Do the Blind Deserve More Effort on the Web?

dratcw writes "An article was posted this week to ComputerWorld, detailing the frustrations faced by blind people struggling to use the Web. The piece shows how little progress has been made and the inadequacy of solutions such as Microsoft's Narrator screen reader. While the article generated many positive comments, one reader said the disabled should 'get a grip' and maintained they 'have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, as a diabetic, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used.' Should Web sites and software makers do more, or does the reality of today's economics dictate that the blind/disabled will continue to struggle and learn to live with it?"

Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

If we work on the broader problem then we get better web sites for everyone, especially the disabled, without even making any particular effort for them. For example:

- A link to download a file should just go to the file, not some clever javascript crap that tells you to please wait while you're redirected, your download should start in a few moments etc.

- Quit breaking stuff up into dozens of tiny bite sized pages. My scrollbar works just fine thank you very much, and it lets me scan all of the content in an instant instead of having to click through it all. Yes, I know that some people do this to goose their ad revenue, but you see it other places too.

- Don't use clever little graphics and pop-ups for every link, text works much better.

- I don't need links to "print this page" or "email it to a friend".

- You don't need to know what region of the world I'm in before I can download a damned printer driver.

- Don't use ridiculous URLs that query stuff from a CGI with a zillion arguments just to serve up a static page.

I could go on all day... fixing any of those design problems would automatically improve accessibility, not just for blind users but for mobile devices as well.

Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible ... musical home pages.

Are you kidding? Those at least can be enjoyed by blind and seeing people alike!

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

I find it highly insensitive that you have overlooked the deaf community. Surely they also wish to enjoy such magnificent web pages.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

I find it highly insensitive that you have overlooked the deaf community. Surely they also wish to enjoy such magnificent web pages.

So you're saying that when I add the soundtrack to my home page, I should have the musical notes going by in a flash animation?

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

So you're saying that when I add the soundtrack to my home page, I should have the musical notes going by in a flash animation?

Speaking as a guy that's 70% deaf:

F'r the love o' Pete, NO!

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

Sometimes when you browse in the off corners of the web, you find wonderful examples of how to entertain those, that are (perhaps not by choice) totally reliant on their eyes...
I want to share one of those I found a while ago:
Jones Partners: Architecture [jonespartners.com]
WARNING!! MAY CAUSE SEISURES, HEADACHES, NAUSEA, BLEEDING AND/OR EXPLODING EYES

Disclaimer: Following the link is voluntary. I am not morally, financially, or in any other way responsible for the wellbeing of those following the link in this post. You have been warned. Good luck.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

Unfortunately, though, more and more companies are making their pages entirely flash based. I think that's a far more of an egregious problem than the stuff you mention. Why the fuck I need to waste my time loading fucking flash movies to navigate a page when it works better in plain HTML is beyond me.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

more and more companies are making their pages entirely flash based.

Ding! See what Janus [janusfunds.com] recently did to their front page. Because it uses Flash, not only can't the blind get to their accounts, but they have now forced people to use an insecure interface to access their account. Brilliant!

The same applies for those links you see. Click on 'Institutional Cash'. See what happens?

This is why, Flash must die! [slashdot.org]

...pages entirely flash based...

Two words. Sing them with me:

Flash! Aaa-aah!

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

"Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that."

You've never seen MySpace have you?

Most of the topics you've covered are that way because someone decided it was a better way to get another opportunity to serve you a targeted advertisement. The download links are that way to prevent other people from stealing your content, denying you ad revenue and leeching your bandwidth... It all comes back to money and some content providers heavily rely on ad revenue to pay their monthly hosting and bandwidth costs.

Others are just greedy.

When bandwidth becomes free, maybe you'll see the reverse to these trends. Maybe. Probably not.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

In addition to the many problems cited by the parent, I'd like to point out that anything that doesn't work in a cross-browser environment is a problem.

Saying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer only" is like putting up a sign outside the Wal-Mart parking lot saying "This lot is designed for GM vehicles only". You'll still get plenty of visitors, but is there some good reason for keeping people (and their money) out of your business?

My company is about to move a PC-based system to the Web, and I'm going to be poking around as much as possible to get rid of IE-specific pitfalls. I may not have much luck, though... it's a vertical market app for an environment where "Nobody got fired for buying IBM^WMicrosoft" is very much in effect.

You are in Slashdot

is there some good reason for keeping people (and their money) out of your business?

