OK, as a blind person myself, let me try and address these questions.
games for the blind
There are actually quite a few games out there that the blind can play. Most of them are specially designed for us. For more information, I'd dirrect you to someofthemanufacturers. For something that's a little closer to what the original poster was looking for, check out this, this is the closest to a virtual world we have. The majority of these games are actually pretty good considering the size of the development staff for them.
open source software
Unfortunately, accessibility is not high on the priority lists of many of the open source projects out there. Even if it were, I am not sure a huge number of blind people would switch. I'm sure us blind techies would look at the software just like anyone else, but you'd have a much bigger problem getting your blind grandmother to switch than your sighted grandmother. The reasons for this are extreemly complicated, and get into basic issues of how blind people look at technology in general. Most, however, beleive that Microsoft solutions work for them, and unless an open source solution can offer them something really compelling, and I mean to them specifically, they won't see a need to switch. As a result, most of the adaptive technology vendors do not see it worth their time to provide support for open source software at this point. Adaptive software vendors are concentrating on software a blind person would use in an employment situation, and for most work environments, Microsoft is it. Remember most blind people are not in IT related jobs, and those that are many times role their own solution. Also from my experience, your average IT person is really scared of putting adaptive software on their network. All of that said, there are some small efforts. The biggest example is the Window-Eyes screen reader, which as of 5.0 will offer support for the Mozilla Suite (NOT FIRE FOX)
MP3 players
For all the wonderful things I've heard about the IPOD, unfortunately its useless for the blind. There are some MP3 players out there that would work, however. One interesting product is a device called the Book Courier, which not only plays MP3 files, but also reads text and Microsoft Word files. The Book Courier will also play content from Audible, a service which sells audio books online, much like the many music download services. Unfortunately, only a limited number of MP3 players support this service. I do not know if the IPOD is one of them.
Honestly, from my perspective, the adaptive technology world is several years behind the mainstream world. The reasons are rather obvious, but still I consider the situation pretty sad. Adaptive Technology is a pretty small, but in my view largely untapped, nitch that has a lot of room for improvement.
Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?
Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.
First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.
You're looking at someone who doesn't need a screen, as a blind person they just get in the way anyway. I mean, a screen reader works just the same anyway. Oh, for more screenless laptops, check out this.
OK, let me throw in my two cents both from the perspective of a blind web surfer and a blind website designer. I actually am a user of the technology mentioned in the article, and yes, some web sites can be extreemly difficult to surf./. itself isn't the easiest in its default state, although it is usable and making some customizations in user preferences does help a lot. From my experience on the whole, if a web site sticks rather strictly to HTML, CSS and the other standards, they're OK. Problem is, very few sites do. An even worse problem is many web designers design their sites using Dreamweaver or some other graphical tool. This seperates them from the HTML itself, and many times they don't know what's going on under the hood. The common mantra among web designers I've noticed is "if it looks right, its right." It is very frustrating running into one of these sites, and the unfortunate thing is, there are many of them.
Now that I've addressed the technical issues, let's move on to some of the other things that I've been reading about in this thread. I tend to aggree with the common conseption around here that lawsuites are way over used, and many people tend to be way too sue happy, thinking that will solve their problems. But let me ask, in a situation like this, what would you have done? I'm sure this blind person did try to contact the web designer. In fact, as blind people we are instructed to do just that right away when we encounter an inaccessible site. Problem is, very few web designers listen to us. I'm not sure if its intentional, but many of them just do not understand how we surf the web, and are probably under the impression that they have to go way out of their way to modify their pages for a screen reader. Refer to what I said above, that if a page is designed properly, nine times out of ten it will work just fine. OK, so contacting the web designer yeilds no response, so what next? Sometimes there is no other way to get a business to listen other than through its wallet. Very sad, dispicable, but true.
So, again what is he to do? Assuming this person had contacted Southwest's webmasters (which as I said they should have,) what would you do next? And don't say just not use there services. There aren't enough blind people who have access to the internet in the first place to make it make a difference, and that's just like saying that blacks should just not frequent the businesses that discriminate against them. We all have a right to make use of public services, be them brick and morder or online. And considering how relatively little modification it takes to make a web site accessible (following standards is not hard,) I think that this person may very well have a case against Southwest.
Zform Poker is far from the first accessible game. Other games include Shades of Doom, which is based loosely on the Doom series of games. Shades of Doom is the closest blind people have to a modern FPS game. Also check out Grisley Gultch, Western Extraviganza, a children's game for the blind from Bavisoft.
The field of accessible games has actually been very dry until recently, but starting about two years ago its really started to take off.
