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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.'"
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"
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.