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."
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
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#anchor62335Those 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.