Slashdot Mirror
Giving the Blind Better Web Access
crimeandpunishment writes "Decades ago, the breakthrough for the disabled was making buildings wheelchair accessible. Today, it's making their world Web-accessible. Disabled groups are hailing new legislation Congress has sent to the President. Among other things, the measure will give the blind greater Internet access through smart phones, and require devices like iPhones and Blackberrys to be hearing-aid compatible. 'It breaks down barriers for all of us,' says Mark Richert of the American Foundation for the Blind."
> and require devices like iPhones and Blackberrys to be hearing aid compatible.
Ummm, why not require hearing aids to be Bluetooth compatible?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What if you did it with OCR on images pulled from the GPU? Then you can literally read everything, from the text that shows up in the HTML between tags, to text in images, to text in flash. Heck, it would read street signs in people's pics on Flickr. And no one would have to make anything on their webpages special for blind people.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Google Analytics tells me that I got 20k visitors yesterday. Four of them used NS4. 1500 of them used IE6. There are few NS4 users that I honestly don't care how my site renders in their browser. There are enough IE6 users that I do have to care how my site renders in their browser.
How can I get Google Analytics to tell me how many of my visitors are blind and using screen-readers?
Yes it will be getting much cheaper for the minority and slightly more expensive for the rest of us who now subsidize you.
So, Apple doesn't provide hardware support for T-coil users, for instance. A hearing impaired user must find a third-party accessory that works, with luck, with Apple products... until Steve decides it hurts his user experience.
Everything on that page tell me that Apple takes accessibility in similarly serious fashion that Microsoft takes POSIX / open systems compliance. It's a bullet in their checklist, and they implement it minimally just to stay in government-style approved vendors lists...
Here's one: Tom Mundy and his lawyer Morse Mehrban both make an estimated $300,000 a year suing small businesses
Believe it or not, most "blind" web users can, in fact, see. They can't see well enough to read, but definitely well enough to draw boxes around what they want to read. Seriously, check out what qualifies as "blind."
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Handicapped accessible == machine readable.
Machine readability can be a bad thing when human eyeballs are the product and the information on your web site exists solely to entice humans to look at your advertisements. Watch as TV listings sites have introduced CAPTCHAs and distort the listings in ways that only a full CSS layout engine can untangle, specifically to deter machines that screen-scrape instead of paying per month for API access.
If you grok HTML and CSS then I fail to see how an accessible design costs a whole lot more than a non-accessible one.
Accessible design costs more if you incur costs per day or per view that advertisers are supposed to pay, but they don't pay if most of your visitors are scrapers. To take a bad gaming analogy: is it desirable to make a first-person shooter "accessible" to aimbots?