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Web Guru To the Blind
the_newsbeagle writes "Chieko Asakawa went blind at age 14, learned to program mainframe computers by sense of touch, and has spent her 27 years at IBM-Tokyo bringing personal computing and the Internet to the blind. From the article: 'By 1997 she had developed a plug-in that worked with the Netscape browser, mapping Web navigation commands to the computer keyboard's number pad and using text-to-speech technology to read out content. Computer stores around the world sold IBM's Home Page Reader, and Asakawa says its effect on the blind community was immediate, electric, and sometimes touching. ... Other browsers for the blind followed IBM's groundbreaking efforts, and Asakawa moved on to addressing a deeper problem: the fact that designers were unintentionally creating inaccessible websites. She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do and to suggest ways to improve navigation for audio browsers.'"
...nothing to see here
"She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do"
She invented turning the monitor off?
But where is the news? its just a random story...
Well, good for her! This isn't your typical job in today's technological world. Though i wonder how much coding she personally did, and not her team of designers.
my sig pwns your sig
See also T V Raman, author of AsTeR and Emacspeak. Has worked at Xerox, Adobe, IBM, currently at Google.
As a web designer part time, I find it frustrating to try to tell my clients "that's not a good idea" when they think because they stand over the shoulder of their 15 year old and watch him surf the web that they are experts on UI design and web compatibility. NO, really, you are going to piss people off and alienate them with that! I usually have to use the "Google won't see it either" trick to get them to agree to simple stuff like redundant text-based menus.
Looks like it's still in beta, but will see what's up anyway.
Ironically enough, the Eclipse web site that hosts the install files has a menu that won't work in Chrome.
I admire people who don't let their handicaps handicap them. It amazes me how successful Chieko is at programming, despite her blindness. Sometimes it takes a loss of sight or hearing to stop taking our senses for granted. The loss of a sense, when accepted with a good attitude, motivates one to develop the full potential in their remaining senses.
Ordinarily it involves turning the monitor off and using screen reader software such as JAWS that's often prohibitively expensive for small web design firms, around $1000 per seat. A lot of assistive tools are priced for health insurers and for companies subject to Rehabilitation Act section 508 or Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, not for individuals.
... works pretty well.
I've found that as long as sites I'm working on are reasonable navigable with Lynx, then they work for most adaptive technology users (of which my son is one).
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
But I wish this didn't have to exist. I wish that we had the same enthusiasm for biotech as we do for space... Seeing blind people touch away at our highest technology while we are still unable to master our own biology seems ... odd.
They're NOT inaccessible, stop lying.
"Accessible" is a term of art meaning available to people with widely recognized disabilities.
The world doesn't revolve around you, despite the fact that you can't see that.
The world doesn't revolve around any of us: not minorities, and not the economically dominant minority (able-bodied neurotypical adult white males). That's why there are laws to help minorities such as people with disabilities. Otherwise you end up with the political equivalent of two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for dinner.
... that this story immediately follows the one about a Seattle library allowing some guy to watch porn (http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/02/03/1611259/seattle-library-lets-man-watch-porn-on-computers-despite-complaints). Hmm, what's the connection? If you don't stop it, you'll need one of these web readers?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
The fact that aDesigner requires "Internet Explorer 6.0 or above", thereby making the tool itself inaccessible to a significant portion of the web development community, is almost too much to bear.
Is it a self-referential joke that the "View all" link in TFA is dead?
I could not come up with a line for the subject and I could not RTFS or TFA for some neuropsychriatric reason, but I think that a plug for Accessible Computing Foundation would probably be in order right about just there:
http://accessiblecomputingfoundation.org/
I heard about this on the linux outlaws podcast number 246:
http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws/246
They interviewed Jonathan Nadeau, who started the project. He's a blind gnu/linux user/peddler. I think I've repeteadly heard him on the Kernel Panic too. I hope I'm not confusing him with any other blind gnu/linux user. They all sound alike.
Anyway. Swell guy with a worthy cause, by the sound of it.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
I worked a lot on software for people with disabilities, did a GPS navigation app for Symbian back in the day.
Got commissioned by the U.N. to look into adaptive technologies. Summary follows: Products fall into two broad categories: commercial and altruistic. Altruistic products are usually brilliantly designed for a specific person (This is considered the central issue of adaptive technologies and is the major talking point. specificity) usually a relative or friend. These products are ingenious, well made and available for extremely reasonable prices. You can find them if you search hard online, generall,y someone making a TTS engine for his daughter isn't a web guru with a marketing budget. The second group is the commercial products, almost universally INSANELY overpriced. $50 of hardware sells for $5000. Visual basic level software selling for hundreds or thousands of dollars. This exorbitance is rationalized through: Disability being a "small" market (regardless if a product sells 100,000 a year), quality (you shouldn't force a person to learn a new technology every few years, hardware breakdown is a nightmare if it's non-standard and you NEED it to read,communicate or work) which is bullshit I've seen just as much breakdown and poorly written,documented and supported software from the major players as from the passion projects, and source of funding... taxpayers, bureaucrats and contracts. I'm sure you've seen it before, bleeding hearts SUCK at negotiation. Dignity is a problematic area I've encountered a few times as well, products that work ideally but provoke surprise or distaste from those without special needs are discarded. *(special rant follows useful information).
