Web site accessibility for blind users
Matt Probert
not my commercial web site is usable by blind users.
Because of a lack of funds, all I can do is test the site in Lynx and
see what words are displayed and try to imagine how they might be
spoken, or printed in braile. I am a bit distrustful of systems like
Bobby.
Would you mind if I ask you which web browser you use? And whether or
not my site is usable by you.
If there are any ways in which I can make my site easier for blind
users to use, I should be grateful to know.
The URL is:
http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com
Please be aware. This site is a general knowledge encyclopaedia, run
for commercial gain through selling advertising space.
Thanks
Matthew Probert
end.
Isofarro
relevant a topic for this group]
Matt Probert wrote:
> As a sighted person, it is very hard for me to understand whether or
> not my commercial web site is usable by blind users.
>
> Because of a lack of funds, all I can do is test the site in Lynx and
> see what words are displayed and try to imagine how they might be
> spoken, or printed in braile.
This is a good way of making sure content is accessible, since the
order the page appears in Lynx is the order it is received in a speech
browser. If the order of the content is logical, it certainly goes a
fair way to getting the page accessible.
The one thing you have to keep in mind is that for speech readers and
braille readers visitors can't "see" the whole page at once like Lynx,
only one line at a time. Imaging running your entire text on the page
through a marquee -- that's what it is like.
> I am a bit distrustful of systems like Bobby.
Bobby's relationship with the webdevelopment community seems to be
quite sour at the moment, hopefully the website owners will do a full
upgrade.
Have you tried Access Valet on http://valet.htmlhelp.com -- its written
by Nick Kew who seriously knows his stuff.
You can also download a 30 day trial of IBM Homepage reader -- that's
known to be used in the speech browser community. If there's a trial
for Jaws - try that - its too expensive otherwise.
> Would you mind if I ask you which web browser you use?
I do the Lynx test backed up with lots of reading and a handy printed
copy of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
> If there are any ways in which I can make my site easier for blind
> users to use, I should be grateful to know.
One of the neat tricks I picked up is to use linked transparent 1 pixel
gifs to allow a linear-mode browser to jump around to the required bits
of the page using <a name="#content"> etc. (any agent that doesn't see
a webpage as a complete page but in bits I tend to call linear-mode,
since they see a bit at a time in sequence)
An example - a tables based layout with a left hand menu, middle
content and right hand "recommended reading" link list. On a linear
browser the left hand menu would be reached first, and having to go
through the links every time they reached a new page is murder.
So before the first menu item, have two transparent image links to jump
to the content and recommended reading sections:
<a href="#content"><img src="1.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="Skip to
the content"></a>
<a href="#recommended"><img src="1.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="Skip
to recommended reading"></a>
Do the same at the beginning of each section and at the end of the
webpage -- its a very good start to making your pages so much easier to
use in a linear browser.
Even though the content is in a table in a graphical browser, its just
a stream of text to a linear browser, so allowing skip forwards and
skip backwards type navigation does certainly help.
--
Iso.
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Recommended Hosting: http://www.affordablehost.com/
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Jukka K. Korpela
> As a sighted person, it is very hard for me to understand whether or
> not my commercial web site is usable by blind users.
I have encountered similar problems, and the details can be difficult, but
the basics are relatively simple. To put it simply and coarsely, it's a
matter of textual linearizability and comparable to, though not identical
with, the presentation that a text-only browser such as Lynx displays.
> Because of a lack of funds, all I can do is test the site in Lynx and
> see what words are displayed and try to imagine how they might be
> spoken, or printed in braile.
That's a good start, and by doing so, you are way ahead of the great majority
of authors. But Lynx is still visual, although its output could be fed as
input to speech synthesis. To understand some differences, consider the
following. If you use an image that is a long horizontal line, what would you
use as alternate text for it? On Lynx, using a long sequence of hyphens or
underline characters would work pretty well visually. But imagine how a
speech synthesizer reads "hyphen hyphen hyphen" and so on. (It might
recognize the situation and do something more sensible. But we shouldn't
count on that.) Using alt="New topic" would work better, assuming the line is
intended to correspond to a major division of the document into parts. You
might as well be more informative and also tell what the new topic is, if it
won't be very apparent for example from a heading that follows.
