side monitors run 1280x800 and the center runs 1440x900. Very low and disgusting resolutions by todays standards but it's what I need to be able to sit comfortably and still see the screens.
I think that in general, it's not so much of a software issue as it is hardware. Take low vision like mine for example... I'd love to have a wrap around display like you see in the movies, set on about an 8" or 10" stand so that I can get the monitor nice and close and still be able to move the keyboard out a distance far enough to type.
Regardless of weather you like flash or music on the home page or image files (I'm in IT geek, I hate them all) the users with poor vision should not be limited to what they can see or not see in the design of software/web pages. If there was adequate hardware support for this need, it will be a non-issue.
-brian -- Brian D. McGrew { brian at visionpro dot com } --- > But his grip on his santiy hovers somewhere bet
Two words. Sing them with me:
Flash! Aaa-aah!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Try reading some HTML as text:
Greater than, quote, less than, semi-quote, have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, comma, as a diabetic, comma, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used, period, semi-quote, greater than, slash, quote, less than.
I got results like that when I tried to use a voice synthesizer to read HTML email. Note that it doesn't differentiate between reading the 'quote' inside the tags and the 'semi-quote' in the quoted text.
Good luck on trying to get everybody and his invisible pal to reformat all their web and email. Far more likely to succeed would be to entice browser and email client developers to produce smart HTML strippers (and Flash readers, etc.) to produce a text-only output for use in voice synthesizers, and/or develop voice synthesizer plug-ins that process the HTML etc. as proper inflections (for bold, underline, etc) or statements ("quote"/"unquote") to be spoken.
There's a relatively small but steady market for accessibility-related software. Much of what's produced is subsidized by tax money, of which there's a high user-per capita quotient. A developer might not sell as many of such programs, but with fewer users per dollar, that means less support downstream. And with only a few developers focusing on that market, they can each make some decent money. Of course open developers such as the Mozilla group could do the same, for the usual reasons.
To hook up with people in this area, visit with the accessibility people found at many public and university libraries (at some universities it's a separate department).
Another problem needing fixing is closed caption voice-to-text processing, to give the deaf (or the Deaf, the capitalization is an important distinction) the ability to watch the now ubiquitous videos on news site and such, without having to wear their eyes out trying to lipread the low rez/bandwidth video usually produced. Take in video, buffer for later use, read audio and produce closed captioning, and send output to a window with CC synced to and overlaying the previously buffered video.
Note to commercial developers: producing such things under tax-supported/non-profit/government agency label might not earn a lot of money, but what it does earn can be taken as tax-deductions, as can the "money" that goes into the inevitable (and admittedly high-per capita) support.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Is that the web is an enabling platform. I think the blind should have as much claim to being enabled as the non-visually impaired. However, the "Web Browser" is a visual paradigm. Its goal is not to be (as I put that in italics) the web, but to present an interface for empowering you to accomplish some task. Be it paying bills, reading the latest research. Arguing for accessibility is like saying the deaf should be able to enjoy and appreciate music by watching the visualization. It just don't make any sense.
Where do we go from here? Well I think web services should be exposed by all sites that allows a non-visual client to operate the service. The blind user is then left to find any kind of web services client (voice recognition, braille input, TTY) to operate that service. If we can enable blind people to be enriched in function, and not aesthetics, we've accomplished what we needed to do. All the effort of images, flash, etc. is for the non-visually impaired.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
From the perspective of content, the Googlebot and a screen reader work about the same. If your page is not accessible to the blind then it is also not accessible to the web spiders that you need to dive traffic to your sight
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Early in the years of the "web" things were text-based. That could probably have led to easy accessibility for the blind. Also, the deaf were not an issue since everything was visual. Now, things are VISUAL. As in "Visual Basic" and so many other GUI tools. Yes, that means GRAPHICAL user interfaces - not BraileUI's or BUIs. Will we decide to limit or slow the development of sites and tools because they are not accessible to a few people out of the greater population? I hope not. Sorry, but the .4% (that is .004 of 200+ million people) in the USA should not win out over the 98.006% of the people.
Sorry I'm an ass but let's get real. No one has the resources to accommodate every minority group.
The minority groups should band together and work out a method to accommodate their people.
One of my best friends is blind and works specifically on this problem. If everybody would just follow the W3C guidelines, and not use flash all would be better. Blinds dont use Windows Narrator - that thing only helps them while they get to stick Jaws on the box. Jaws is the industry standard and it handles pretty good most of the crap that's out there - except for FLASH and some AJAX mess. It is not hard - just follow the standard and thats it. In the US section 508 requires that most material - including websites need to be accessible by people with disabilities - not just blind but everybody. Just a bit of common sense.
>London IT Support - Prominent Solutions
I am legally blind, totally color blind and dyslexic. I have a lot of diffaculty useing tech in general and many websites are unuseable to me.
my credit card, bank, utilitys and mortgage companies are continusly pushing nagging me to go paperless. The is a problem is with my combined visual disabilities. It is almost impossable for me to do that. setting text size to largest does not work on many websites or it distors the page making it unreradable. The colors often are a problem. Atleast I have some vision. Many who are totally blind are all but completely unable to use the web at all. Screen reader software has limitations. Its not just the web cell phones ATM's buss card vending machines anything with a display is a challange for a person with a visual imparment. the self checkouts that they are putting in the grocery and walmart stores are not useable by the blind I have some vision but for me to get close enough to see the display the mechines anti streal sensors freek out.
Since this article hits on both, conveniently I am both diabetic and have vision problems (I can see, but I have a horrid prescription to do so, and even then cannot see anywhere near 20/20).
:-) ), I am (almost rabidly) opposed to the idea of government enforcement to do so. The quickest way to ruin something good is to add government intervention.
While I think its nice if businesses accommodate those who are visually impaired, and I think its in their own best interest to do so (just because I have trouble seeing doesn't mean I don't spend money
There are a number of websites, both commercial and not, that I have trouble reading. Know what I do? I go browse somewhere else.
