[Cagdu] FW: Fw: Are the Blind in a Bine

[Tina Thomas]

Hey folks, this is not guide dog related, but it is an interesting read no
technology  access for the blind. 
 

Tina, Nina and Sicily

**"Champions do more" Be sure to check out my online mall At:
www.go4gold.biz   

 


  _____  

Subject: Fw: Are the Blind in a Bine
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>



> Are the blind in a bind?
> 
> 
>> Daily Herald, Everett WA, USA
>> Sunday, February 11, 2007
> 
>> Are the blind in a bind?
> 
>> By Brian Bergstein, Associated Press
> 
>> An IBM initiative is making strides in helping decipher Web site
>> information for the blind
> 
>> WESTFORD, Mass. - Cynthia Ice is blind and lives in the suburbs, 
> so
>> shopping on the Internet can make her routine easier. But it 
> also leads
>> her into odd dead ends - like the time a technical shift in a 
> Web grocery
>> site made its meat department inaccessible to her screen-reading 
> software.
> 
>> "Everybody could go on the Atkins diet but me," she joked.
> 
>> Such troubles are especially common for computer users with 
> disabilities
>> as the Web takes on many features that make sites appear more 
> like dynamic
>> programs than static documents.
> 
>> While that design trend gives many people more engaging Web 
> experiences,
>> good old static documents can be much easier for screen-reading 
> software
>> to decipher and narrate to the blind. Such software has trouble
>> interpreting newer "Web 2.0" features, such as text that pops up 
> without a
>> mouse click, or data that automatically update in real time.
> 
>> "The new technology being implemented poses even more of a 
> threat to the
>> small accessibility wins we have made," Steven Tyler, who heads 
> disability
>> access services at Britain's Royal National Institute for the 
> Blind, wrote
>> in an e-mail. "Around 80 percent of Web sites we estimate as 
> having
>> accessibility problems, some considerable."
> 
>> However, progress is being made on programming hooks that would 
> help
>> screen-reading tools grasp the new Web's advanced layers of 
> content.
> 
>> Web architects at IBM Corp. have been laboring on a system 
> called
>> iAccessible2 that addresses some common scenarios bedeviling
>> screen-reading software.
> 
>> For example, consider software "trees" where clicking on little 
> plus or
>> minus signs in boxes expands data or rolls it up. To the ears of 
> someone
>> using screen-reading software, the setup can present a 
> hard-to-visualize
>> jumble.
> 
>> To deal with this, iAccessible2 makes it possible for a blind 
> user to be
>> told where text on the screen lies in the tree. A bit of text 
> might be the
>> second item on a list of five, for example, at a "depth" of two 
> - meaning
>> it required a click to be revealed.
> 
>> Aspects of iAccessible2 are being integrated into the 
> open-source Firefox
>> Web browser. The technology also is entering IBM's Lotus and 
> Workplace
>> office-productivity programs. Ice, 48, who has been blind for 20 
> years
>> because of diabetes, helps lead the effort in Lotus.
> 
>> A longer-term goal is to make it easier for blind people to deal 
> with Web
>> pages that offer complicated stews of changing information.
> 
>> IBM Web architect Aaron Leventhal pointed to basketball box 
> scores that
>> dynamically update dozens of statistics as a game progresses. A 
> sighted
>> person easily can zero in on the most vital information - the 
> game score -
>> and glance only occasionally at unfolding data of lesser 
> importance, such
>> as free-throw percentages.
> 
>> But how can a screen-reading program know to utter only certain 
> stats as
>> they are updated and not every single one?
> 
>> Leventhal and colleagues believe one answer is to encode parts 
> of a Web
>> page - in this case, certain statistics - as "rude," "assertive" 
> and
>> "polite." Screen-reading software could be programmed to 
> vocalize "polite"
>> information anytime and the "assertive" data less frequently.
> 
>> This concept is still in development, but Leventhal hopes it 
> becomes part
>> of Web production tools so site designers bake it in as they 
> create pages.
> 
>> "We don't want accessibility to be the thing that limits what 
> people can
>> do on their Web sites," Leventhal said. "We're not trying to 
> slow down the
>> world. We're trying to say, take accessibility into account."
> 
> 
>> http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/07/02/11/100bus_blind001.cfm
> 
> 
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