Accessibility for the blind

[gkearney]

Has any consideration been given to the issue of accessibility for the
blind in Wave?

Gregory Kearney
Manager - Accessible Media
Association for the Blind of Western Australia
61 Kitchener Avenue, PO Box 101
Victoria Park 6979, WA Australia

Telephone: +61 (08) 9311 8202
Telephone: +1 (307) 224 4022 (North America)
Fax: +61 (08) 9361 8696
Toll free: 1800 658 388 (Australia only)
Email: gkea...@gmail.com

[Arne Wischer]

I think it's just a question of how the corresponding Wave Client is designed. For Wave relying on HTML it should be fairly easy to create an appropriate Client, which is able to parse the information. The difficult thing with this is probably the fact, that a wave is no static construction.

Just think about a Wave, that gets edited at the end, the middle and the beginnig at the same time. But this as well is just a matter of designing the right Wave client. It could very well be done with a client, that handles the Wave in a "static" way.

[Joseph Gentle]

I suspect designing the client in an accessible way would be harder with wave than it is with regular email.

(From what I hear regular email has been a godsend for blind people since with appropriate software nobody needs to know you're blind on the internet)

It would be nice if someone, somewhere looked into it and made some UI mockups & implemented them. Bringing communication to blind people isn't something we want to lose if wave replaces email.

-J

[Sam Hiatt]

Y'all bring up a very interesting issue. In other threads, (and
everywhere, really) people are talking about how Wave might replace
email completely. I don't think this will ever happen because email
is beautiful in its simplicity. There will always be people using
email, whether because of poor connection speeds, old habits, or
accessibility issues. We can't do much to improve people's
connections or change their old habits, but we can design a
communications protocol that allows universal accessibility.

I'm not familiar with how typical clients for the blind work, but I do
understand that the HTML specs have always addressed accessibility
issues. That leads me to wonder what accessibility provisions are
included in the HTML 5 spec, and how that might enable an appropriate
client for the blind.

Is anyone familiar with the issue willing to offer some insight?
Anyone know how Ajax apps are currently handled by such clients?

Thanks to the original poster for bringing this up.

Sam

[BJ]

Another possibility for a "wave reader" could be a client based on
snapshots. Either way I agree it is all in the client and how the
client is designed.

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[Arne Wischer]

That is actually what i meant with a "static" Wave. ;)
Just take a snapshot at a certain point of time and you should easily be able to build an approprate HTML parser for this.

Live editing may be much more difficult to implement, but not impossible at all.

As you mentioned, it's just a matter of writing the right Client.

[guruvan (Rob Nelson)]

Why couldn't you have a text-speech robot that participates in the
wave? To be honest, I don't know anything about accessibility issues,
but it would seem that that would be an acceptable method. And It
would seem that it could allow text and sound to participate in real
time together.

Is there an IM client for the blind?