The University of Denver, where I am currently an undergrad, is into its second yearlaptop requirenment. So far, the results have been rather mixed. While their Laptops and Learning page gives some examples of how laptops are used in class, the vast majority of students have never had to take their laptop from their dorm rooms. As a response to the "laptop initiative," DU has started modifying a majority of their classrooms to be what they call "smart classrooms." These are basicly classrooms with a network jack and plug for every student. Half the network jacks don't work, and neither do half the plugs, however. And one of these smart classrooms has only 10MBPS ethernet. Good thing the CS class I have in that room doesn't even require that you bring your laptops. For online components, DU is using a system called Blackboard, which is an outsourced system that to me at least still feels like its getting some of the bugs worked out of it. I only have one class that does anything with it, and that professor doesn't do much with it. I also know there were quite a few instances of theft last year, and a lot of student's broke their laptops when they got unknowingly too rough with them. Fortunately, I brought a desktop in adition to my laptop, and that's where I do most of my work.
I am a freshman at the University of Denver, which I realize is a college and not a primary school, but. Starting this year, all freshman were required to bring a laptop. All the professors went through a two quarter training program on how to integrate the laptops. So how did it turn out? Pitifully. A lot of people I know have never taken their laptops out of their dorm rooms, I've never been in a class where your laptop has been required, and the closest thing I've done to a fancy multimedia program was a stupid alcohol awareness CD-rom at the beginning of the year that has since been thrown out. Even in the computer science department, the laptops are never used. Most of the classrooms in the CS building aren't even networked. And next year, the requirenments for a laptop are outrageous compared to what will actually be used. True DU does have a few articles on their laptops and learning page as to how laptops are beeing used in the classroom, but these are few and far between. So, it basicly boils down to the fact that a lot of students waisted a lot of money on technology they'll never use at least to its full potential. And I do consider the majority of the facalty here more computer literate then the facalty at my high school. My point, if this is how this stuff is beeing used in college, imagine what will happen at the high school and especially elementary level. On another note, are we sure that a seven or eight year old can understand what the word fradual means as far as computers go? I know when I was little I tended to break things.
Let me bring you all a new perspective on this whole story, and why I really hope that this article is at least somewhat wrong. I am a blind computer user. I use a speech synthesizer to translate the text on screen into speech. The programs that allow me to do this are made by mostly no-name companies who don't have billions of dollars or tons of lawyers. Perhaps ironicly, however, half of how good the access product is has nothing to do with the quality of these companies, but how well Microsoft wants to cooperate with them and give them the information they need. Sorry to say, that despite what MS says on TV and the like about how they are trying to help the disabled, in reality it really doesn't show itself all that well. As an example, in the coming months MS is releasing a new dictionary product. However, this product will not have the APIs' that MS themselves designed to allow it to communicate with access products. Some commitment. I spent over a month last year trying to find a C++ compiler that I could use, and finally had to settle on an eight year old version of Borland C++ for dos. Around mid last year, I got introduced to Linux. I'd heard about it before, but never really gave all that much thought to it. Then I heard about the whole open source idea. It was almost too good to be true! Here was a model that allowed for the fact that not all products worked properly under all situations, and gave people the right to go out and change it and make it work better for their own individual needs. It was almost an admition by programmers that no they can't address everyone's needs, so we're giving our work to people that can. A few weeks ago I installed Redhat 6.0 on my computer. Sense then I have been able to use the latest C++ compilers, and can do stuff I'd only dreamed of doing in the past. I use a program called Emacspeak, which allows me to access anything that Emacs can do and I am quite frankly amazed. I don't think anyone could have pulled this off using Microsoft products and been able to spend the rest of their life out of jail. Linux is perfect for addressing the specific needs of people who otherwise would have been left out. I really hope that what is talked about in that article above doesn't happen to Linux, because then it'd be Windows all over again. Sorry for the length of this, but it is something that needed to be said. Thanks for reading this rant.
From my understanding of the device, I don't think it would be very usefull as far as braille goes. i myself am a blind web surfer, and I use speech to surf the web. I think that is mostly the prefered method among the blind comunity. Plus, braille is very small, and very exact. I doubt this mouse could represent the braille good enough. However that is not to say I don't think this mouse could have some positive effects on the blind comunity. It could be used to give access to web pages and applications that aren't all that keyboard friendly, and allow the blind user to get some tactil feedback to images on web pages, allowing the blind user access to an arena that he has never had before. One thing's for sure, I wanna play with this gadget!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, as a blind person myself, let me try and address these questions.