What I told the U.N.: You have three problems: 1.) This stuff is expensive, and overpriced... getting it to developing countries is going to be extremely difficult and infrastructure for them will also be extremely costly. 2.) Languages most people DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. Since this stuff is commercial, not open source, there is little opportunity or motivation to create versions for Swahili speakers. It's bad... if you don't speak English, French, German, Italian or Spanish your options are diminished 99.5%.
Then of course I got pissed and determined and decided I would let a blind dude in the Phillipines see. I went through the spending of all long term programs to purchase technologies for people with disabilities and looked at the actual distribution of people's needs (People in Africa have an incredibly high level of amputation for example). It turns out that THE U.S. ALONE is already spending 10x to 20x what it would cost to do the job, we're just putting the money into companies instead of open sourcing it or creating a community lead program for development.
This is obviously speculation and I'd need to provide a lot of evidence to prove how inefficient it is but an example was my call to the Arizona school board. $50,000,000 a year, for approximately 4000 arriving disabled high schoolers.
My recommendation: move funding towards open source software and hardware, nothing else will solve the language and distribution issues... the technologies are just moving too fast and the users are too clueless for any help from market forces in this direction.
Rant time! Ok I'd like to introduce you to a man his name is Ray Kurzweil. From now on I will call him The Jewish Nazi or JN for short.
Mr. Kurzweil was one of the first to market will an OCR device, nothing special a webcam and a flat panel to put the documents on... and only $8000! Because he got in early his company achieved name recognition, which was good because I compiled a LIST OF EVERY ELECTRONIC DEVICE it's about 2100 products or so. Then went to several leading experts to determine which products were excellent and which were popular (huge divergence) JN sells a lot... but his products all suck and are overpriced.
So now our Jewish Nazi has the disabled community by the balls and starts gouging away. $10,000 for screen readi
Personally, I have never tested a website for use by the visually impaired because the services themselves can only be used by somebody that can see in the first place.
What kind of "services" are you talking about? Consider the use case of a blind person and a sighted person in the same household, one signing up for the service and the other using it.
When I look into this I find sites that are not up to date. If anyone knows what the best tools for testing are it would be of extreme interest to me. I have been payed to make existing sites 508 compatible. I hate to think that something slipped through the cracks.
When programming new sites I am not a designer but I would like the websites I program to be as accessible as possible. If I can figure out a way to program something in a more accessible way then I will, time permitting etc.
Rather than copy everything over, take a look here; http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2040692&cid=35510122
Summary of points:
- Accessibility is a good theme, but a bad goal - it never pays for itself
- Retrofitting accessibility on a pre-existing systems is a bad idea
- Most apps/sites/etc are 'accessible enough'
The main problem with the aDesigner approach is that it is based on assumptions about how a blind individual accesses a webpage with a specific screen reader. Reality is that there are multiple screen readers that are commonly used by the blind, and they have differences in how they present a webpage. As such, a simulation of how a webpage is rendered through a screen reader would need to be configurable based on the behaviour of the various screen readers, and often even different versions of a specific screen reader. On top of that, you also have to account for the individual reading behaviour of the user, because not all users utilize the screen reader the same way when reading web pages.
Back in 2005, at the HCI International conference in Las Vegas, Ms. Asakawa confirmed that her team had not tested the accuracy of the aDesigner against input from a sufficient diverse group of blind users. Instead, it was reported to be based on an assumed standard screen reader and reading protocol.
That is not to say that ms. Asakawa has not done very impressive work. It is simply more limited in nature, and by promoting it to e.g. web developers as yet another tool that will tell them how a blind person will see the page, a possible disservice is done, because developers (especially in companies) are very good at deciding that their pages are accessible 'because they look right in aDesigner'.
Tab order is important.
Top-to-bottom and Left-to-right (depending on language setting). No jumping back and forth, left, right, up and down. Oh, and the reverse tab order should be what it says. Don't insert, remove or skip fields when tabbing backwards. If 5 tabs takes me to the next field I need to change, 5 Shift-Tabs should take me back where I was, no mater what you think or want.
"She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users "
You need a program to close your eyes to experience a site as blind users?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The world doesn't revolve around you, despite the fact that you can't see that.
Really bad pun.