What are we going to require next? Special keyboards at public internet stations for those who are prone to hangnails?
If I had a commercial website and someone or some government entity *demanded* or *required* that I arrange my page a certain way, etc, quite frankly I'd tell them to go get fucked.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Someone's already thought of that:
http://pornfortheblind.org/
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
it's too bad that the Bobby certification is no longer available for free. I people weren't already making an effort to make their pages accessible when it was free, I doubt they'll PAY for it. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/tester/policy/accessibility/
In Canada, a corporation with more than 50 employees has a duty to accommodate people with disabilities.
The same kind of laws exist in many countries.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There's always the selfish argument. If screen readers can't make head nor tail of your site for the blind, what are the chances that a search engine can?
And as another poster mentioned, there's other self interest reasons to make accessible websites. An accessible site is more easily rendered in mobile browsers, increasing the number of users of your site, and capturing the bleeding edge crowd, who aren't afraid of spending money.
Writing your web content for only one class of renderer is a great way to miss a lot of opportunity.
As a father of diabetics I have to say that the article's premise is just plain wrong. As a diabetic (or as anon-sighted person) you have the right to demand reasonable accommodation of people around you. Diabetics needs to know how much carbohydrates there are in a food product they are about to eat to be able to inject themselves with the right amount of insulin to prevent high or low blood sugars (high blood sugars being less dangerous than low). It is reasonable that producers of food that sell their product on the open market supply that information so there is a law for that. It so happens that this law also makes provisions for the declaration of other ingredients as well, benefiting not just the diabetic.
As a non-sighted user you have a similar right to expect, and demand, reasonable accommodation. And again, such accommodation does not just benefit the non-sighted, as has been pointed out in other threads. As is the case with the declaration of content in food, at least in the US, its the law that you have to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled in publicly available software for sale.
I strongly disagree! Very frequently the "print this page" link remedies many of the problems you listed--gets rid of ads, all on one page, gets rid of navigation cruft, etc.
While I somewhat agree with this a style sheet can be used for print.
FalconShould there be a Law?
As a blind computer user I see several problems with the article. First narrator is in no way represented of any decent windows screen reader, weather free or that costs money. Second the article doesn't define what users we are talking about. I'm a computer user who has experience with programming, and isn't afraid to figure things out on my own. Just because the learning curve may be steeper if your blind doesn't mean the internet isn't usable some blind people just don't put enough effort into figuring out how to use sites and give up when they come to the first hurtle. Third blind people helped cause this problem Microsoft wanted to make narrator a good screen reader, but companies like Freedom Scientific and GW Micro who sell screen readers threw a fit which is why narrator is so useless and Microsoft didn't develop it to it's full potential. I'm hoping that Linux screen readers will surpass windows ones since the code for the operating system, most applications, and the accessibility API's are all available. While I'm impressed with what I've used so far on ubuntu it's not good enough for me to switch from windows to Linux yet.
I agree web design has become a horrendous mess. Unfortunately, it isn't going to get any better with companies trying to shove more advertising and content in our face.
Working in design I face this constantly. Clients predictably insist they want a clean, minimalist design then over the course of the project proceed to cram as much as they possibly can onto the page. And of course every last shred of content is so important that it needs to land above the cutoff for the browser window.
The problem is that nobody takes interface design seriously, particularly not on the web. Companies are already cheap enough as it is, but they're certainly not going to pay for the kind of consulting and guidance required to make a page function as it should. And designers certainly aren't helping things. Most design something with little thought other than because it looks good. They may know how to design something aesthetically pleasing and visually impressive but once they have to handle real content they're lost and the design falls apart.
But here's my impression whether or not the blind deserve more effort on the web, and it's probably considered insensitive by some: I say no. I don't mean that efforts shouldn't be made to aid the blind, I mean that they shouldn't be forced on us through legislation.
The internet is a very visual medium. That's a very basic fact. These people can't realistically expect that everyone else should have to accommodate their disability. If a company decides they want to be sensitive to the needs of the blind on their website, that's great. If other companies decide to develop software to assist the blind with browsing the internet, that's good too.
However, to force more accommmodation through lawsuits and legislation is just nonsense. And unfortunately, it's already happened.
..also annoys the non-blind. It's just a matter of degrees. If you make your website suck, it hits the blind the hardest, but you've probably pissed off everyone else too.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
i have many blind friends that see no problem with the current web
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
I work with a non-profit that gets two grants from the DHR, both of which are managed by a local office nearby. Both grants have a reporting requirement, and both report mechanisms are web based applications - standard pump and dump data entry, with a Crystal Reports pretty viewer.
One mechanism demands IE 6.0 only - the application won't load or run under anything else - and utilizes a lot of ActiveX settings that Microsoft itself recommends being disabled. The developer is inflexible and insists that his preferred method of operation is not about to change anytime soon.
The other mechanism demands IE 7.0 - the application will load, but will rarely run in anything else. There's some effort at cross browser compatibility - the Crystal Reports app supports four methods of output: Java, DHTML, Advanced DHTML, and ActiveX. Unfortunately, its a crap shoot as to which output method will work, and when. One week, Java's the way to go; the next DHTML is the only way to go. I've never managed to get the ActiveX control to work.
So, when it comes time to submit reports for these grants, I have to use two machines to do the data entry and printing. One is a downgraded Win2K box with ridiculously low Internet security settings, and the other a WinXP machine with a fairly standard config.
Here's the kicker: the DHR office keeps all it's IT staff on one floor, and the web developers sit in one corner of that floor, occupying about 600 square feet of space. They receive their paycheck from the same guy, they eat in the same cafeteria, they piss in the same restroom. These two guys are literally close enough together to spit on each other, and they still cannot get their respective applications to run on anything other than their own personal favorite browser platforms. I can't figure out if this is a supervisory cock-up, or if the intra-office political boundaries are ultra rigid, or if the whole damn organization is just hopeless. Most days, I lean toward the latter.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
...and to me, the response from the diabetic is cowardly at best. It shows a bitterness and a level of immaturity at accepting the diabetic diagnosis, and necessary lifestyle, for what it is.
