> 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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