Blind People and the Internet, Will It Be A Perfect Solution For Them To Brows The World Wide Web?
To almost every individual who uses the Internet, the images and text on the screen are an effortless way to browse for information. For millions of others who don’t take their sense of sight for granted, the Internet is the place different than anything a normal person will ever go through. Everything to start with, is words that are read out by a robotic voice. The layout of a webpage means nothing. Images are occasionally translatable into a description; at other times, they’re simply ignored. Words and sentences are things to listen to and not to be read. Finding your way around the page can be cumbersome. Still, for some reason, blind people use the Internet day in and day out; they even use the same equipment that people with normal eyesight do. How does all this happen?
Microsoft Narrator, the text-to-speech program which is projected to facilitate blind people included in all Windows operating systems, is about the basic way that blind people use; it helps them read anything out of a browser. On the Mac, Voice Over does nearly the same thing. The problem with text-to text screen reading software is that there is no way to know what is important. The narrator starts from the very top of the screen and works its way to the very bottom, working its way through every useless item of information, there might be. When you hover your mouse pointer over a picture, you usually get a trifle tool tip about what the picture is about. Occasionally, there’s a meta-tag that has a description. That’s all blind people using the Internet get to recognize about what the picture is about. Some of the times, to help the listener tell the difference between a picture and a written sentence, the screen reader uses a different voice for pictures.
Websites these days are attempting to comply with the new W3C standard for accessibility. Websites following the standard try to design their pages so that tags are decently used, headers are used as much as possible to help describe paragraphs, and so forth. However, even a website that does all of this can be hard to understand. Take Facebook, for example; the layout of the Facebook page is not really conventional, the way a book is presented.
And even when blind people take the trouble to master how to get about Facebook, when the company changes the design of the website, everything has to be relearned.
Blind people tend to use the mobile version of Facebook that is rather stripped-down. It helps them take in information on Facebook in the most effective manner possible. The Americans With Disabilities Act is trying to ram through legislation that will make the entire Internet a lot easier for screen reading software.
