Difficulties+of+Web+2.0+and+the+Visually+Impaired

Tami Kissell
The Internet is changing how America operates. Educational instruction is available online, but more importantly Universities are requiring that their future students apply, register, and pay fees online. The health care industry is also directing their clients to use the online features described in an automated phone call. But what about those folks that are visually impaired? Not only is my father blind, but this year I have two students that require visual assistance beyond glasses or preferential seating. They each have an electronic textbook and the school has had to purchase screen readers and magnification programs. I realize that this paper is to be written on how Web 2.0 has great tools for students with disabilities, but my heart is with the visually impaired and we have a long way to go for those folks and in my opinion Web 2.0 has actually created more problems.

I find myself orally reading or describing what the student should be seeing on the screen. The reader takes way too long especially if there are several images that can be scrolled over and linked to another site. Not only am I frustrated but so are my learners. So I guess with this paper I am playing the devil’s advocate, Web 2.0 does provide for equal access and socialization on the Web is a huge plus but it seems to prevent more barriers than it removes. Let me explain. Individuals who are blind or have low vision often confront significant barriers to Web access and the use of online becomes a nightmare. This is because many Web sites provide information visually without features that allow screen readers, such as JAWS or AJAX, or other assistive technology to retrieve information on the site so it can be presented in an accessible manner. The most common barrier to Web site accessibility is an image or photograph without corresponding text describing the image. A screen reader or similar assistive technology cannot “read” an image, leaving individuals who are blind with no way of independently knowing what information the image conveys ( e.g., a simple graphic or a link to another page). Similarly, complex Web sites often lack navigational headings or links that would facilitate navigation using a screen reader or may contain tables with header and row identifiers that display data, but fail to provide associated cells for each header and row so that the table information can be interpreted by a screen reader.  Here is a simple example that my father encounters. Most Americans shop online or at least compares prices. When a visually impaired user finally decides to make a purchase, filling in the order form becomes a nightmare. When instructed to add address, the reader fails to tell the individual that there is a separate box for apartment number. Below I tried to copy and paste shapes I created in word to show a sample order form and as you can see this program did not read them correctly. I could take it out, but this wiki has not idea what to do with it and neither would a screen reader.

  Name     Address Apt #

City State Zip Code

Not knowing any better, the user might include the apartment number in the first field. The "Address" field label is so ambiguous that one might even decide to include the city, state, and ZIP code. The user won't realize a mistake has been made until they get to the "Apt. No." field. At this point the user will have to go back to the "Address" field to re-edit it. If the form is particularly long, the process can be incredibly aggravating. Worse yet are the sites that use FLASH and open with sound or a video. Talk about sensory overload, the reader and the audio are playing simultaneously. Unless I am sitting right next to my students to help, navigation through these sights are awful. My heart aches for them but they continue to move forward and I am so glad they cannot see the frustration on my face!

So how do you address the problem? Web designers are going to have to include tags on images, try to avoid drop down menus or just include a choice at the start of the site “text only”. I do realize that 21st Century learners need to be stimulated far more than learners of yesteryear, but there are still students that too much stimulation is a bad thing. As much as I do like 99% of what Web 2.0 has to offer, I believe the designers still have a large hill ahead of them for the visually impaired. Sources: [] [] [] [] [] []

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In today's world of technology, it is easy to take for granted the use of the computer and what it offers but yet it is far from being accessible to those who have vision disabilities. According to the American Foundation for the Blind, an estimated 25 million Americans experience some type of vision loss and the number is expected to rise as our population ages. The vision loss can be placed in three categories: low vision, blindness, and color blindness. In teaching, I now have to be very aware of my students' disabilities not only for my art projects but for assigning any kind of computer work. How does someone with a vision disability use the computer? Technology has so much to offer a visually impaired person yet it has many limitations. There are many assistive technologies available such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, refreshable Braille, tabbing, speech synthesis, voice browsers, and text browse﻿rs. These allow students to do research, complete their homework and tests, and read books on the computer. Advancements have definitely been made in the past few years to allow the visually impaired person to continue mainstreaming in our current society but yet there are still many problems with Web 2.0 and the visually impaired despite our advancements. Many websites are not accessible at all to the vision impaired. Most web browsing methods are not developed so that the page structure is correctly coded and easily processed in either Braille output or speech output. Web designers need to use standard HTML syntax to avoid important errors in the source code. Problems in the way table cells and rows are read means the designer needs to make sure the source code interpreter extracts the information in the order it is meant to be read. Also, the visually impaired user is unable to see images or photos because they rely on the description, or ATL tag which means all images need to be properly tagged. Using less graphics would be beneficial since the visually impaired person has no ability to know what the message is from the graphic. Text, images, and page layouts need to be resizable as well as the contrast needs to be changeable. The visually impaired will become more of the Web 2.0 internet community when the web designers can meet the needs of the visually impaired in their design process. ======

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[] [|http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/people-use-web/diversity#visual] [] [] [] []