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Internet
Means Possibilities, Frustration for Blind Surfers
by Stephanie Miles, Wall Street Journal Online
For more articles visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
Amy Green is
trying to open her Yahoo e-mail account.
Ms. Green, a 19-year old student at the School for the Blind
in Fremont, Calif., has low vision, which means that her sight
can't be corrected to any level approaching normal. With
painstaking patience, she moves the cursor slowly around the
Yahoo Inc. home page, which has been magnified to five times
its usual size using ZoomText, a special program for the
vision-impaired. Because of the magnification, only a
tiny portion of the window can be displayed at one time.
Even so, she
has her nose pressed up against the monitor, doggedly working
to locate the link that will open the right page. "This is
kind of starting to annoy me," she says, almost under her
breath. After several minutes of trying, Ms. Green finds the
link and clicks on it. Now the process starts all over again,
as she attempts to locate the windows where she must type in
her name and password.
Ms. Green
isn't alone. Twenty percent of the 93.5 million adults who
access the Internet in the U.S. say they have vision problems,
according to ComScore Media Metrix, which tracks Internet
usage. The Internet is giving the visually impaired access to
the same information at the same time as the rest of the
world, "for the first time since the end of the oral tradition
and the beginning of the printed word," says Stuart
Wittenstein, superintendent at the School for the Blind, which
focuses on teaching blind children and young adults life
skills to help them succeed in mainstream society.
But if the
Internet has leveled the playing field, it is also an exercise
in frustration for thousands of people every day. At the
School for the Blind *which offers its students, teachers, and
administrators some of the most sophisticated assistive
technology around-the Web seems to cause as many problems as
it solves.
Off Limits
Completely blind people use the Internet with the help of
screen-reading software, which literally voices every graphic,
link, and piece of text that appears onscreen. Instead of
using the mouse, special keyboard commands are used to select
links and move from window to window. Those with some vision
can also use screen magnifiers, which enlarge a portion of the
screen between two and 10 times its regular size.
GADGETS LEVEL
PLAYING FIELD
New gadgets
help people with weak eyesight, poor mobility and fading
hearing take full advantage of popular technologies like the
Web. Read the article. Because blind people are
dependent either on audio text-readers or screen magnifiers,
much of the Internet is effectively off limits to them.
Popular children's sites like Disney.com are hard for blind
kids to navigate because of the graphic-heavy design, along
with ad-heavy portals like Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.
And while pop-up windows and glitchy antivirus software are
mere annoyances for the sighted, they are even more vexing for
blind surfers, because they wreak havoc with assistive
software. Disabled-rights advocates have long pushed for the
Web to be more accessible to the blind, with mixed results.
Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the Americans
With Disabilities Act doesn't cover virtual space, dismissing
a suit demanding that the Web site for Southwest Airlines be
altered to work better with text-readers. In 2000, America
Online, now a division of AOL Time Warner Inc., avoided a
lawsuit filed by the National Federation for the Blind by
agreeing to make its Internet software more compatible with
text-readers. Internet companies say they don't have the
resources to make their sites disabled-accessible. "We have
such a huge range of users," says a spokeswoman for Yahoo,
declining to comment specifically on what the company has done
to make its site usable for blind users. "We have worked with
outside organizations to help our people understand the needs
of people with all types of disabilities," says a spokeswoman
for the Disney Internet Group, while conceding that some of
Disney.com's multimedia features "might pose some
difficulties" for blind users.
Advocates say
that Web developers who ignore the blind users in their
audience are missing a potentially huge market. The disabled
community has $175 billion in discretionary spending and $1
trillion in income, according to management-consulting firm
Booz, Allen & Hamilton in Washington, D.C. That community
includes 10 million blind Americans, according to the American
Foundation for the Blind (
www.afb.org).
Blind students and teachers at the School for the Blind say
that it is clear that most Web designers don't take visually
disabled users into account, forcing them to navigate unmarked
links, mysterious unlabeled graphics, and framed Web sites
that don't work with many assistive software programs. "It all
depends on the Web designer," says Joan Anderson, who runs the
computer lab at the School For the Blind. "The Internet is a
great thing, but it's also the most frustrating."
For many in
the blind community, the Internet is a lifeline to the outside
world, Ms. Anderson says. Like many other teenagers, her kids
enjoy burning CDs and listening to music on the computer, but
by far the most popular activity is e-mail. "E-mail-they love
e-mail," she says. "E-mail, e-mail, e-mail." In their
enthusiasm for communicating with friends and family, the
students willingly put up with the frustrating design of sites
like Microsoft's Hotmail.com and Yahoo Mail, she says,
pointing out that neither site works well with the special
keyboard commands. This means students like Ms. Green must
slowly scroll around a magnified version of the screen,
searching for the right link. While Ms. Green is willing to
patiently scrutinize the magnetized computer screen, searching
slowly for the right link to click, some say it is just too
much hassle.