Sure, you can take your twinkies and powdered donuts and shove them - I'll have the salad. I'm not happy with that, I'd rather have the sweets.
But the fact is, I'm stuck with this disease, but yet - I can choose to control it. Not perfectly, but surprisingly well with some discipline and strict adherence to medical advice and treatment. Hey, even then, it may just kill me a lot sooner than most, but it is what it is.
But you know what? Right now, in spite of some limits, and self-denial, my quality of life is every bit as good as any other sighted person in good health.
The blind, however, have little control over their condition, or their surroundings, or their interaction with the world. I see a moral imperitive to assist them if it is not overly burdonsome to do so. Web pages can be crafted in such a manner in most cases, except where the material is truly only visual (nekkid ladies)?
So hopefully I've helped to kill off that pathetic and selfish counterargument against access for the truely handicapped.
Saying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer only" is like putting up a sign outside the Wal-Mart parking lot saying "This lot is designed for Pintos only."
Truly I am a master of metaphor...
-- thinkyhead software and media
Sometimes it just has no excuse. E.g.,
1. government / local government pages. Even skipping past the issue that they should set an example by obeying the rules they voted into law... Exactly how do those depend ad revenue?
2. I go to some manufacturer's web page, to buy something or get some drivers like the GP, and... some are really a bad case of flash overdose, and some are full of ads too. Bonus points when occasionally it's not even to their own products. But anyway, WTF? I'm there either to buy something they make, or because I _have_ bought something they make. Why should I be bombarded with ads there? No, seriously.
And even skipping the banner ads, I've seen a couple where I had to go through loops and plough through pages after pages of marketing gibberish, just to get to the page with the prices. In at least one case I gave up because I just couldn't find the price list.
And a some have horrible colours, fonts and layouts too, and make wrong use of graphics at that, just because aparently someone thought it's all the rage to look like the funky marketing brochure. Thankfully that became a lot more rare over the years, but sadly it's still not dead, and it keeps coming back like a vampire.
This isn't just a case of "bad design" as in page layout and technologies used. It's outright stupid. It's not even just a case of letting the marketing drones in charge, it's letting the _stupid_ marketing drones in charge. If you want to sell me something, don't annoy me first and don't make it hard to get to (A) the specs, and (B) the prices and/or online shop pages. No, I'm not interested in how many decades of buzzwords you leverage, nor in your synergies, nor in how award-winning/industry-standard/customer-centric/buzzword-driven you are. I'm not there to play Bullshit Bingo, so just let me know (A) exactly what you sell, and (B) for what price.
At any rate, the couple of cents they might get in ads there, sorry, just aren't worth losing a potential sale over, no matter how I want to look at it. And it feels _petty_ that when I'm looking to buy something that costs hundreds of bucks, someone tries to shaft a few cents out of me with their maze of ads. It's like meeting their sales guy and seeing him trying to steal my office pens. It just doesn't make a good impression, ya know?
3. (Or 2B.) Some game publishers' pages. E.g., dunno, I want to know what their latest game is all about. Or I bought it and need a patch. Or whatever, really. And I'm forced to sit and twiddle thumbs while their flash loads, then have to read the information in a tiny window, with a tiny font, split into a gazillion tiny pages, and with a shitty colour scheme to boot.
I mean, wtf? Either I'm looking to buy their game, or I already blew some money on their game. And especially in the latter case, let's make one thing clear: the whole market for unfinished buggy games exist only because of the promise that they'll make up by offering a free patch later. I'm already annoyed by that deal, don't push it. Making me essentially pay for the patch by watching ads, or worse yet by putting it on some shitty site that makes me wait an hour for the download unless I pay to subscribe, is just adding insult to injury.
And let's make another thing clear: I _paid_ for that game. Don't make me go through a mandatory form that wants to know even my exact street number, telephone number, birth date, and size of condoms I use. I'm looking at you, EA. I already paid, ok? I'm not your data-mining guinea pig too.
Admittedly, probably the blind don't play first person shooters or console RPGs much, but I find it just as annoying as a guy who doesn't even need glasses yet.
4. But perhaps the best way to say it is that I have been before one of the guys who programmed those shitty sites, or helped fix their performance problems. I still have nightmares about some colour schemes like orange on orange-ish yellow, or cyan on bright blue, that I had to implement during the dotcom years. Or the clas
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The only reason you'd have to expend extra effort "accommodate" FireFox or Safari is if you're a 1/2-assed, crappy Web-page-creator (I won't deign to call you a "designer" let alone "programmer")
Create pages using a standards-compliant tool (not FrontPage, Publisher, or any other MS tool designed to "work best with IE") and you won't have any problems.
I am so tired of lazy luddite lamers who cry about how tough it is to create "cross-browser-compatibile" pages. IMO (and I've been creating Web pages since 1994), if you have even the vaguest of notions of what you're doing, it's HARDER to create "IE-only" pages than the reverse. .
Somebody redefine disability for me please.
I know about dragon, and I know microsoft and macs have some built in functionality, but what software should I get to make sure the blind are having a good user experience?
The article states
This may be the big hurdle. How am I, as a normal Joe, going to spend 500 - 1000 dollars to make my page blind friendly? I'd love to be able to test it to verify its integrity, but the cost is prohibitive.
There are some Best Practices I can use that are listed on the site which I will mirror here:
That's a good start but it doesn't help to know what the experience is like for someone who is blind.
Maybe the companies that offer screen reading software can offer some sort of stripped down version for web developers to test with?