CmdrTaco has said that he is not particularly concerned when some of the new features don't work in IE since most of the readers use Firefox.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

I'm rewriting my (presently not so good) website from scratch so I can learn more about CSS and W3C-compliant HTML. I'm coding to standards. Style separate from content.

I notice the standards-compliant code I'm creating is accessible pretty much by default. If I pay proper attention to design (minimalist, easy to navigate) and not add features just because I think they look swell, the final design will be far more accessible than my present one.

It will be much leaner and easier to update as well. I am adding a content management system. Updates will be easier, and I will test the results using common screen readers.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

I once worked for a web design company (back when image maps were generally server-side supported, not client-side) that had truly bad design choices. One for a page that used a server-side image map, they tried to include text links at the bottom of the page so that the links could still be followed by search engines. Except they couldn't get the text to position itself precisely on enough clients that it wouldn't break their (NetObjects Fusion) layout table... so they turned the text links into an image of text links and made it another server-side image map.

This was when the boss angrily declared, "I am not an idiot!" when I tried to point out the problem to him.

The last thing I ever did for that company was finally give them something they really wanted: a frameset that constrained the usable real-estate on a page to be no more than 640x480. They then converted their own website to use that frameset and quickly went out of business.

The parent company though still publishes a free, local, ad-supported business magazine. Their website even as an "Accessibility Statement" page.

Re:Shitty web design is not a "blind" problem

I strongly disagree! Very frequently the "print this page" link remedies many of the problems you listed--gets rid of ads, all on one page, gets rid of navigation cruft, etc.

A properly crafted site intended to have a printing option has a stylesheet that has @media print rules for restyling the page for printing, automatically removing that cruft.

Do the Blind Deserve More Effort on the Web?

I can't see why not.

Alt Tags for Images

The biggest thing web designers do that breaks the web for disabled people is not include the alt tag in an image. I mean how hard is that?

Re:Alt Tags for Images

I disagree -- and if you've ever used a screen reader you'd understand how nearsighted (no pun intended) that comment is.

1. = Alt tags, yes. But also:
2. = Long desc on images that are content-heavy or pertinent to the content
3. = Using a proper hierarchy of header tags (H1/2/3/4/5)
4. = Using lists (UL, OL, DL, etc.) properly
5. = Placing the content BEFORE the navigation, or at least providing an internally linked "skipnav" link (use CSS to hide it)
6. = using title properties on links
7. = Creating non-flash versions of key items
8. = Using Javascript as an additional convenience, but not a key element. (I *still* see sites that use window.href onclick events instead of just using an "A" tag.)

That's just the beginning. Not using alt tags doesn't "break the web" for screen readers, it's just less helpful. But not using semantically accurate tags can make it nearly impossible to read or navigate a page. The screen reader JAWS (what I was trained on) can jump through a page by header tags, so having a proper hierarchy is crucial to them being able to quickly locate the information they need.

If your site breaks with all plugins, javascript, and CSS turned off, then blind people will effectively NOT be able to use it.

It isn't that hard

I've worked as a web developer for years and can honestly say that it isn't hard to make an accessable website/webapplication but it doesn't happen because no one is willing to pay for it. Even the fact that there are laws in place in some countries that require certain standards doesn't motivate (most) clients into paying the extra 5% to have an accessable website; on top of this it doesn't help that your (dishonest) VP of marketing just pulls a number out of the air when they go after a project and you are (typically) heavily underfunded for the work you have to do.

Why even debate?

At least in the US, it's the law that you have to use well-known and available methods to allow handicapped people into your place of business. For example, you don't have to provide access for someone in a ventilator, because that would be impractical, but you do have to provide access for someone in a wheelchair, because it's really not all that hard. The EXACT same principle should apply to the web. Providing access to the blind on the web is probably a lot easier than providing wheelchair access in a bricks-and-mortar store.

Limited by management ...

On any number of projects where I've provided a web interface, I've been told in no uncertain words that I was to make pages that were tailored for exactly the browser and screen that the project's manager uses.

Thus, I've often been told that the pages must be forced via things like width= attributes to be exactly N pixels wide, even when there's nothing in a page that is dependent on any particular width. I've been ordered to present some data in pictorial form, even when simple text data was easier to understand and took less screen space.

So very often, managers explicitly order their developers to produce web pages that are inaccessible to anyone other than people exactly like them.

