THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

November 7, 2002

Internet Means Possibilities, Frustration for Blind Surfers

By STEPHANIE MILES


Amy Green is trying to open her Yahoo e-mail account.

Ms. Green, a 19-year old student at the School for the Blind in Fremont,
Calif., has low vision, which means that her sight can't be corrected to
any level approaching normal. With painstaking patience, she moves the
cursor slowly around the Yahoo Inc. home page, which has been magnetized
to five times its usual size using ZoomText, a special program for the
vision-impaired. Because of the magnification, only a tiny portion of the
window can be displayed at one time.

Even so, she has her nose pressed up against the monitor, doggedly
working to locate the link that will open the right page. "This is kind
of starting to annoy me," she says, almost under her breath. After
several minutes of trying, Ms. Green finds the link and clicks on it. Now
the process starts all over again, as she attempts to locate the windows
where she must type in her name and password.

Ms. Green isn't alone. Twenty percent of the 93.5 million adults who
access the Internet in the U.S. say they have vision problems, according
to ComScore Media Metrix, which tracks Internet usage.

The Internet is giving the visually impaired access to the same
information at the same time as the rest of the world, "for the first
time since the end of the oral tradition and the beginning of the printed
word," says Stuart Wittenstein, superintendent at the School for the
Blind, which focuses on teaching blind children and young adults life
skills to help them succeed in mainstream society.

But if the Internet has leveled the playing field, it is also an exercise
in frustration for thousands of people every day. At the School for the
Blind -- which offers its students, teachers, and administrators some of
the most sophisticated assistive technology around -- the Web seems to
cause as many problems as it solves.

Off Limits

Completely blind people use the Internet with the help of screen-reading
software, which literally voices every graphic, link, and piece of text
that appears onscreen. Instead of using the mouse, special keyboard
commands are used to select links and move from window to window. Those
with some vision can also use screen magnifiers, which enlarge a portion
of the screen between two and 10 times its regular size.

Because blind people are dependent either on audio text-readers or screen
magnifiers, much of the Internet is effectively off limits to them.
Popular children's sites like Disney.com are hard for blind kids to
navigate because of the graphic-heavy design, along with ad-heavy portals
like Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN. And while pop-up windows and
glitchy antivirus software are mere annoyances for the sighted, they are
even more vexing for blind surfers, because they wreak havoc with
assistive software.

Disabled-rights advocates have long pushed for the Web to be more
accessible to the blind, with mixed results. Earlier this month, a
federal judge ruled that the Americans With Disabilities Act doesn't
cover virtual space, dismissing a suit demanding that the Web site for
Southwest Airlines be altered to work better with text-readers. In 2000,
America Online, now a division of AOL Time Warner Inc., avoided a lawsuit
filed by the National Federation for the Blind by agreeing to make its
Internet software more compatible with text-readers.

Internet companies say they don't have the resources to make their sites
disabled-accessible. "We have such a huge range of users," says a
spokeswoman for Yahoo, declining to comment specifically on what the
company has done to make its site usable for blind users. "We have worked
with outside organizations to help our people understand the needs of
people with all types of disabilities," says a spokeswoman for the Disney
Internet Group, while conceding that some of Disney.com's multimedia
features "might pose some difficulties" for blind users.

Advocates say that Web developers who ignore the blind users in their
audience are missing a potentially huge market. The disabled community
has $175 billion in discretionary spending and $1 trillion in income,
according to management-consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton in
Washington, D.C. That community includes 10 million blind Americans,
according to the American Foundation for the Blind ( www.afb.org).

Blind students and teachers at the School for the Blind say that it is
clear that most Web designers don't take visually disabled users into
account, forcing them to navigate unmarked links, mysterious unlabeled
graphics, and framed Web sites that don't work with many assistive
software programs. "It all depends on the Web designer," says Joan
Anderson, who runs the computer lab at the School For the Blind. "The
Internet is a great thing, but it's also the most frustrating."

For many in the blind community, the Internet is a lifeline to the
outside world, Ms. Anderson says. Like many other teenagers, her kids
enjoy burning CDs and listening to music on the computer, but by far the
most popular activity is e-mail. "E-mail -- they love e-mail," she says.
"E-mail, e-mail, e-mail."

In their enthusiasm for communicating with friends and family, the
students willingly put up with the frustrating design of sites like
Microsoft's Hotmail.com and Yahoo Mail, she says, pointing out that
neither site works well with the special keyboard commands. This means
students like Ms. Green must slowly scroll around a magnified version of
the screen, searching for the right link.

While Ms. Green is willing to patiently scrutinize the magnetized
computer screen, searching slowly for the right link to click, some say
it is just too much hassle.