Yes, we have laws that require businesses to make "reasonable accommodations" to the disabled. Reserved parking places and entry ramps are but a few. (Are lever doorknobs that big of a deal? I prefer them myself...) Now, the ADA is not perfect, and "reasonable" is certainly open to interpretation, which is why we have courts.
Why do we have such a law at all?
Because, as a country, have decided that people that are disabled, (usually through no fault of their own) deserve an opportunity to meaningfully participate in society, even if that participation exacts nominal costs from those that provide public accommodations that make up society.
Yep, ADA compliance costs money, in some cases quite a bit of money. Without the ADA, those that chose to accommodate the disabled would be at a competitive disadvantage, due to increased costs not borne by those that did not choose to accommodate. That leads to either no accommodations, or higher-priced stores being the only ones accessible to the disabled. The ADA spreads those costs out so that they do not have to be absorbed only by the disabled.
All the increased costs aren't good for business. Without the ADA, those required curb cut-outs or reserved parking places likely would not exist. Why would any business choose to voluntarily put those in?
If you were blind, would you be perfectly content to simply have huge swaths of the internet closed off to you, despite the fact that opening them up requires nothing more than nominal expense and some thought put into the web design? If you were in a wheelchair, would you be content to be essentially forced to never leave the house, due to a lack of curb cut-outs, ramps, or doors a chair could fit through?
SirWired
I feel about this much as I do everything to do with the ADA.
I absolutely believe that organizations that are funded by the government (to any degree) should be held to this standard. I include in that "essential to life" private organizations like private hospitals, utilities, and so on (and in truth, most of those have gotten gov't funding either directly or indirectly to some degree anyway).
But for your typical private company like Wal-mart, Target, etc. If they want to alienate visually impaired customers, then that's their choice.
Fundamental to freedom is the right for private entities to give offense and be offended.
Well... I would like them to be able to see my extended middle finger.
Whiners
Those of us who work in the field of disability regard this issue as a matter of Civil Rights. Once you understand that about us, it may help you understand why we are dogmatic about it.
The analogies people make to the build environment (e.g., ramps) are apt. If a designer does not incorporate the best practices that constitute electronic curb-cuts, there is nothing the best assistive technology (even at the helm of the most skilled end-user) can do to surmount the barrier.
Fortunately, things have matured enough that I no longer have to convince programmers to do the right thing, as the law and economics are on the correct side (this time). If you want to sell to the Federal government you need to make your stuff accessible.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
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Now obviously the article part would need to be parsed by a reader of sorts. But you already create a site map usually so creating a link map for every page split by categories would be simple. Through voice command:
List Navigation:
"Top, Secions..."
List Navigation Top:
"Help and Preferences, Subscribe, Firehose.."
Go to Navigation, Top, Firehose.
or
Read Article.
I'm not uncompassionate to the misfortunes of others, in fact the town I live is a leader-blind city, they train the dogs here, they have installed beeping/talking crosswalks, etc.
Very nice! But at some point we have to just say sorry, this just wasn't designed for you! Web applications (whether flash based, web 2.0/AJAX, etc.) in particular are designed to provide feature-rich, VISUAL interaction. These tools are created mostly to increase productivity, simplicity, and hopefully more intuitive interfaces.
Frankly, we have bigger fish to fry... and its simply not feasible/economical or in some cases even technologically possible to ask the web developer to build accessibility in to a web-based application.
Informational websites, on the other hand have come a long way... most screen readers don't have a problem with these types of sites. Not to mention rss feeds etc, which I'm sure the blind have a high appreciation for.
So while there is some progress on this front, I just don't see how its ever going to be fixed. One day, the technology will be there to supplement vision, so there is that. Until then, it seems like tunnel-vision (excuse the pun) to expect any law or enforcement mechanism (unlikely) to fix the problem.
Knowin' nothin' in life but to be legit' Don't quote me boy, cuz I ain't said shit
Web site? Web page? Web Application? Sure, my friend Joe can code up his XHTML and CSS to make his site completely accessible - even for those horrendous screen reader anomalies. However, the answer to the stupid question "how much can it really cost to make it accessible" isn't apparent to people who haven't been through the process.
If you attempt an accessiblity conversion project with a significantly sized web application that serves hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of daily users, the costs easily get into the millions. Most companies undertake this due to fear of litigation. Risk assessment results are the reason companies either do the conversion or not.
Frankly, the members of the standards group themselves (W3C) can't come up with a decent standard that everyone interprets in the same way. The new draft recommendation is worse (more ambiguous) than the first. Key players in the industry are split regarding how to code for accessibility.
And really, all this additional effort shouldn't be the burden of the content/application provider. As a brick and mortar store owner I don't have to give you a wheelchair because you can't walk, but a ramp to the entrance. If your wheelchair is defective or occassionally turns left when you wanted to stop or go right, it isn't my fault. The same should hold true with web sites and screen readers.
So I'm supposed to code against a PROPRIETARY screen reader's functions and make up for its deficiencies?
Taking the politically correct thing just a bit to far with this one.
I'm sorry but heres the way it is.
Your blind.
A computer uses a visual interface, thats why we call it a GUI. GRAPHIC user interface.
Is it fair? No, but the world is a not a fair place.
Demanding a 'blind acessable' internet is as foolish as complaining that movie theatres don't do enough to meet blind peoples needs.
Humans as a species are very visually dependant, when we design things they are visually oriented, because thats how we interpret our world.
As someone lacking a primary sensory organ (namely your eyes), and there for vision you must accept that the entire planet was built with the exact opposite of your condition in mind.
There are some tasks for which a blind person is simply SOL, driving being the most obvious. Full usage of a computer would seem to be next on the list
More competition would be good, these display prices are insane.
What about WiFi Braille pads? Or network enabled cell phones optimized for working with web pages through audio?
I have no idea what would work best, but I bet new technologies might help fill in some gaps.