"I rarely use
it, because it's so frustrating," says Marcus Graves, the
school's receptionist, who is blind himself, pointing to the
computer sitting in front of him on his desk. Mr. Graves uses
the phone and fax machine in the reception area with few
problems, but is thwarted when he tries to log on to look up
the day's stock information. "When I try to find something, I
cannot," he says. "The sites are designed poorly."
June Waugh, an
administrator at the school with severely impaired vision,
says she will use the Web for some important tasks at
work-like e-mail, and even occasionally buying airline
tickets-but not for entertainment purposes because it is so
difficult and time-consuming for her to get around online. Ms.
Waugh pushes her computer monitor to the very edge of her
desk, and reads text at 200% its normal size. "If it was easy,
I'd do it," she says. "The Internet isn't particularly fun for
me."
The phenomenon
of pop-up and pop-under ads also causes problems. JAWS, (which
stands for Job Access With Speech) a popular text-to-speech
software program made by Freedom Scientific Inc., in St.
Petersburg, Fla., often gets confused by the proliferation of
browser windows. "When they pop up, JAWS tries to read it to
you," Ms. Anderson says, explaining that it can be difficult
to navigate via the text-to-speech software back to the
correct window. The school doesn't use any kind of
ad-suppressing software. "They end up blocking everything,"
she says. "I haven't found one we can use."
Although JAWS gives completely blind users-for whom screen
magnification won't help-access to computers and the Web, the
software has its own share of obstacles. JAWS doesn't
recognize unusual fonts, for example, which crop up on many
Web sites. Web sites that are continually updated, such as
sports and news sites, sometimes trick the software into
thinking a new page has loaded. JAWS's humanistic voice
hiccups every time the antivirus software runs, and some
students like Amy Green can't stand the robotic voice at all.
"It is just too annoying," she says, preferring to magnify her
screen instead. Eric Damery, product manager for JAWS, says
that the program, which was initially designed as a text
reader for DOS systems in 1988, has been morphed over the
years to keep up with the evolution of the Internet. JAWS now
has an installed user base of 70,000 users, with an additional
1,000 users every month, he says. Although many commercial
sites are difficult for JAWS readers to use, the majority of
federal, state, and educational Web sites are designed to be
blind-accessible, and Web standards for accessibility like
those from the World Wide Web Consortium
www.w3c.org also help, Mr.
Damery says.
"It's come a
long way, but we're not there yet," he says. "It's a big
challenge for us as an industry." Google Clicks Although Ms.
Anderson steers new students away from complex sites like
Yahoo and Disney until they get more experience, at least one
heavily trafficked site is also popular with the blind:
Google. "Google is our favorite," she says, both in
terms of its clean and text-reader-friendly design, as well as
the accuracy of the links, which help save blind users the
tedium of finding and clicking extraneous links before hitting
the right one. "It's great for sighted kids and its great for
blind kids," Ms. Anderson says. Google was designed with an
eye on making the site accessible to a wide range of users,
including those with disabilities, according to Craig
Silverstein, director of technology for Google Inc., in
Mountain View, Calif. "If you start from the assumption that
you need to make things simple and easy to use, then I think a
lot of these things fall into place," he says.
Some tasks
have become easier with the advent of the Internet, like
reading a Braille version of a book. Because Braille takes up
significantly more space than regular text, Braille versions
of popular books can require several volumes, Ms. Anderson
says, and are frequently too heavy for kids to carry around or
take with them on trips. The Braille version of the latest
Harry Potter is three volumes alone, each over 200 pages long,
she points out. Now, students can find the Braille version of
most books online for free at
www.handiworks.com,
then download the text to a memory card, which can be inserted
into a portable braille reading device. "There's so many
options they didn't have before," she says. But all this
technology doesn't come cheap. In addition to rows of new
Compaq computers with 21-inch displays and Microsoft software,
the computers in the technology lab are outfitted with JAWS,
which, for individual users, costs about $850 per copy.
The portable Braille readers start at $3,600, according to Ms.
Anderson. The school's technology lab has 17 readers, which
can be checked out by students. The new version of the Braille
reader that Ms. Anderson wants, which includes a network card,
browser interface, and a Global Positioning System to help
blind pedestrians find their way to the nearest Starbucks,
costs $5,700, she says. "It's not cheap, but it's a
lifesaver," she says. And many say they're more than willing
to put up with all the hassles and the expense. Wayne Siligo,
a music teacher at the school who is totally blind, uses JAWS
and his Internet connection to communicate with parents,
students, and even collaborate on new music compositions-
activities he says would be nearly impossible without the Web.
"It's like if you've been riding a horse your whole life and
then they give you a Ferrari. Even if it's in the shop all the
time, those three days where you
can drive it
are great."
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