Are you blind? This isn't a rhetorical question or a chance for me to make fun of you, I'm serious here. Are you blind? If not, have you ever browsed the web without using your eyes? Think about it, without vision, what good is a monitor? Some people don't have access to certain parts of the web due to this unfortunate design flaw currently expressed in parts of the web like images, third party plugins, or any element of a web site which doesn't include real meaningful text which the browser can read (and in the case of computers used by those without vision, synthesized into audio.)
After recently listening to a guest podcaster on This Week In Tech which itself is a podcast, I realized how many parts of the web this encompasses. He mentioned the current secure commenting system on Blogger.com (which is currently an option, for those who don't mind spam) requires users to view and read characters from an image before commenting. Obviously this system is flawed in a way which affects two forms of web browsing for certain; That of bandwidth impaired (text-only), and more importantly that of the visually impaired (audio-only.) The solution to this can't lie in machine readable code, this is the reason for laying the text in an image (usually in an obscure way,) to deter scripts. The podcaster proposed a novel idea (not sure who's it is at the moment) which was an audio button which once clicked on would play an audio version of the obscure code (and I would imagine it will be a bit harsh sounding to deter speech to text recognition software, a true representation of the image version.)
This may spark a whole new way of representing images if you think about it. Click on an image for an audio description, of course any images now (except for those used for spam catching) should have meta data which describes it, but I have a feeling most of use eye users don't spend time wondering what our images sound like...
So back to the point of this post... I've decided to quit using my blog in it's current form until changes have been made to satisfy the many users who aren't as fortunate as most of us. Until I've seen that all aspects of this blog will be compliant to text browsers and screen readers I will be holding all posts to this blog which are of any other topic, and will be devoting my time to contacting Blogger on behalf of all of those less fortunate than myself, asking them to make changes to their current user interface, and changes to the way they go about designing future user interfaces.
I'll be editing this post with more information about screen readers and this subject.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment