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From: C-reuters@clari.net (Reuter / Michelle V. Rafter)
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Subject: Blind computer users experience bad, good of Internet
Keywords: urgent
Organization: Copyright 1996 by Reuters
Message-ID: <Rcolumn-livewireURzGI_6FQ@clari.net>
Lines: 106
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 12:00:22 PST
Expires: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 12:00:22 PST
ACategory: financial
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Threadword: column
Priority: important
ANPA: Wc: 968/0; Id: a1622; Src: reut; Sel: reuff; Adate: 02-26-N.A; V: --REQUESTED REPETITION--
Note: (Requested repetition of Feb. 21 item)
LOS ANGELES (Reuter) - The thing about the Internet that
excited Cathy Murtha the most was newspapers.
Murtha loves them. But she is blind and most papers aren't
available in braille, so her options are limited.
Murtha believed the Internet was the answer, what with so
many papers setting up online editions. So last year, the
36-year-old mother of three from tiny Pioneer, Calif., got a
computer, and with a friend's help, opened an Internet account
-- only to find she'd been locked out again.
The graphics, photos, icons, forms, and frames that
newspapers and magazines are adding to their World Wide Web
sites as they exploit the Web's multimedia capabilities render
them nearly indecipherable to vision-impaired people like Murtha
who depend on special software to ``read'' what's on the screen
and translate it to speech.
``They were (captioning) pictures,'' she explained. ``All
I'd hear is 'link' or 'image' and I wouldn't know where I was
going.''
The problem isn't limited to online newspapers and
magazines. Any Web site that uses image maps, picture icons or
more than one hypertext link in a line of text is so much noise
to screen reader software, which reads text from left to right
and can't distinguish columns, tables or pictures.
In her quest, Murtha stumbled onto one of the big problems
that blind people have online: the more successful the Web has
become, the more elaborate Web design has evolved, and the
bigger the headache for people whose ears act as their eyes.
In the Web's early days, most Internet users had Unix
connections with text-only access through browsers such as Lynx.
As a result, pages were accessible to everyone, including the
blind, whose screen-reader software could scan the text.
Then pages started to include more graphical elements,
browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator were invented to
read them, and the days of text-only sites were numbered.
The problem isn't lost on publishers of screen-reading
software, academicians who study how people with disabilities
use technology, and architects of HTML, the Web's programming
language.
They counsel companies that build Web sites and develop Web
browser software to be as accessible as possible. It's not that
hard: add text captions, or tags, for every graphical element on
a page; put up text-only versions of sites, and write pages so
links are listed one line at a time rather than thrown together
on the same line or paragraph.
``We're not saying don't make nice layouts. We are saying
have a way of presenting it so it's usable to someone who's
blind,'' said Peter Korn, president of Berkeley Access, a
division of Berkeley Systems and publisher of the Outspoken
screen-reader program.
Publishers are doing their share. According to Korn, the
next version of Outspoken will be able to read columns of text
in any document, including a Web page.
Nobody's denying the Internet hasn't helped people with
disabilities. On the contrary, it's been a boon to people with
vision and other impairments merely because of the amount of
useful information that for the first time is available in
digital, machine-readable form, Korn said.
``I live in Berkeley,'' he said. ``UC Berkeley has put up a
server with links to public transportation. Now the bus schedule
is on-line. The BART (commuter train) schedule is on-line. All
the transportation you'd normally use is online. That right
there is a tremendous benefit.''
Murtha solved her access problem herself. She started
writing to newspapers and other publishers and didn't stop until
she'd sent hundreds of messages.
The result? More than 200 have put up text-only versions of
their Web sites, she said, and some Webmasters made changes
literally overnight.
``The letters I get are really wonderful,'' Murtha said.
Pete Gardner, author of a site for text-based games called
Snacky Pete's Text Adventure Archive
(http://www.helikon.com/person/pete/advents/iflib.htm), was on
Murtha's list. Gardner said he'd never thought about
accessibility.
``I knew some people used Lynx but I figured they were just
behind the times and I wasn't going to bother with them,'' he
said. ``I realize now how ignorant I'd been.''
Gardner, who is a Webmaster by trade, used a program that
automatically generates Web pages to create a text-only version
of the game site within days. But not all companies may be so
accommodating if they don't have the tools, time or money, or if
the subject of the Web pages are purely graphical in nature, he
said.
Making Web pages accessible to people ultimately can help a
much larger universe of Internet users, according to Korn, with
Berkeley Access. That group includes people who are deaf, and
other computer users whose only deficiency is a slow connection.
Murtha has put links to newspapers and magazines that are
accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired on her
home page, at http://www2.cdepot.net/kathy/. Other sites of
interest to people with vision impairments include:
-- Blind Links (http://seidata.com/marriage/rblind.html). A
large collection of links covering adpative technology,
employment, medicine, mobility and government services.
-- Designing HTML Pages
(http://trace.waisman.wisc.edu/HTMLgide/). Guidelines for
writing accessible Web pages, from the Trace R&D Center at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison.
-- Berkeley Access (http://access.berksys.com/). Information
about the company's OutSpoken screen-reader software, plus links
to government agencies, universities.
(Michelle V. Rafter writes about cyberspace and technology
>from Los Angeles. Reach her at mvrafter(at)deltanet.com.
Opinions expressed in this column are her own.)
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