The problem with producing a completely accessible site, is that is is quite difficult to test that it is, after you've followed all the best practices, actually accessible. Most small businesses don't have the resources to test how most acessibility tools will render their site. I use ALT tags, avoid flash, popups and the like, and am pretty sure my application will be usable, however, I can't sign on the dotted line that it will be 100% accessible to multiple disabilities or multiple adaptive technologies. The truth of the matter is that the odds are similar to the person running $strange_browser or $strange_addon or $mobile_device. In the end, you just have to do the best you can to provide a stellar service to the mainstream, and the highest level of functionality to the remainder of users who have differing configurations or abilities.
The secondary issue relates to duplicating content. A large subset of sites, as some posters have said, have a bona-fide requirements that limit accessability due to disability, or configuration. To use a chat room in the 90s, you basically needed Java. To use YouTube you have to have Flash. A clothing website cannot provide a equal level of usability to someone visually impaired in an ALT tag. I think a lot of companies say "I don't know what level of accessibility is going to be of real use to my customer, and even if I do, I can't gaurantee with my limited knowledge of adaptive technologies that it will meet that level of accessibility."
I worked for a community college who had a Office of Disability Services and even with an onsite resource, it was difficult in many areas, even with the adaptive technology to test our product with, to provide an equal level of usability and content.
On a positive note, I think the simplicity of Google, and the fact that minimalism seems to be in vouge at the moment (at least in the US) is helping create more usable sites for disabled and non-disabled folks that tend to handle odd and mobile platforms.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Every official website is required to put their site up for review, and receive the label as "every citizin should be able to use official services, be them online or not". For example, "tax on the web" is completely tweaked for visually challenged people.
Here's some more indepth about it: Response of a blindsurfer consultantToo bad the official site (appearantly renamed to "anysurfer") isn't accessible for "English" speaking folks: Anysurfer
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
seem to me the only way to go... just as WAP, Mobile versions of the site. Your browser could send some info stating that you prefer the blind version, and thatÂs it. It should be fairly easy to do it with today CMS.
web sites would be wiser to first translate their content to other language. Start with Spanish.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
What's this _deserve_ nonsense? Why should any content be posted which is not available to anybody. I have this argument repeatedly at work (Who are we trying to deny content to?).
A reasonable designer can use Flash and whatnot, and simply present alternate content. in the needed format, appropriately. When I'm checking out sports equipment or service times at a local church, I shouldn't have to endure the #*$&4.
The web is necessary for success in today's world. Saying that legislating accessibility is like banning sugar in foods is ridiculous. They'd only be remotely comparable if your job, life, taxes, social connections, economic viability and pretty much everything else was influenced by whether or not you could have a sugary food.
What I've yet to comprehend is the hostility that the general population seem to show disabled people. Yeah, it's scary to imagine living life differently than you do now, but that doesn't mean you have to be hostile in your exclusion of people with disabilities.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/09/224204 I'd reply with the same comment I made in the last featured article, and would probably get modded a troll again. Eh, so what... The internet isn't a right. If you can't use a site properly because of YOUR disability, then take your business elsewhere and let the company know that their site is crap. There, I did it.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Blind guy: I don't know.
Peter: Was it a red card?
Blind guy: I don't know what red is.
Accessibility and usability can go hand in hand - an example and advices
The web site for the Icelandic Meteorological Office has achieved accessibility certification based on WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). It has received very good critics for usability. It received an award for the best Icelandic Web-site in public service during 2007.
The most important weather forecasts and observations are shown graphically on maps but are still accessible for disabled people. This is achieved using Web2 techniques.
There are less than 400.000 people living in Iceland. The Icelandic Met. Office is small. It employs only a handful of tech guys running the whole operation. The Icelandic Met. office would be considered very small compared to any small or medium size office in USA and Europe
Still this micro met. office has a web site with good accessibility and usability. There is no excuse for USA companies not to do it too.
Here are some advices:
I enjoy a good city bus ride; for me, a good bus ride is when you can watch the scenery outside, and better, have a good view ahead. But lately, too many bus systems have been getting low-floor buses that have room for wheelchairs, and too often, those imply having side-facing seats (I **HATE** those, you can't see outside) and worse, a huge honking eye-level cushion that blocks the view ahead.
We shouldn't forget the welcome side-effects of accessibility requirements; they can often offer positive benefits well beyond their original target audience.
Take the Americans with Disabilities Act. Among other things, stuff gets wheelchair accessible. Which also makes them stroller accessible! Traveling with a young kid in Europe is much, much harder than it is here, since all the work to make things work for wheelchairs also works with strollers. Moving equipment around on carts is also a lot easier.
We can get similar effects with metadata. In SIlverlight, we're doing a lot of work for it to support accessibility, both for screen readers and for captioning of audio assets. It turns out that infrastructure metadata is enormously useful for searchability and indexing. Getting a nicely transcribed text stream into media assets enables a whole lot of cool stuff, like being able to automatically build menus and transcripts. And being able to search for, and seek to, keywords.
My video compression blog
The thing about the changes needed for web accessibility is that it requires web pages that are more machine-parsable (since screen-readers need to parse web pages better than visual-oriented browsers, where the parsing can be all thrown off as long as the end display works out). So it surprises me to see so much opposition to web accessibility when web pages that are standards-compliant and more machine-parsable should be very desirable.
I, for one, would love to have more of my content in more structured, more standards-compliant formats like RSS and Atom. It would open up more possibilities for autonomous agents, richer interactive clients, less reliance on overwrought Javascript navigation, and would provide better accessibility for the blind at the same time.
This story reminds me of the panel dicussion at the Software Development West show a couple of years back.
The topic was : Model Driven Architecture.
During which a blind guy stood up and asked what are you doing to help blind developer use models for MDA?
