[vicsireland] Javaa Scripts
- From: "tonysweeney" <tonysweeney1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "vics" <vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:20:51 -0000
Chicago Defender, IL, USA
Friday, February 09, 2007
As Web evolves, blind left behind
By Tim Spangler
The last time Ray Campbell tried to buy Cubs tickets online, Tickets.com
asked him to enter the text in a distorted image in order to prove that he
was
not a robot programmed to automatically buy tickets for scalpers. .
The only problem: Campbell couldn't read the text in the image. In fact, he
couldn't see it at all - he's been blind his entire life.
"All I want to do is buy tickets and I can't do that, because there's this
verification and they have not provided an audio link to it," Campbell said.
For America's nearly 2 million blind or visually impaired Internet users,
problems like these can prevent them from taking advantage of all the Web
has
to offer.
"The two challenges with Web accessibility are not just being able to access
the site, but being able to use the site," said Leah Gerlach, director of
counseling
at the Diecke Center for Vision Rehabilitation in Wheaton.
Gerlach said the growing use of multimedia video on Web sites creates a
significant accessibility challenge, saying that Internet video can confuse
the
screen reading software that blind and visually impaired people use to
browse the Internet.
Blind Browsing
Blind and visually impaired people use special software called screen
readers that "speak" to them in a synthetic voice what is happening on the
screen.
When browsing a Web site, a screen reader examines a page's code and
determines how the page is laid out and what links are on it, then reads the
content
of the page to a user.
Screen readers rely on explanatory text, defined by webmasters, to interpret
images. Because of this, the World Wide Web Consortium, which sets Internet
standards, requires developers to define alternative text for every image on
a page.
Multimedia content, like Adobe Flash, is unintelligible to screen readers
and is skipped entirely when the page is read. Sites that rely heavily on
Flash
should be sure to offer accessible, text-only versions of their pages.
Screen reading software uses text-to-speech conversion, machines that
translate on-screen text to Braille or a combination of both to present a
Web page
to a blind or visually impaired user.
The challenges
Campbell is a technician at the assistive technology help desk at the the
Chicago Lighthouse, an organization for the blind and visually impaired. A
former
software engineer at Lucent Technologies, he now takes calls from blind and
visually impaired people across the U.S. and Canada and helps them solve
computer
problems and navigate Web sites.
Campbell identified what he said are the Web's three major accessibility
problems: graphics without descriptive text, required plug-in installations
and
visual registration tests, called captchas, an acronym for "Completely
Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart." Captchas
are
particularly troublesome when it comes to accessibility.
Why captchas?
Many major sites require users to verify that they are actually human - not
automated robots. By presenting the browser with a captcha - an image of
distorted
text that is difficult for a computer to decode - and asking the user to
enter the text they see in the image, robots can be blocked from the site
while
human users who can see the text are given access. Campbell said that
captchas can be made accessible by using audio clips in addition to images
to verify
users as human. Some sites, like LiveJournal.com, already do this.
What works, what doesn't
Blogging, a growing Internet phenomenon, is still largely text-based and
tends to be more screen reader friendly than other applications.
"My experience has taught me that [blogging] is pretty accessible," said
Campbell, who keeps his own blog on LiveJournal.
"Screen readers can handle a lot of the current techniques that are being
used in Web design," Campbell said, as long as designers take extra care to
make
their sites accessible. These include avoiding the use of images to display
text, providing audio narration for videos and offering text-only versions
of pages with multimedia content.
As interactive, multimedia Web sites become more prevalent, blind and
visually impaired users might find themselves behind the curve as designers
forgo
accessible pages for glitzy ones and screen reading software lags behind,
said Leah Gerlach at the Diecke Center
"We don't drive change. We have to follow it and keep up with it," Gerlach
said. "We're always six months behind cutting edge because we have to be."
Tim Spangler is a reporter for the Medill News Service.
http://www.chicagodefender.com/page/local.cfm?ArticleID=8439
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