By Brian O'Neill
posted June 22, 2001
Website Usability

A Blinding Omission
Why has the Internet all but ignored the visually impaired?
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee once said that the power of the Web
is its
universality and that "access by everyone regardless of disability is an
essential
aspect." Indeed, the advent of the Web should have been a godsend to those
facing
a physical challenge. But the power to bring a world of information to
one's fingertips
is only as valuable as it is accessible, and for the more than 10 million
Americans
considered blind or visually impaired, the Web is decidedly inaccessible.

Both the World Wide Web Consortium (under the Web Accessibility Initiative)
and the U.S. Department of Justice (under the Americans with Disabilities
Act) have issued extensive standards for accessibility, including
operability through keyboard input alone and enabling users to render
blinking text or animations as motionless.
However, some studies suggest that up to 99 percent of websites come
nowhere near
meeting W3C or ADA criteria, and a recent survey by accessibility
consultancy OrbitAccess
found that only 1 percent of Fortune 500 companies' websites are blind
accessible.
Too bad for them, considering that 1.5 million blind or visually impaired
Americans
over the age of 15 currently use the Internet — a number expected to grow
as text-to-voice
browsers and other software and hardware tools improve or emerge.
In fact, the visually impaired are among the most devoted of the
shop-at-home set.
"Marketers should realize that we are a great audience," says Penny Reed,
editor
of the Braille Forum, a publication of the American Council of the Blind.
"We're
loyal to the sites we know we won't have to spend hours trying to get through."
And for those sites they do have to spend hours trying to get through? In
1999, the
National Federation of the Blind sued America Online, demanding that the
company
make its services accessible. A blind Australian man sued the International
Olympic
Committee, claiming that the site for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games was
inaccessible.
So what gives? With a ready-made niche market right under their noses,
who's to blame
for the market segment that e-commerce forgot? The consensus: Blame the Web
designers.
Most of the accessibility headaches encountered by the visually impaired
come when
their non-graphical browsers are stymied by graphics with useless metatags
such as
"graphic" instead of an ALT tag that describes the picture. Similarly,
because text-to-voice
browsers read information horizontally, a graph or table configured
vertically comes
out as sheer nonsense.
The worst offenders are the increasingly popular Flash or Java site intros,
which
non-graphical browsers cannot penetrate at all. More and more, Web
designers are
abandoning the underlying tenet that markup language was designed in such a
way that
the method of accessing the code was unimportant — be it a PC, a handheld
device,
even an old-fashioned teletype machine. But the notorious
Netscape/Microsoft browser
showdown ushered in an age of Web design tailored to browser whistles and
bells.
"It's no accident that ALT tags aren't being used," says AccessOrbit
founder Dennis
Báthory-Kitsz. "Any designer who's read
A Beginner's Guide to HTML
  knows about them. They either choose not to use them, or they're just
being lazy."
On the flip side of the problem, accessibility tools have improved
dramatically.
IBM's Home Page Reader, a text-to-voice browser that was released in late
1998, is
now in its third incarnation, with features like a changing voice and sound
effects
to represent different kinds of content, and an improved user interface.
British
retailer Tesco has, in cooperation with the Royal National Institute for
the Blind,
developed proprietary voice software that will be embedded in Tesco.com's
code, allowing
users to surf the site without the aid of a talking browser.
On the lower end of the scale, New York-based WeMedia Inc. released its
free talking
browser in March. More than 10,000 of the browsers have been downloaded
from the
WeMedia site as well as CNet and ZDNet, says Caryn Kaufman, WeMedia's
director of
communication. Its synthesized Stephen Hawking monotone and inability to
read e-mail
may not make for total user friendliness, but Kaufman says early response
has been
"phenomenal," and that the bugs are being hammered out for subsequent
releases. High-end
technologies include the $5,000 VirTouch Mouse, which creates visual
representations
of site images on a series of movable pins.
Companies interested in making their sites more accessible can assess their
weak
spots by running a "Bobby test," a software application developed by the
Center for
Applied Special Technology (CAST). Brian Matheny, who provides technical
support
for CAST, says the free application is downloaded nearly 200 times a day
from government
and commercial sites, including IBM and online music retailer UpBeats.com.
Bobby
checks site pages for ALT tags and other potential stumbling blocks, and
makes suggestions
based on usability standards.
As always, the ounce-of-prevention approach will save you from having to
make changes
later on. Báthory-Kitsz says two or three minutes are needed for every hour
of design
to make sure a site passes muster. "The fact that people even argue about
this staggers
me," he says. "It takes almost no effort at all."
Brian O'Neill is a staff writer for The Next Big Thing.




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