There are some ways that one can fight this. In a few cases, I've found that I can "go over the boss's head" by showing a higher-up something that they find useful. I happen to know that they have a Blackberry or a Treo that they love and use all the time, and my boss's declared page structure won't work on their machine, so eventually orders come down to make the web interface usable on the higher-ups' favorite little handheld gadget. While doing this, I can also sneak in things that make it more accessible to the disabled.

But this is a passive-resistance approach, and it's not always successful. I like to also try to get across the idea that you, yes you, may find yourself handicapped by this time next week, in a way that you can't predict. The sensible thing would be to guarantee that your minions' efforts are usable even after that accident or medical emergency has left you restricted in what you can see or read.

But few managers are willing to take such a long-term view of the situation. So all too often, my pages aren't as accessible as I know how to make them.

It would be nice to learn of other ways that we developers can fight such management intransigence.

The largest difficulty

I have looked into developing for screen readers in the past, but the biggest problem I've run into is the software being used by the disabled.

1) there are great disparities between how the screen readers interpret things.
2) the most popular screen readers are expensive, and offer no free versions for developers.

The Microsoft Narrator didn't hit my radar. I don't know anything about it, but if it's free and of high quality, that's a major step forward.

It would be nice if it could be better...

... but some kind of sites are going to have more challenges than others.

For example, I publish a few webcomics (at Ubersoft.net). A webcomic is an image file (in my case, pngs) which are flat-out useless to the blind. Now, there are specifications about how graphics should be used to make them useful to the blind (i.e., include a complete description of the graphic within the img tag -- using "alt" I think, though I'm not sure) but this seems counterproductive. Webcomics as a whole are somewhat useless to the blind because they are a visual medium. Granted, my art is lousy and static but it is still presented visually.

So how much trouble should I, a publisher of a medium that seems to fundamentally work against a blind man or woman's browsing experience, put into making my site accessible to them?

As it happens, I do try some, though I am unfamiliar with the latest accessibility guidelines. I use css and xhtml (as best I can) to tag the site properly and make it navigable to a screen reader. This is a bit challenging since the publishing system I'm using (Drupal) makes it difficult for me to sift through everything, but I'm making slow progress. I've also started transcribing my comic archives -- primarily to make them searchable by my site's search engine, but one of my readers pointed out that it also allows a blind visitor to actually read the dialog.

There are other types of sites -- political discussion sites, news sites, sites like Slashdot -- where accessibility would be far more useful. The web was originally primarily text, and on sites where the content is still primarily text there's no reason it can't be designed to make that text more easily accessible to the visually impaired.

An Easier Fix

Try reading some HTML as text:

Greater than, quote, less than, semi-quote, have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, comma, as a diabetic, comma, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used, period, semi-quote, greater than, slash, quote, less than.

I got results like that when I tried to use a voice synthesizer to read HTML email. Note that it doesn't differentiate between reading the 'quote' inside the tags and the 'semi-quote' in the quoted text.

Good luck on trying to get everybody and his invisible pal to reformat all their web and email. Far more likely to succeed would be to entice browser and email client developers to produce smart HTML strippers (and Flash readers, etc.) to produce a text-only output for use in voice synthesizers, and/or develop voice synthesizer plug-ins that process the HTML etc. as proper inflections (for bold, underline, etc) or statements ("quote"/"unquote") to be spoken.

There's a relatively small but steady market for accessibility-related software. Much of what's produced is subsidized by tax money, of which there's a high user-per capita quotient. A developer might not sell as many of such programs, but with fewer users per dollar, that means less support downstream. And with only a few developers focusing on that market, they can each make some decent money. Of course open developers such as the Mozilla group could do the same, for the usual reasons.

To hook up with people in this area, visit with the accessibility people found at many public and university libraries (at some universities it's a separate department).

Another problem needing fixing is closed caption voice-to-text processing, to give the deaf (or the Deaf, the capitalization is an important distinction) the ability to watch the now ubiquitous videos on news site and such, without having to wear their eyes out trying to lipread the low rez/bandwidth video usually produced. Take in video, buffer for later use, read audio and produce closed captioning, and send output to a window with CC synced to and overlaying the previously buffered video.

Note to commercial developers: producing such things under tax-supported/non-profit/government agency label might not earn a lot of money, but what it does earn can be taken as tax-deductions, as can the "money" that goes into the inevitable (and admittedly high-per capita) support.

Re:My philosophy

Stop being a drama queen. I have peanut butter allergies too. I just don't eat the shit. Problem solved.