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?"
"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."
You've never seen MySpace have you?
Most of the topics you've covered are that way because someone decided it was a better way to get another opportunity to serve you a targeted advertisement. The download links are that way to prevent other people from stealing your content, denying you ad revenue and leeching your bandwidth... It all comes back to money and some content providers heavily rely on ad revenue to pay their monthly hosting and bandwidth costs.
Others are just greedy.
When bandwidth becomes free, maybe you'll see the reverse to these trends. Maybe. Probably not.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
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
I disagree -- and if you've ever used a screen reader you'd understand how nearsighted (no pun intended) that comment is.
That's just the beginning. Not using alt tags doesn't "break the web" for screen readers, it's just less helpful. But not using semantically accurate tags can make it nearly impossible to read or navigate a page. The screen reader JAWS (what I was trained on) can jump through a page by header tags, so having a proper hierarchy is crucial to them being able to quickly locate the information they need.
If your site breaks with all plugins, javascript, and CSS turned off, then blind people will effectively NOT be able to use it.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
We also have twinkies.
The premise here is that all websites should be coded to be accessible to the blind. Therefore all food should be made to be edible by diabetics without worry.
The difference between is that sites can do many things while being accessible, but food for diabetics really can't have any sugar in it.
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#anchor62335And there are @media types addressing the topic as well. Pardon the appearance; I'm having to compensate for a lack of style for definition lists under Slashdot's stylesheet:
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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!
But you still miss the whole point of the web standards Right Way. Which is that, although it almost always takes a bit more effort, it's almost always possible to have your cake and eat it. Progressive Enhancement.
Your case is a good example of many cases, in fact. The Right Way would be to serve a 'vanilla' (x)html document where links are normal links, ie <a> elements, (or not links at all, if you REALLY know someone without javascript can't use what it links to anyway), which are assigned suitable IDs/classes, and then you have an "init" javascript routine which, assuming javascript is available and enabled in that user-agent, will run through those links in the DOM and rewrite them to your souped-up scripted alternative.
With a library like JQuery it's not even difficult: $('.rewritelink').your_transform_func() for the link rewriting itself, plus it gives you a robust method of attaching your init routine. So you don't even need to worry about browser javascript compatibility, the library abstracts that away from you.
Yes, it increases bandwidth (~53KB for Jquery) and CPU use, you could argue "unnecessarily", but it is a method of you, and everybody (blind and sighted users alike), having their cake and eating it. Hate javascript? Turn it off, get normal links. Resent even downloading the extra .js bytes? Well, at least this way it's a separate document, a distinct layer in the "onion skin", so the end-user still has the control to absolutely prevent that (eg, at HTTP or DOM level, Adblock, Greasemonkey, firewall/proxies, etc). Whereas if you leap into, say, Flash or Silverlight instead, you're leaving people an all-or-nothing choice.
Just some food for thought. Although my post is seemingly "disagreeing", thanks for your post, it was refreshing to read a cogent argument in favour of added web dev whiz-bang, which is rare on slashdot.
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).
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.
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?
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