Puzzled looks by the panel, then Scott Ambler said something along the lines of:
"Well nothing....you need to be able to see models"
Man that got the crowd going
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
Accessibility for blind users also makes the pages easier to view for sighted people on mobile devices. Web sites developers should target multiple levels of users. It only goes to increase their audience. The best choice is to put content into almost a database like form or XML and use multiple interfaces to serve content.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
...they don't want open source packages to succeed on the desktop, even if they include accessibility tools, because that means there isn't a well-funded target to hassle with their demands.
A lot the same arguments crop up here whenever the subject of web accessibility arises. It's pretty obvious that playing on people's sense of ethics/compassion once again fails, so let's concentrate primarily on the economic arguments:
1. First of all, the "free market" argument doesn't hold water, since most industrialized nations have some sort of welfare system. Every time a disabled person has to get alternative accommodation because they were refused it in the public sphere, the workaround comes out of pockets of the taxpayers, disabled or not. A business owner may not have to pay for not making a site accessible, but everyone working there (a.k.a. Joe taxpayer) will pay in the long term.
2. Having multiple systems to accomplish the same goals is almost always more expensive than having a universally designed one. e.g. We are seeing this with public transportation in many cities - making conventional busses wheelchair-accessible is cheaper than subsidizing both a conventional transit system and an additional paratransit system.
3. By increasing disabled persons' participation in society, we can stimulate the economy. We are not talking small numbers of ppl (approx. 10-20% of citizens in wealthier nation have some sort of disability and the numbers are higher in less wealthy nations). Nor are we talking small dollar amounts ($3 trillion dollars worldwide). Just because businesses are unaware of these stats doesn't mean the numbers aren't there.
Other things to consider:
Disabled people aren't demanding absolutely everything on the planet be accessible, where do people get this idea? Stop vilifying them as such already. Accessibility is not about "special treatment", it is about undoing something that was done wrong in the first place. It's like saying the abolishment of slavery is giving "special treatment" to Blacks. The real drama queens are the ones claiming that accessibility is such a huge burden (and without any stats to back it up).
Access to the internet may not be a right, but more and more activities connected to our rights are accessed primarily by the internet. With rare exception, everyone becomes disabled at some point in their lives. Disability isn't merely a special interest group, it's everyone.
Furthermore, as has already been said many times in many ways, the measures to make websites accessible are fairly easy and straightforward - otherwise ur doin' it wrong.
I think a few of you need a lesson in the Social Model of Disability.
My wife is significantly vision impaired. She will often use the "print this page" link, as this removes the "cruft". It is easier for her to use the "print..." link than it is for her to force her browser to only read the "@media print"
I'm having trouble understanding how Bill Gates fits into this?
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
I think they should put subtitles in braille books so I can read them.
It's right in the article on the dang first page. You mention "oh, perfectly accessible with a *mouseover*. Hello, they don't want to use a mouse, they use the keyboard and key commands and shortcuts.
.avi or your sound clip as an .mp3. Just have your text..be text. Flash just makes stuff be twice as slow and twice as complicated as it needs to be, for no purpose whatsoever except to make adobe money and for some web master(bators) to feel leet or something. It's busywork for no good reason. Flash causes every browser out there to eventually choke, I don't care how much ram you have, once you start to add on the tabs, eventually damn flash will kill it. You wonder why flashblock is such a popular add-on? Because flash sucks, that's why, and millions of people think so. Youtube is popular despite being flash, it would be even better if they just offered a clean download or even just torrents.
No! Flash sucks! Sucks hard and long! Why don't they use truth in advertising and call it "molasses" instead of flash, because that is all it does, slow down everything connected to it. Just stop it! You make your whole site be flash based, it sucks, no matter some doofus's standards crap! There is no legitimate reason to use flash for anything, including movies/videos, we have perfectly good and sane alternatives to flash that work, such as..just put the damn image where it is supposed to go, with an alt tag that really describes it. Just have a link to download your stupid video as an
If that person has that mindset about people who are disabled, then by their own logic they should be required to synthesize their own insulin from scratch. I can't believe a diabetic had the nerve to compare themselves to someone with a severe disability who cannot drive a car or get around without the assistance of others.
I don't think accessibility laws apply here, since we're not dealing with a physical space. I see it more like a print medium.
A magazine publisher has an option of what fonts/layouts it chooses with its magazine. They can choose to make versions of their magazine more friendly to people who are visually-impaired. (Readers Digest does this.)
However, they're not forced to do this. I think it should be the exact same way with websites. I could see a government site perhaps being required to offer substitute pages that are more easily navigable for the visually-impaired, but that's the exception, and not the rule, as far as I'm concerned.
(Before anybody thinks I'm somebody with 20/20 vision who is insensitive to people with visual limitations, I want to point out my vision is pretty horrid and getting worse. I've been stuck behind glasses since I was six and have retinal damage in one eye.)
"Standards compliant" has been, for a very long time, synonymous with "Does bad things in IE".
No it wasn't a joke, you're right about IE though. However there are workarounds for getting standards compliant website to rend in IE correctly.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The thread it is not about deserving effort, but more effort. In fact, the Internet it is not just the "web", you can access newsgroups, amateur radio, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sensitive about disfunctionalities, but "the web" is visual oriented.
Not hard at all to test for that, use the on/off button on your monitor. Go to your site, turn your screen off. Now try to use your site (without sight).
Now, I am not blind, but I am on dialup (no broadband availability where I live, one mile and change too far for dsl, zero cable), and I sure would like there to be some sort of HTML attribute that would automagically take me to the "print this page" version of most websites rather than waiting for some JS and Flash infested monstrosity pulling ads from who knows how many other slow servers to finally finish loading just so I can hunt for the "print this page" version. Some web pages now take actual multiple minutes to get to the point I can find the print this page. I wonder if there is a google hack there someplace to do that? hmmm.. Although I would like the browser and website to cooperate to do that. Accessibility isn't only about the blind, in the great flyover nation, there are millions of people who will never be served by broadband because it isn't the law that they are, 100 year old thin copper and 99 year old switches are all they will get. Oh well, I still like the tradeoffs of being rural, I wouldn't switch to urban just for broadband...but I still spend money and go to commercial websites. If they suck, are too slow and bloated to use on dialup, no loot from me, fullstop.
Slashdot degrades nicely though, full bloat and the new design with JS turned on is almost unbearable and unusable for me on dialup (I mean, you can't hardly even scroll normally, it "jumps", best way I can describe it, it fast jumps up and down with normal scrolling-only place I have ever seen such an effect), but the old low res version still works fine and I get all the same relevant content at 5 times (or more) the speed. The Nasa site isn't too bad either for giving you options, once you've broken through the front page barrier that is-that still needs some work.
The problem is that the web requires more effort than TV to accommodate the blind. They're a small minority so people don't want to work on it and considering how much richer the web is going to get that software will have to be more advanced which means more expensive.
The fact is that magazines don't have to accommodate the blind and it's due to the cost and silliness of such a thing unlike TV where you just pay someone to sign language or describe what's happening on the screen.
I also think the problem is the responsibility of the handicap software developer and not the web developer. Any web developer that does his job decently will provide a site that should be pretty usable anyway and he should have to stop himself from using a bit of flash that might have text in it because a blind person might miss out.
We all know it sucks ass to blind. You have to live with it and realise you can't have everything perfectly packaged in some sort of blind man's alternative.
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect" -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
If you don't like that basic principle, publish your stuff somewhere less accessible, off-web.
THEIR customers would benefit, and so would they in the long run.
@media braille
</style>
solved
I decided to run the computerworld article through JAWS (A Windows-based screen reader) and their site seems a good example of why it's so frustrating. (JAWS has a 40 minute mode which web people can use to test their designs, I find it very useful).
Here is what you hear:
"Link Graphic Click here to find out more, Link Graphic Click here to find out more, Link Graphic Click here to find out more, Link Graphic Click here to find out more." Then you get the top images, which are well described, then you have a Jump To section, again, not too bad, and the search is clear.
Then you're thrown into the navigation without any kind of skip link and no access keys. Then you get ads to download MS Search Server and an Ebook, Network Scanner, Virtualisation something. Then a Table to sign up for newsletters, then print edition. THEN you reach the content.
Admitedly you can use headings to skip to content, which is a bonus, but I've not seen a huge number of sites that use headings correctly.
You get the Heading, Sub Heading, then the comments, recommended and share links, then the Comments/Related box to the left of the article. Then the Zone advert THEN you get to the content of the article. The quote isn't obvious, there's a message for me to get the latest flash player, then the remainder of the article.
After this are the page links. "Link 2, Link 3, Link Next Right double angle bracket"
It should be noted that I am not a very competent screen reader user and that experienced users can speed this process up and if you have headings (Which computerworld do) you can skip to H1 and save a lot of time, but to be honest their site could do with fixing, just like the majority of ones I see (myself included sometimes, I'm still learning too).
Well, obviously greed is a motivation there, but the distinction I was trying to make was, briefly:
A. smart greed = actually makes some money
B. stupid greed = loses a $1000 sale to serve $0.01 worth of ads and marketing bullshit
C. plain stupidity = stuff that doesn't even serve that extra $0.01 worth of ads. It's there just because some retard thought it's "cool" or "exciting" to have different colours and fonts than everyone else, and more animations than anyone else, and a navigation that's a bad mini-game by itself, and God knows what other stupidity.
To give you an example of #3: back in the dot-com days I actually had to do a contract for a company whose site's navigation looked, basically, like a heap of cuts from newspapers. I don't even mean something like a neat menu which only happens to be tackily rendered as a each option being a scrap of paper. I mean those scraps were literally heaped in an ugly pile, and you had to search in that pile for the one you wanted.
It's stuff that wasn't even an ad, it didn't help serve more ads, and generally didn't earn them a cent, in any form or shape. It just made it not only inaccessible to blind people (since those slanted pieces of paper were images, and a screen reader can't do much with them), but a royal pain in the arse to use even with perfect eyesight.
It was simply the creation of a graphics artist turned PHB, so now he wasn't just free to do all the art for art's sake that he always wanted, but also had the authority to turn their navigation into such a work of art. Completely unusable, but artsy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Similarly with the internet. The internet is a mostly visual medium. Newspaper makers don't have to distribute a audio disk of their paper and nor should the websites. It is simple economics: does the added market justify the expense? Unless you are selling white canes NO!
More should be done to make the internet better for the masses and available at a lower cost. This in turn could drop the bar as far as making a for the blind website to the point where it is feasible.
In conclusion: people lived just fine 20 years ago when they didn't have the internet and they will survive without it. Does it suck that they can't experience everything that is part of modern culture? Yeah, but that is part of being disabled, by definition you can't do everything someone "normal can". Just like your little Johny can't be a brain surgeon if he is "smart like dumptruck".
Heh :-)
Why have the whole web adapt when the right software could convert the sites to a usable format to match the userâ(TM)s disability? Then you would not need to search for a site that has put in the time and effort to make there site usable by one type of disabled user? Or may be a service offered by the ISP to disabled users.
Indeed, I always find the vaunted Free Market economy to be quite heartless in practice and devoid of most empathy.
To take your example of wheelchair access, there was a survey done of Pubs in the capital of Ireland, Dublin. These were all in the city center and are VERY lucrative. HUGELY profitable.
The survey group went around to 20 of them in one night with one member of the group in a wheelchair. Zero of them were wheelchair accessible. The best they found was a place where the bouncers offered to carry the guy and his wheelchair up a set of stairs. The worst was a place that told them their elevator was temporarily broken until they had to admit that they did not actually have an elevator. On top of that, most of the places were found to be using their Handicapped Toilets as storage rooms, so after a wheelchair bound customer had a drink or two, and naturally needed to take a leak, he or she simply couldn't.