"I rarely use it, because it's so frustrating," says Marcus Graves, the
school's receptionist, who is blind himself, pointing to the computer
sitting in front of him on his desk. Mr. Graves uses the phone and fax
machine in the reception area with few problems, but is thwarted when he
tries to log on to look up the day's stock information. "When I try to
find something, I cannot," he says. "The sites are designed poorly."

June Waugh, an administrator at the school with severely impaired vision,
says she will use the Web for some important tasks at work -- like
e-mail, and even occasionally buying airline tickets -- but not for
entertainment purposes because it is so difficult and time-consuming for
her to get around online. Ms. Waugh pushes her computer monitor to the
very edge of her desk, and reads text at 200% its normal size. "If it was
easy, I'd do it," she says. "The Internet isn't particularly fun for me."

The phenomenon of pop-up and pop-under ads also causes problems. JAWS,
(which stands for Job Access With Speech) a popular text-to-speech
software program made by Freedom Scientific Inc., in St. Petersburg,
Fla., often gets confused by the proliferation of browser windows. "When
they pop up, JAWS tries to read it to you," Ms. Anderson says, explaining
that it can be difficult to navigate via the text-to-speech software back
to the correct window. The school doesn't use any kind of ad-suppressing
software. "They end up blocking everything," she says. "I haven't found
one we can use."

Although JAWS gives completely blind users -- for whom screen
magnification won't help -- access to computers and the Web, the software
has its own share of obstacles. JAWS doesn't recognize unusual fonts, for
example, which crop up on many Web sites. Web sites that are continually
updated, such as sports and news sites, sometimes trick the software into
thinking a new page has loaded. JAWS's humanistic voice hiccups every
time the antivirus software runs, and some students like Amy Green can't
stand the robotic voice at all. "It is just too annoying," she says,
preferring to magnify her screen instead.

Eric Damery, product manager for JAWS, says that the program, which was
initially designed as a text reader for DOS systems in 1988, has been
morphed over the years to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.
JAWS now has an installed user base of 70,000 users, with an additional
1,000 users every month, he says. Although many commercial sites are
difficult for JAWS readers to use, the majority of federal, state, and
educational Web sites are designed to be blind-accessible, and Web
standards for accessibility like those from the World Wide Web Consortium
( www.w3c.org) also help, Mr. Damery says. "It's come a long way, but
we're not there yet," he says. "It's a big challenge for us as an
industry."

Google Clicks

Although Ms. Anderson steers new students away from complex sites like
Yahoo and Disney until they get more experience, at least one heavily
trafficked site is also popular with the blind: Google. "Google is our
favorite," she says, both in terms of its clean and text-reader-friendly
design, as well as the accuracy of the links, which help save blind users
the tedium of finding and clicking extraneous links before hitting the
right one. "It's great for sighted kids and its great for blind kids,"
Ms. Anderson says.

Google was designed with an eye on making the site accessible to a wide
range of users, including those with disabilities, according to Craig
Silverstein, director of technology for Google Inc., in Mountain View,
Calif. "If you start from the assumption that you need to make things
simple and easy to use, then I think a lot of these things fall into
place," he says.

Some tasks have become easier with the advent of the Internet, like
reading a Braille version of a book. Because Braille takes up
significantly more space than regular text, Braille versions of popular
books can require several volumes, Ms. Anderson says, and are frequently
too heavy for kids to carry around or take with them on trips. The
Braille version of the latest Harry Potter is three volumes alone, each
over 200 pages long, she points out. Now, students can find the Braille
version of most books online for free at Handiworks.com (
www.handiworks.com), then download the text to a memory card, which can
be inserted into a portable braille reading device. "There's so many
options they didn't have before," she says.

But all this technology doesn't come cheap. In addition to rows of new
Compaq computers with 21-inch displays and Microsoft software, the
computers in the technology lab are outfitted with JAWS, which, for
individual users, costs about $850 per copy. The portable Braille readers
start at $3,600, according to Ms. Anderson. The school's technology lab
has 17 readers, which can be checked out by students. The new version of
the Braille reader that Ms. Anderson wants, which includes a network
card, browser interface, and a Global Positioning System to help blind
pedestrians find their way to the nearest Starbucks, costs $5,700, she
says. "It's not cheap, but it's a lifesaver," she says.

And many say they're more than willing to put up with all the hassles and
the expense. Wayne Siligo, a music teacher at the school who is totally
blind, uses JAWS and his Internet connection to communicate with parents,
students, and even collaborate on new music compositions -- activities he
says would be nearly impossible without the Web. "It's like if you've
been riding a horse your whole life and then they give you a Ferrari.
Even if it's in the shop all the time, those three days where you can
drive it are great."

Write to Stephanie Miles at
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Updated November 7, 2002 7:31 p.m. EST


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