What did my blind friend mean by this? (voice browser-related)

Factual Questions
1

I don’t know if this should go in IMHO, MPSIMS or here. Mods please feel free to move this.

I have a new friend who is blind and who uses a voice browser to access the web (well, to access his entire computer). We were writing back and forth about inaccessible web pages. I take pride in making sure all my web pages are accessible, but I mentioned a MySpace page I maintain as the exception and he said it was, indeed, woefully inaccessible. In his e-mail, he said this:

Unlabeled links? I’m not sure what he meant. If a word or phrase is linked as opposed to a URL that’s linked: http://www.straightdope.com/, is that what he means? I’ve never heard of a link having an “alt” tag the way images do (or are supposed to).

I vowed to make that MySpace page accessible to him. To help do that I downloaded the same program he uses, Window-Eyes and installed it (they have a 30 day Demo). I went to the MySpace page and it only read the links, no text. The page is divided into 2 sections, left and right, and WE read the links and image alt tags all the way down the left side of the page, then stopped, rather than continuing at the top of the right side. I’m not sure that’s anything I can fix or what I can do to make WE read all of the text on the page. I want to make it accessible, but I’m not sure how to do it.

I tried WE on one of my other pages, one that I was sure was 100% accessible, but it got to the end of a line a quarter way down the page and just stopped. I looked at the html code and didn’t see anything that might have caused it to stop. It was straight text in an html paragraph. Now I’m wondering if voice browsers have never been able to read the whole page. It has nothing but basic html, 17 photos, all of which have alt tags, and several links. No Java, no Flash, no image maps, no animated gifs, nothing fancy at all. That was a blow. If a state-of-the-I-guess-art voice browser can’t read my simple web page, that’s not good.

Using the voice browser made me appreciate my eyesight even more. What a pain in the ass it is to surf the Internet like that. I closed my eyes and tried to understand how it would be, and I couldn’t keep them closed for very long.

He’s a classically-trained musician who’s lived in India studying Indian instruments. He’s bright and interesting but a large part of the World Wide Web is closed to him. Most of it totally unnecessary too. I’m not talking about images or videos (though, he can hear just fine and first wrote me regarding some videos I had put up on Google Video. He loved what he heard and asked me questions about what he was hearing), but rather sites that use Flash and Java and provide no alternate text that his voice browser can access. He dearly wants a music notation program and sound editing progam he can use too, but there’s nothing for him. It’s a damn shame.

2

Better hope the software works on forums, because the only people that will understand this program are the ones that use it. Meaning, I hope blind people will be able to use WE and read your question here and give you an answer.

Ironic, huh?

I think that unlabled links means just that, they are possibly pop up codes, ads or something else that myspace is full of…

3

I was thinking maybe a friend or relative of a blind person might know about these things, or someone who was very interested in web accessibility.

I was going to try WE here at the SDMB, but the demo only allows using it 30 minutes at a time, then you have to restart your system to try again. I don’t want to restart right now but I’ll try later. I certainly hope this place is accessible.

That program is really expensive (around $800.00). I feel sorry for poor blind people, they’re shut out 100%. You can buy bare-bones computers for less than this program.

There are banner ads at the top of the MySpace page, but no ads on the page itself and no pop up ads.

It sure is tedious listening to the browser read links. It actually reads the whole thing. Look at the URL in the address bar and imagine Stephen Hawking reading every single thing, and many URLS are many times longer.

4

The only think I can think of which could be called a “label” for a link would be the TITLE attribute for the <a> tag. Example:

<a href=“Straight Dope Message Board - Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks.” title=“Straight Dope Message Board”>Straight Dope Message Board</a>

This will cause a tooltip to pop up when you mouse over the link. Try it on your site and see what the screen reader does with it.

5

I did a bit of accessible web design, and I think your friend means links whose purpose is not obvious.

Screen readers read the text of the link. Consider this (common link):

To get to the Straight Dope Message Board, click here.

A screen reader searching for links will jump to the word “here.” Obviously, this doesn’t tell the person using it where the link is going or what it means.

