List member and leader in the New York city VICUG gregory rosmaita is
profiled in this article from Wired News.
kelly
The Blind Leading the Blinkered
by Austin Bunn
12:04pm 3.Jul.97.PDT For Gregory Rosmaita, surfing on the Web can
feel like "land swimming" in an empty room. By feeling the surfaces,
"I can say the room has four walls," he says, "but one may have the
Last Supper on it and I couldn't tell you."
Rosmaita, a webmaster, programmer, and site designer, went blind at
age 20, but you wouldn't know it judging from his work - which is
exactly how he wants it. Using the text-based Lynx browser, Pico
editor, and a JAWS (Job Access With Voice) screen reader to speak the
code, 29-year-old Rosmita currently oversees two projects - the
Caldwell College site, and his own extensive blindness/academic
resource Camera Obscura - both impressively dense with information. In
fact, their sheer efficiency is precisely his point.
"Let's bring HTML back to what it's supposed to be - to present
information," says Rosmaita, "and let's leave the [graphical] desktop
publishing aspect to the browser."
But just as hundreds of thousands of blind people have come online,
many of them are nervous about what will happen next. At the National
Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind
conventions this week, concerned blind users worried that their many
advances and training with DOS-based systems may soon be rendered
obsolete by the rise of the graphical-user interface.
Curtis Chong, president of the National Federation of the Blind in
Computer Science, says that when blind people first got onto the Net
in the early '90s with the help of assistive technologies like
WebSpeak or JAWS, "the first big boom was email, because you could now
see and send mail without having to pay someone to read it." But with
the onset of graphical email and the active desktop, Chong stresses
that "the danger signs are on the horizon." As Rosmaita says, "the
problem with the Web is that it's point and shoot, but if you're
blind, you can't see the target."
In response, Rosmaita has in recent months become something of a Web
watchdog. One of a growing number of concerned (and visually impaired)
webmasters and developers, he's determined to confront obstinate GUI
designers who are either ignorant or insensitive to the blind online.
"Lynx would encounter a page that just said "image map," so I would
write to the webmaster and say this is what your page looks like in
Lynx, proving to them that it was butt ugly," Rosmita says. "They
would blow me off or say 'you're right, but I don't have the time.'"
Coordinated through the WebWatch listserv (just one of an exploding
number of blindness-related mailing lists), Rosmaita and others would
deluge the sites with complaints or simple counsel "just to add alt
tags." (Some sites with poor accessibility records, like ABCNews have
been cataloged by the WebWatch list.)
But some sites remain a frustrating mystery. Because the screen reader
prioritizes text horizontally, sites using frames are broken into
indecipherable slivers. For the blind, "frames are living hell," says
Rosmaita.
For developers, BOBBY, a free application developed by the Center for
Applied Special Technology, takes URLs and reposts pages the way they
seem to blind people - usually a humiliating test of a site's
accessibility. Sun and Microsoft have downloaded Bobby to help them
design their applications, says CAST director Chuck Hitchcock, but
critiques and guidelines aren't enough. "People just don't read
[guidelines]," says Hitchcock, adding that the next version of Bobby
will actually suggest simple programming solutions for problematic
pages.
T. V. Raman, a technology consultant for Adobe Systems who is also
blind, believes that attempting to retrofitting speech onto graphic
environments is a mistake. While you could get away with speech
readers in a very poor visual environment 10 years ago, says Raman,
speech readers in the GUI world are like "standing around and feeling
the different parts of an elephant to figure out it's an elephant."
Raman believes that Rosmaita's approach of
graphics-as-difficult-to-access and text-as-simple-to-access presents
a false dichotomy, especially considering the many confusing ways in
which text can be formatted.
Raman designed an audio desktop that builds speech capabilities
directly into applications, as opposed to adding speech capabilities
afterward. At Adobe, he's currently working to take the graphic PDF
files and make them "useable in as many ways as possible."
The highest levels of the industry have already started looking to
standardize solutions for accessibility. The World Wide Web Consortium
announced in April the creation of an Accessibility Initiative, but
the body still struggles to create a working group. Rosmaita says
Microsoft has been remarkably receptive to adapt the Windows OS for
accessibility, and the company's accessibility division has recently
released standards for Java and Windows developers to follow.
W3C's guidelines, however, may not be easy to enforce, and software
standards are critical to secure Web access for blind people, says
Rosmaita. He likens the problem of technical standards to the trouble
of elevators. "The ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] made sure
there is Braille by the buttons, but there's no standard place for the
panel, and you don't know if the Braille corresponds to the number
above or the number below," he says. "By the time you figure it out,
you're way past the floor."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
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