Subject: Web Accessibility: Surfing the Web Blind
From: Mike Smith (MikeS@wpas-rights.org)
Date: Thu Mar 15 2001 - 08:57:58 PST
This is an article on web access using a Macintosh, from TidBITS. There are
two previous articles about accessibility on the Mac which can be found at
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1189
Michael J. Smith
Staff Attorney
Washington Protection & Advocacy System
180 West Dayton, Suite 102
Edmonds, WA 98020
Voice: 1-800-562-2702 (toll-free) or 425-776-1199
TDD: 1-800-905-0209 (toll-free) or 425-776-1648
FAX: 425-776-0601
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> WPAS: a private, non-profit organization protecting and advocating for the
> rights of people with disabilities in Washington since 1977
>
> From TidBITS#571 March 12, 2001
>
> Web Accessibility: Surfing the Web Blind
> ----------------------------------------
> by Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>
>
> In two previous articles, I explained concepts related to
> accommodating Macintosh users with disabilities, some of the
> hardware and software (adaptive technology) available for that
> purpose, and how Apple has fallen asleep at the switch in recent
> years when it comes to accessibility. (See "Accessibility on the
> Mac" beginning in TidBITS-568_.)
>
> <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1189>
>
> These days, of course, nearly every new Mac sold is connected to
> the Internet, as are scads of the old ones - even my coelacanth of
> a machine, a Power Macintosh 7100/66. But the Internet raises
> entirely new issues when it comes to accessibility, with a crucial
> new wrinkle: making the Web accessible requires not only important
> adaptive technology on the Mac owner's part, but also careful
> design and coding choices by Web authors. If you thought
> accessibility on the Mac was in bad shape, Web accessibility is
> worse. On the positive side, things are improving quickly.
>
>
> **Traditional Media** -- Let's think of old media for a second.
> Start with one of the oldest media, the printed book. If you can't
> read the type on the page due to a visual impairment, you have a
> few choices:
>
> * Wait for a large-print, Braille, or audio tape version to come
> out (months later, if it happens at all).
>
> <http://www.loc.gov/nls/web-blnd/bph.html>
> <http://www.rfbd.org/catalog.htm>
>
> * Use a magnifier to enlarge the print until it's big enough to
> read (usually on a big monitor not connected to a computer).
>
> <http://www.telesensory.com/products2-1.html>
>
> * Use a reading machine that scans print and reads it aloud (a
> near-miraculous technology when Raymond Kurzweil invented it in
> 1976, now quite commonplace). Reading machines, formerly separate,
> free-standing equipment, are largely Windows-based now, though the
> L&H Kurzweil 3000 electronic text reader is available for Macs.
>
> <http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/elan/ray.html>
> <http://www.LHSL.com/kurzweil3000/mac/>
>
> In other words, to make a printed book accessible, you must use
> something other than the book itself.
>
>
> **On the Web** - By contrast, to make a Web site accessible, the
> site itself must be set up properly and, in most cases, you also
> must use adaptive technology. An important distinction comes up
> here between accessibility on the Web and on the Mac in general.
> Even in the age of Napster and QuickTime, the Web remains
> essentially a visual medium composed of text and images.
> Accordingly, the accessibility or inaccessibility of the Web
> mostly affects blind and visually-impaired people.
>
> Deaf or hard-of-hearing Web-surfers might find an occasional
> accessibility problem with multimedia, while people with learning
> disabilities like dyslexia may find reading all that colourful
> online text difficult, but the extent of these barriers pales in
> comparison to the simple issue of seeing and understanding the
> screen.
>
> The World Wide Web Consortium has a very readable site that gives
> some imaginary examples of people with various disabilities and
> the ways in which they use the Web.
>
> <http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/Overview.html>
>
>
> **It's All about Options** -- As you undoubtedly know, Web pages
> are written in a markup language called HTML (though an increasing
> number of Web pages consist of non-HTML technologies like Flash).
> The markup gives structure to a document. For example, text in a
> paragraph goes between <P> and </P> tags. Or an image might reside
> in an <IMG> tag that contains details like the filename and the
> image's size.
>
> For a Web page to be accessible, you must include layers of
> meaning and redundancy. The most common example is adding text to
> an image - usually in the form of an ALT (for "alternate")
> attribute which enables text to be included in the IMG tag. If
> your browser doesn't load graphics, or if you use an adaptive
> device like the reading machine mentioned earlier, you can rely on
> the text version rather than an image you can't see. As an easy
> example, the logo on the TidBITS home page carries the ALT text
> "TidBITS Electronic Publishing." If your browser loads graphics
> and if you're not using adaptive technology, you typically never
> see the ALT text, because you don't need to: you can look at the
> image instead.
>
> <http://www.tidbits.com/>
>
> Accessibility, then, is all about options. Can't see a picture,
> for whatever reason? No problem. We'll give you words to read
> instead. Unfortunately, simple measures like this are seldom
> implemented. Web authors are interested in a lot of things:
> earning their livings, meeting deadlines, showing off, expressing
> themselves, pleasing their clients. What they are generally not
> interested in is accessibility. Why?
>
> * Unfamiliarity. Generally, Web design books and courses barely
> mention the issue. Web shops rarely have adaptive technology on
> hand to test their designs, nor do they do usability testing with
> disabled people (if they do usability testing at all).