> I am a bit distrustful of systems like Bobby.
Bobby is indeed of rather limited usefulness. It checks some aspects only,
and many of its messages are misleading. It can be useful though, if you
understand what it tries to tell. But among the automated accessibility
checkers around, there is no really satisfactory program. What I would
recommend in the present situation is A-Prompt, available for free for
Windows environments from
> The URL is:
>
> http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com
The first impression to a sighted person is a picture of books on a shelf. It
takes some time to figure out that they are links to parts of a dictionary.
The texts in the books are partly difficult to read. There is nothing on the
page that would let a speech browser or a text-only browser present the book
names. Technically, the page uses a client-side image map. If used, it should
have alt attributes for each area element. But for several reasons, it would
be better to turn the image map to a simple list of links, which would be
accessible to anyone. The image could appear as a mere decoration then, with
alt="" so that it does not disturb in no-images mode.
> Please be aware. This site is a general knowledge encyclopaedia, run
> for commercial gain through selling advertising space.
The problem with advertisements is that they are images with no alt texts.
Thus, browsers that do not display images can't really deal with them
properly. They might e.g. present the image URL, as you may have noticed on
Lynx (though Lynx behavior varies, depending on version and settings).
Since most of the advertisements seem to be links to pages that are rather
inaccessible to the blind, it might be best to use alt="" for the
advertisement images. But you might need to ask the advertisers about this.
On the subpages of the dictionary, there are some accessibility problems. For
example, there are entries like the following (I'm quoting the markup):
<P></P><B><A NAME=FABENS>FABENS</A></B>
That's not structured markup. It's logically a heading, and it would better
be marked up as
<h2><a name="FABENS">Fabens</a></h2>
Whether this matters depends on the browser, but it is generally best to use
logical markup, which lets browsers process documents structurally, e.g.
automatically constructing lists of headings upon request and reading
headings emphatically and slowly and with pauses before and after. Using
mixed case is better than upper case, though mostly to sighted people, since
mixed case text is easier to read. But mixed case may also help speech
generation distinguish between normal words and caps-only abbreviations and
maybe read them differently.
A key problem, however, is access to the dictionary entries. Using indexes
for that is not very convenient via speech, since one needs to listen to long
lists initial letters or fragments of words before getting at the desired
entry. So the search facility is very important. It is essential that the
page that the user gets as response to a search tells first and simply
whether the search was succesful (something was found) and then presents the
results so that when listening to them, one either gets the information
needed or gets a direct link to relevant information. Apparently your search
systems tries to work that way, but it might need some tuning. I would like
to refer to my treatise on the accessibility of search results:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/qdfa.html
There's the general problem that most pages of your site are fairly large,
implying long wait times, but I guess there's no simple solution to that.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Makrobicz
"Matt Probert" <w...@probertencyclopaedia.com> wrote in message
news:3d8c3ad6...@news.ntlworld.com...
If funds are an issue, you can download the free WeMedia talking browser.
It will take you a couple of hours to get comfortable with it but then you
can just switch off the monitor and listen to the sweet tones of your pages.
Here is the site link:
http://www.wemedia.com/ (Just incase they get upset about deep linking I
won't post the download URI)
HTH.
--
"He's got a heart as big as his size, which isn't big -- but his heart's
bigger than that."
(KEVIN KEEGAN, Radio 5 Live)
http://www.private-eye.co.uk (affiliation,surely not?)
Graham W. Boyes - HawHawJokes.com
> Because of a lack of funds, all I can do is test the site in Lynx and
This is a good start. Basically the text-to-speech program will read exactly
what's displayed in Lynx.
> Would you mind if I ask you which web browser you use? And whether or
> not my site is usable by you.
Any browser will work usually - Internet Explorer and Netscape are again the
most common. All that's needed is a text-to-speech converter. Jaws is a
pretty popular one, it's the one I've heard of most often.
> If there are any ways in which I can make my site easier for blind
> users to use, I should be grateful to know.
You could have text links for the books on the bookshelf on your main page.
This next part is not an issue on your page, but I will say anyway to avoid
designs where there's a navigation menu placed cronologically (sp?) BEFORE the
content of your page in the code. Otherwise, the text-to-speech program will
have to read the menu each time the user visits a new page.
Good luck :)
Graham W. Boyes