And these are some of the most profitable businesses in the country frequented by millions of people.
Yup...
"does the reality of today's economics dictate that the blind/disabled will continue to struggle and learn to live with it?"
It has nothing to do with today's society.
THEY ARE BLIND.
Until replacement sight exists, they're going to have problems doing what others do, because THEY LACK ONE SENSE.
There's another problem... most web designers are blind to common sense. I don't know what to tell you on that except to post IQ testers at the gates and turn down the congenitally stupid.
i can understand a little bit why they would need to use it. but its going to be a long ass time before they get something out that will work. for people like them.
I am all for the blind getting more consideration on the web. And though a bit nearsighted, I can see just fine.
Frankly, I don't want the pictures most of the time. I'm a text guy. I even wish people would eschew mathml/latex math symbols on wikipedia and make an effort to write things in a way that is readable in ascii. I hate having to fire up a picture web browser so I can see some formula.
I also hate javascript urls. WTF. Use a frikken anchor tag asshole!
...
It's not hard to check if your site is accessible, turn off images, script, flash and css in your browser, if you can still use the site and navigate around, you shouldn't have much of an issue. The internet for the blind and partially sighted people is a frustrating place, the browser and plug-ins they have to use are pretty poor. This is not helped by developers being lazy. It's not hard to make a site accessible, it's just that it's very easy to make a site inaccessible.
DESERVED!? wtf
So why were people building "IE only" sites back in 1997 when IE had a 15% marketshare, if that? Cause MS bribed people to do so with 'free' access to their 'site builder tools' and such. It had nothing to do with being a 'better' browser or better experience for the end user. I worked at a company that did this, and I believe it explained many of the 'best viewed in IE' buttons way back when.
creation science book
That Zonk would put another social-engineering-is-good assertion with a rhetorical question mark after it. Fine. I'll do the obvious and answer a question with a question. Since the question was do the blind deserve preferenctial treatment, what does "deserve" mean?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Are catalogs compelled to publish braille editions? Are magazine publishers? I think typically, there are companies that charge large sums of money to make braille translations of books and magazines. If your company thinks it would be cost effective to target the blind, then go ahead an create a web site that's more open to them, but most customers want a site that takes advantage of their abilities. Maybe a little callous.
No. Long answer; utilitarianism.
it isn't a question of making everyone change-their-ways,
.. .. "no harm intended" ..
it's a question of including as much of humanity as reasonably-possible,
instead of boostering
exclusion for social-fad/pretense.
No-one's saying you have to make your PERSONAL advertisement accessible,
but if you choose to block blind people from doing business with your business or government agency,
then I hope you accidentally get hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed,
as the experience of being disabled in some way,
and f***ed-over by everyone
-washing hands and turning away-
-while they block your freedom and life-
is offensive beyond words.
Is it considered rational to include children, elderly, infirm, but not disabled? we are human too, and didn't ask to be blocked out.
Maybe euthanasia enforcement is more your style?
I hope you taste the other side, for years and years, buddy, maybe you will understand human values, someday, if you get honest enough
Many websites already present a css sheet based on browser and capabilities, think PALM, or early web enabled phones, pre-java text only. Why not add a check for a user using a blind web device and displaying text only? Little to no cost and everyones happy.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Designing a website so that it can be properly used by the blind also helps design it well for cellphones. Many cellphones have trouble displaying images, or the connection speed is so slow that many people choose to disable images.
Clickable images are often useless on a cellphone, which scales down the image to the point of being unreadable, and also lacks a mouse pointer with which to click on the image.
Flash, and the more complicated parts of JavaScript, are often not supported. AJAX probably won't work.
And finally, many cellphone users are paying by the KB for their downloads! I certainly don't want that charge to be wasted on a useless Flash animation that only serves as a gatekeeper to the real content I'm trying to get at.
Designing a website for the blind isn't profitable. However, designing for cellphones is!
Maybe setting a browser to spoof the User-Agent setting, to appear to be coming from a cellphone, might help?
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Blindness and diabetes are 2 completely different things, blindness being a lot worse as diabetes.
with diabetes you've got a diet issue, with blindness you're actually missing one of your primary senses. That's quite a difference. A difference which goes waaaay beyond comparing apples with oranges.
With diabetes you've still got all your senses, with blindness you haven't.
With diabetes you can still eat (however limited in some cases), with blindness you don't see anything.
Granted, diabetes has as a consequence you are faster tired. But that still makes it a lot more bearable as blindness.
Oh, and one last thing... You aren't confronted with diabetes all day; with blindness, darkness is endless and lasts until it's fixed or until you die.
I am not in the habit of responding to ACs, but you ask so nicely!
The technique of implementing a parallel text-only site is one that is explicitly allowed by 508 and WCAG 1.0 and still favored by some experts, advocates, and end-users. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of failures with implementations, the idea has long fallen out of favor and does not appear at all in WCAG 2.0 as a consequence.
For a web comic, I would recommend longdesc with the dialog. The Java site might be even more straightforward with things like: alt="screen shot of rendered code as described in the next paragraph". The thought exercise I like to recommend is to ask yourself: How would you read the page to an informed colleague over the phone?
Authors new to accessibility tend to get hung up on how hard it is to provide text equivalents when really all that is needed most of the time is text alternatives which "at least provide descriptive identification of the non-text content". This change in language from WCAG 1.0 to 2.0 is quite deliberate. If you make the paradigm shift from thinking of the web as a visual medium to that of an information medium, you will be on the right track.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
What about the poor vegetarian kid whose only source of protein is nuts because he's allergic to milk? Can he just not go to the same school as the kid who's allergic to peanuts?
Peanuts are legumes, not nuts.
"It's just being more sensitive to people who feel that government and institutions ignore them," he said. A pretty small first step... but perhaps having a blind person in a prominent position like this will allow him to call attention to issues of web accessibility for blind people?
My bicyles