>
> * Priorities (often misplaced). Web designers will spend untold
> hours coding JavaScript for a page and will labour over egregious
> Flash animations, but too often ALT attributes and a few other
> easy accessibility features get left out.
>
> * Squeamishness. As explained in previous articles, disability
> makes people nervous. To code for accessible Web design requires a
> leap of the imagination - to conceive how, for example, a blind
> person would navigate your site requires you to imagine being
> blind yourself.
>
> Despite these problems, designing for accessibility can help even
> non-disabled populations. Just as level entrances and wheelchair
> ramps make it easier for someone pushing a stroller to get into
> and out of a building, an accessible Web site works for old
> browsers, for people with graphics loading turned off, and for
> Web-enabled PDAs and cell phones.
>
>
> **Resources** -- Yet blame cannot be fully laid at the feet of Web
> designers or even the clients paying for the Web design work. Put
> bluntly, the resources available for accessible Web authoring are
> poor.
>
> The current HTML standard includes many features for accessibility
> - ALT attributes barely scratch the surface (though they are
> actually required in the current HTML version, 4.01). The source
> of these HTML specifications is the World Wide Web Consortium's
> Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which provides guidelines,
> checklists, and techniques for making Web pages accessible.
> However, in the grand tradition of World Wide Web Consortium
> standards documents, those pages are long, confusing, meandering,
> and either maddeningly generalized or overly detailed.
>
> <http://www.W3.org/WAI/>
> <http://www.W3.org/TR/WCAG10/>
>
> There are surprisingly few other online resources for accessible
> Web authoring. You can find links at the HTML Writers Guild Aware
> Center and the Web AccessiBlog I maintain.
>
> <http://www.awarecenter.org/>
> <http://www.joeclark.org/accessiblog.html#specs>
>
> There are only two books on accessible Web design: Universal Web
> Design, by Crystal Waters (out of print) and Web Accessibility for
> People with Disabilities, by Mike Paciello. (Last week I signed a
> contract with New Riders Publishing to write a competing book.)
>
> <http://www.typo.com/store/webbooks.html>
> <http://www.webable.com/book_desc.htm>
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1929629087/tidbitselectro00A/>
>
> In short, it is hard to learn how to code HTML accessibly. And
> authoring tools like Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and
> even the trusty BBEdit make it difficult to include access
> features. You usually have to edit the code manually.
>
>
> **Through The Web, Darkly** -- The design of Web pages is half the
> problem; adaptive technology is the other. People with low vision
> use screen-magnification software like Apple's CloseView utility
> or InLarge by Alva Access Group.
>
> <http://www.aagi.com/aagi/inlarge.asp>
>
> (Why not just select a very large font size in your Web browser?
> Don't forget that the browser runs on the Mac. The entire system
> needs to be accessible. Nice big type on a Web page doesn't help
> that much if your menu bar fonts and dialog boxes are still using
> teeny 12 point text. Moreover, due to poor Web-authoring
> practices, many sites look terrible and are almost unusable with
> extra-big fonts.)
>
> If you have such poor vision that you can't really see what's on
> your monitor at all even if magnified, you need a screen reader -
> a program that reads onscreen text and menus, and interprets icons
> and other items out loud. However, there is but one screen reader
> for Macs, OutSpoken by Alva Access Group, and it doesn't interpret
> HTML. Meanwhile, Windows screen readers are remarkably
> sophisticated, understanding tables, frames, and many of the HTML
> access features.
>
> <http://www.aagi.com/aagi/outspoken_products.asp>
> <http://www.joeclark.org/accessiblog.html#screen>
>
>
> And yet, even well-coded Web sites can remain inaccessible thanks
> to the fact that no browser _fully_ supports HTML, let alone all
> of the language's accessibility features.
>
> <http://www.joeclark.org/glorious.html>
>
> Netscape 4 is notorious for its incompatibilities, even with HTML
> tags that were current back in 1997. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5
> for Macintosh supposedly supports the entirety of HTML 4, but it
> isn't true (features like LONGDESC, used for long textual
> descriptions of images, are absent). The Mozilla project maintains
> a hefty list of unsupported HTML tags in the new, allegedly
> standards-compliant Netscape 6.
>
> <http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/faq.html#Which%20open%20standards>
>
> Meanwhile, the tiny, impressive Web browser iCab has much wider
> support of HTML 4, including nearly every access tag (LONGDESC is
> available), though iCab's accessibility support isn't documented.
>
> <http://www.icab.de/>
>
> And of course, with only one screen reader for Macs which, by its
> maker's admission, does not interpret HTML, the tight
> browser/screen-reader integration we find on Windows is simply
> absent on Macs. To put it bluntly, you're lucky if you can get
> things to work.
>
> When it comes to Web accessibility for Mac users who are blind or
> have low vision, then, the news is pretty much all bad. In the
> short term, these people are still better off using Windows. In an
> upcoming article, I'll address the even trickier issues involved
> in accessible multimedia. Just what do you do with all those
> QuickTime movies and Flash animations?
>
> [Joe Clark is a former journalist in Toronto who's followed,
> written about, and worked in the disability field for two decades.
> Explore his many online accessibility resources at his Web site.]
>
> <http://joeclark.org/access/>
>
>
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