The solution is to do this:

Go to the Straight Dope Message Board

This makes the purpose of the link clear. It’s even better to link to the entire sentence, but there are cases where that’s not possible. But the name of the page is what’s important.

By the way, you can check if your pages are accessible at Watchfire Web.

6

How about links that are attached to little GIFs instead of verbiage, like our “Post Reply” button? Especially if there’s no alt tag?

7

Is there some reason you can’t just ask him exactly what he meant? Seems like you’ll get a better answer then a bunch of people guessing.

8

You might also make inquiries of the makers of the software… it would seem to be in their best interests to help webmasters understand how best to make their pages compatible.

9

I work as an IT consultant for a state university library, and have been learning about this recently. Your friend would likely benefit from your sites becoming ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant*. Here are some useful links to get you closer to that goal:

Website validation tool (click on the “Accessibility” tab once it’s done analyzing)

Federal rules for website accessibility (from section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act)

I seriously doubt you’ll ever get your MySpace page to work, simply because they prevent you from editing most of the underlying code. Wikipedia discusses some of the issues with the MySpace code not being very accessible.

Finally, in regards to the “other” page

Nareau

*From what I understand, the ADA doesn’t specifically address electronic communications. Here’s an interesting paper discussing why the ADA should be applied to websites.

10

What you are looking for is the ALT tag for an image.

For instance if you’re going to link you do this

(a href=http://example.com)(img src=“http://whereyoureimgageislocated.jpg” alt=“this is a jpg image of a kitty cat”)(/a)
Of course you replace the() with <> for real XHTML or HTML

What this would do is it would display the image but if that image wasn’t available, or was corrupted or if a audio reader came along it would instead of just ignoring the JPG which is an image file it would READ THE ALT TAG

In this case at the point in the webpage where you had a picture (The JPG) the reader would read out to your blind friend what ever words you put in the “ALT” tag

My space is horrible. Like FrontPage it uses proprietary codes that only work with some browsers (FrontPage obviously uses IE). You need to take whatever your page is and run it thru a validator for REAL HTML or REAL XHTML

If you use a WYSIWYG editor it makes the webpages so bloated.

A lot of people on myspace concentrate of using images which are worthless to the blind. And since Google gives weight to “ALT” tags but doesn’t read images or FLASH or even Javascript many sites abuse the ALT tag by putting keywords there.

So it is hard for blind people

11

Their English version is in Spanglish so you beeeter be able to read Spanish, but otherwise I believe that the ONCE Foundation is a good source for accesibility problems and solutions. It started as “Spanish National Association of Blind People” and expanded to include all other accesibility-related problems. They make and provide special software and hardware, among other things.

That English part is new, I assume they’re still in the process of translating and upgrading.

12

And Nava brings up another good point. You can tag your webpage with the name of the language it is in. This is especially useful for pages that have sections in different languages. That way, if the screen reader can only handle English, it knows to skip the Spanish and Lojban sections. I think you divide the page into <div> sections and use the lang attribute, but I could be wrong–I need to check my references.

:: checks own webpage ::

Embarassingly, I didn’t do that. Looks like an upgrade is in order…

13

There was a very interesting ruling against Target about website accessibility. The judge upheld discrimination allegations because of the problems with their website.
Website accessibility is one of my pet projects - I keep pushing for the website where I work to become more accessible. I finally got a text-only page established (necessary, because our main page has a central image and the links weren’t reproduced anywhere other than the image).

The main things that I was taught about accessibility have been covered here: make sure your images, especially if they’re essential to understanding the content of the page, have ALT text. Make sure your links are appropriately labeled - not “Here” but “this page” or “http://www.some_nonsense_site”, so users of screen readers can see what it is, and finally, if you have an image based page where images are links and so forth, provide a link to text-only page that is straight html with the same information linked. This is also important if you are using frames (fewer and fewer people are, but some places still do).

14

Section 508 only applies to federal web sites, or those web sites under federal contract using federal tax dollars.

The Target case is probably the first significant test of the ADA against a commercial web site. Whether Target wins or loses remains to be seen.