There are actually quite a few games out there that the blind can play. Most of them are specially designed for us. For more information, I'd dirrect you to some of the manufacturers. For something that's a little closer to what the original poster was looking for, check out this, this is the closest to a virtual world we have. The majority of these games are actually pretty good considering the size of the development staff for them.
Unfortunately, accessibility is not high on the priority lists of many of the open source projects out there. Even if it were, I am not sure a huge number of blind people would switch. I'm sure us blind techies would look at the software just like anyone else, but you'd have a much bigger problem getting your blind grandmother to switch than your sighted grandmother. The reasons for this are extreemly complicated, and get into basic issues of how blind people look at technology in general. Most, however, beleive that Microsoft solutions work for them, and unless an open source solution can offer them something really compelling, and I mean to them specifically, they won't see a need to switch. As a result, most of the adaptive technology vendors do not see it worth their time to provide support for open source software at this point. Adaptive software vendors are concentrating on software a blind person would use in an employment situation, and for most work environments, Microsoft is it. Remember most blind people are not in IT related jobs, and those that are many times role their own solution. Also from my experience, your average IT person is really scared of putting adaptive software on their network. All of that said, there are some small efforts. The biggest example is the Window-Eyes screen reader, which as of 5.0 will offer support for the Mozilla Suite (NOT FIRE FOX)
For all the wonderful things I've heard about the IPOD, unfortunately its useless for the blind. There are some MP3 players out there that would work, however. One interesting product is a device called the Book Courier, which not only plays MP3 files, but also reads text and Microsoft Word files. The Book Courier will also play content from Audible, a service which sells audio books online, much like the many music download services. Unfortunately, only a limited number of MP3 players support this service. I do not know if the IPOD is one of them.
Honestly, from my perspective, the adaptive technology world is several years behind the mainstream world. The reasons are rather obvious, but still I consider the situation pretty sad. Adaptive Technology is a pretty small, but in my view largely untapped, nitch that has a lot of room for improvement.
from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?
Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.
First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.
For more info on just how this works, you can take a look at this page describing just how these navigation features work, and even download a demo so you can try it for yourself and see just how it works.
You're looking at someone who doesn't need a screen, as a blind person they just get in the way anyway. I mean, a screen reader works just the same anyway. Oh, for more screenless laptops, check out this.
OK, let me throw in my two cents both from the perspective of a blind web surfer and a blind website designer. I actually am a user of the technology mentioned in the article, and yes, some web sites can be extreemly difficult to surf. /. itself isn't the easiest in its default state, although it is usable and making some customizations in user preferences does help a lot. From my experience on the whole, if a web site sticks rather strictly to HTML, CSS and the other standards, they're OK. Problem is, very few sites do. An even worse problem is many web designers design their sites using Dreamweaver or some other graphical tool. This seperates them from the HTML itself, and many times they don't know what's going on under the hood. The common mantra among web designers I've noticed is "if it looks right, its right." It is very frustrating running into one of these sites, and the unfortunate thing is, there are many of them.
Now that I've addressed the technical issues, let's move on to some of the other things that I've been reading about in this thread. I tend to aggree with the common conseption around here that lawsuites are way over used, and many people tend to be way too sue happy, thinking that will solve their problems. But let me ask, in a situation like this, what would you have done? I'm sure this blind person did try to contact the web designer. In fact, as blind people we are instructed to do just that right away when we encounter an inaccessible site. Problem is, very few web designers listen to us. I'm not sure if its intentional, but many of them just do not understand how we surf the web, and are probably under the impression that they have to go way out of their way to modify their pages for a screen reader. Refer to what I said above, that if a page is designed properly, nine times out of ten it will work just fine. OK, so contacting the web designer yeilds no response, so what next? Sometimes there is no other way to get a business to listen other than through its wallet. Very sad, dispicable, but true.
So, again what is he to do? Assuming this person had contacted Southwest's webmasters (which as I said they should have,) what would you do next? And don't say just not use there services. There aren't enough blind people who have access to the internet in the first place to make it make a difference, and that's just like saying that blacks should just not frequent the businesses that discriminate against them. We all have a right to make use of public services, be them brick and morder or online. And considering how relatively little modification it takes to make a web site accessible (following standards is not hard,) I think that this person may very well have a case against Southwest.
Zform Poker is far from the first accessible game. Other games include Shades of Doom, which is based loosely on the Doom series of games. Shades of Doom is the closest blind people have to a modern FPS game. Also check out Grisley Gultch, Western Extraviganza, a children's game for the blind from Bavisoft.
The field of accessible games has actually been very dry until recently, but starting about two years ago its really started to take off.
The University of Denver, where I am currently an undergrad, is into its second yearlaptop requirenment. So far, the results have been rather mixed. While their Laptops and Learning page gives some examples of how laptops are used in class, the vast majority of students have never had to take their laptop from their dorm rooms. As a response to the "laptop initiative," DU has started modifying a majority of their classrooms to be what they call "smart classrooms." These are basicly classrooms with a network jack and plug for every student. Half the network jacks don't work, and neither do half the plugs, however. And one of these smart classrooms has only 10MBPS ethernet. Good thing the CS class I have in that room doesn't even require that you bring your laptops. For online components, DU is using a system called Blackboard, which is an outsourced system that to me at least still feels like its getting some of the bugs worked out of it. I only have one class that does anything with it, and that professor doesn't do much with it. I also know there were quite a few instances of theft last year, and a lot of student's broke their laptops when they got unknowingly too rough with them. Fortunately, I brought a desktop in adition to my laptop, and that's where I do most of my work.
I am a freshman at the University of Denver, which I realize is a college and not a primary school, but. Starting this year, all freshman were required to bring a laptop. All the professors went through a two quarter training program on how to integrate the laptops. So how did it turn out? Pitifully. A lot of people I know have never taken their laptops out of their dorm rooms, I've never been in a class where your laptop has been required, and the closest thing I've done to a fancy multimedia program was a stupid alcohol awareness CD-rom at the beginning of the year that has since been thrown out. Even in the computer science department, the laptops are never used. Most of the classrooms in the CS building aren't even networked. And next year, the requirenments for a laptop are outrageous compared to what will actually be used. True DU does have a few articles on their laptops and learning page as to how laptops are beeing used in the classroom, but these are few and far between. So, it basicly boils down to the fact that a lot of students waisted a lot of money on technology they'll never use at least to its full potential. And I do consider the majority of the facalty here more computer literate then the facalty at my high school. My point, if this is how this stuff is beeing used in college, imagine what will happen at the high school and especially elementary level. On another note, are we sure that a seven or eight year old can understand what the word fradual means as far as computers go? I know when I was little I tended to break things.
Let me bring you all a new perspective on this whole story, and why I really hope that this article is at least somewhat wrong. I am a blind computer user. I use a speech synthesizer to translate the text on screen into speech. The programs that allow me to do this are made by mostly no-name companies who don't have billions of dollars or tons of lawyers. Perhaps ironicly, however, half of how good the access product is has nothing to do with the quality of these companies, but how well Microsoft wants to cooperate with them and give them the information they need. Sorry to say, that despite what MS says on TV and the like about how they are trying to help the disabled, in reality it really doesn't show itself all that well. As an example, in the coming months MS is releasing a new dictionary product. However, this product will not have the APIs' that MS themselves designed to allow it to communicate with access products. Some commitment. I spent over a month last year trying to find a C++ compiler that I could use, and finally had to settle on an eight year old version of Borland C++ for dos. Around mid last year, I got introduced to Linux. I'd heard about it before, but never really gave all that much thought to it. Then I heard about the whole open source idea. It was almost too good to be true! Here was a model that allowed for the fact that not all products worked properly under all situations, and gave people the right to go out and change it and make it work better for their own individual needs. It was almost an admition by programmers that no they can't address everyone's needs, so we're giving our work to people that can. A few weeks ago I installed Redhat 6.0 on my computer. Sense then I have been able to use the latest C++ compilers, and can do stuff I'd only dreamed of doing in the past. I use a program called Emacspeak, which allows me to access anything that Emacs can do and I am quite frankly amazed. I don't think anyone could have pulled this off using Microsoft products and been able to spend the rest of their life out of jail. Linux is perfect for addressing the specific needs of people who otherwise would have been left out. I really hope that what is talked about in that article above doesn't happen to Linux, because then it'd be Windows all over again. Sorry for the length of this, but it is something that needed to be said. Thanks for reading this rant.
From my understanding of the device, I don't think it would be very usefull as far as braille goes. i myself am a blind web surfer, and I use speech to surf the web. I think that is mostly the prefered method among the blind comunity. Plus, braille is very small, and very exact. I doubt this mouse could represent the braille good enough. However that is not to say I don't think this mouse could have some positive effects on the blind comunity. It could be used to give access to web pages and applications that aren't all that keyboard friendly, and allow the blind user to get some tactil feedback to images on web pages, allowing the blind user access to an arena that he has never had before. One thing's for sure, I wanna play with this gadget!