Your eyes are absorbing this webpage. They’re passing over this, this, then this word, right away. That’s how reading works, online: you are taking this with no consideration. But what in case you couldn’t?

We grant our gaze to electronic screens for many of the day, and in return, they offer us anything we wish. We stare; they glow. We rarely speak, and neither do they.

And this is smart! The web is a boundless collection of text, images and video, channeled to flat pieces of glass and plastic, beamed through lens, retina, and nerve, each of the way into our brains. It may show us anything, and for most web users, that’s exactly what it does.

But for millions of others-people who are unable to determine-the internet is a wildly different place. Characters become sounds. Layouts are meaningless. Images are, at best, words, and at worst, blank spaces. And yet the blind browse a similar internet as everyone else, day after day. They use an analogous gadgets the sighted do, and happily. But how?

The Sightless Internet

The most typical way for the vision-impaired user to access the net is with a standard browser and text-to-speech software. You’re probably already vaguely accustomed to some of it-Windows users can have stumble upon Microsoft Narrator, and I defy you to search out a single Mac OS user who hasn’t forced VoiceOver to hurl insults at his friends. It’s these tools-or tools like these-that millions of folks rely on to access the web.

But to assert that blind users just ” hear” the net is a gross oversimplification. It’s not just text and pictures that blind users miss, it’s virtually every thing of the elemental browsing experience.

Here, do that: Stop reading for a moment. Lean back and survey this page. Now concentrate on what you do whenever you visit this site. You eyes are probably interested in the stories listed horizontally across the pinnacle of the page. They give the impression of being important, right? Why else would they be up there? Further down you’ll see the location’s banner, but you most likely don’t spend much time staring at that, and your eyes dart to the list of reports in the course of the page. You scroll down, glancing at pictures then headlines, or maybe headlines then pictures. The margins of the location are either filled with ads or static information, so you most likely don’t pay them much mind. Now try in other places, somewhere more visually complicated . Consider how you’re reading it.

Your habits aren’t just sight-dependent (obviously), they’re pretty weird. Your eyes fly around, sometimes randomly and often in response to cues onscreen. You hunt for links and cherrypick from galleries. The word you’re searching for catches your eye, so you click it. Consciously or subconsciously, you always know where to appear.

With a screen reader, there isn’t any ” looking.” It’s a straightforward parser, and it starts at the head. It combs through an internet site a good deal like an internet browser combs through HTML, except in preference to rendering an IMG tag as an image, or an EM tag as italicized text, it converts them to sounds: a readout of the image description-the alt text-and a changed audio inflection, respectively.

Then, needless to say, there’s all that text. On a visually rendered webpage, it lives in blocks and columns. In the event you’re lucky, these blocks and columns shall be organized in a logical or familiar way. They’ll be laid out, basically. But that’s any such visual concept. What happens when a layout becomes words?

” Screen reading software presents the webpage as a collection of lines and links, and probably other things-frames and headers, if the software employs that.” That’s Paul Schroeder, VP of Programs and Policy for the American Foundation for the Blind . Vision-impaired himself, he uses screen reading software for daily browsing. ” While you log onto a site using screen reading software, what you start with is a website that tells you ways many lines, and some basic structure-but not a great deal. Once you’re experiencing a cluttered site, the data you would like may well be 300-400 lines in, and while you’re going line by line, or section by section, it may take you a totally long time to seek out what you will have.”

Think about that: The web is anything but linear-website code is nested and cryptic, and sometimes looks jumbled and out of order. (Right click, view source! Oh, yikes, maybe don’t.) Websites often have multiple visual directions, or sometimes none at all. Yet audio screen readers-and Braille modules, which display about one line of text at a time-must render them in sequence, somehow. And listeners must make sense of it, to develop some form of intuition for a website’s layout and structure based on very, very small amounts of knowledge, all out of order.

After all there are tricks. Screen reading software, like VoiceOver in OS X or JAW for Windows, is more clever than I’ve made it sound. It parses websites for headers, and infrequently navigational elements. It should provide you with a literal description of a page’s layout-” three columns, two rows” -and its surprisingly unrobotic voices reflect all types of punctuation. It even differentiates between outwardly identical tags. My editor actually just sent us an email to this effect: Stop using < EM > and < I > tags interchangeably. One is for italics, and one is for emphasis. It’s a difference that you may’t see, however it’s a difference some will hear.

These are the small features that make spoken webpages usable, but they could’t be taken without any consideration: Those that design websites should be vigilant about including headers to divide large blocks of text, to include alternative text for images, and to take advantage of their tags properly. Problem is, an entire ton of websites-ours included-often don’t. Ever had-or overheard-a tedious argument about whether or not a domain is ” standards compliant” , as in W3C, HTML compliant? Well, it’s like that. Actually, it is that. The W3C defines standards for accessibility a bit like they define standards for the rest of the internet. But like those other standards, they’re often disregarded.

And even a completely compliant website should be would becould very well be overly complicated, or simply too liquid. ” Facebook is a superb example, because it’s an ever-changing environment,” says Schroeder. ” Some users master particular aspects of Facebook, find that the programming has changed, and must rethink their strategy.” But again, there are tricks: ” Vision-impaired users who frequent Facebook and similar sites do one of two things: They either use the mobile version of the positioning, that is less cluttered, or they only engage the explicit thing they wish to do and remember the explicit things they need.”

Properly coded websites, intelligent software, and handy shortcuts and tricks mesh together to make browsing the net tolerable for the vision impaired . Skills and persistence play a big part too. Schroeder tells me that every now and then, blind users can hop through site headers and run searches so quickly that they’re more efficient than sighted users in some situations.

But pending legislation could leave us with a much wider interpretation of the yank With Disabilities act, that could mandate certain commercials websites to do those little things that make screen-reading easier. However it’s a continuing struggle, with technologies often outpacing the tools necessary to parse them. Oh, and I almost forgot, the net is dead. Or something.

Gadgets ‘n’ Apps

In case you missed last month’s Wired cover story, here it’s. The gist, to brutally oversimplify the piece, is that the internet as we are aware of it, this familiar hodgepodge of sites rendered in browsers-you know, the W3C’s standards-based web-is falling out of vogue, making way for the brand new internet: the net of apps.

I don’t totally buy it, but that’s not the point. Apps are everywhere, and so are the devices that run them. I read as much on my mobile devices as I do on my laptop, if not more. So if the longer term runs on an iPad, what does that mean for the man who can’t see?

It’s really a two-part question, so let’s start with the thrill half. The upward push of the touchscreen gadgets, flat, featureless panels they’re, is truly great news for blind folks. Let me put that otherwise: In the event you’re unable to work out, the iPhone, with its virtual buttons and complete lack of tactile feedback, is absolutely easier to exploit than, say, a BlackBerry, with its dozens of buttons. Weird! Well, probably not.

Part of the story here’s software. iPhones (and now Android phones) have sophisticated text-to-speech functionality, without which they’d be useless to the vision-impaired. BlackBerry phones, then again, basically don’t.

But although RIM released an update to all their button-based phones giving them flawless screen-reading abilities, they couldn’t measure up to a touchscreen device.

When you employ a BlackBerry (or a Mac, or a PC) your sense of place is defined by sight. You move with a cursor, or a highlighted menu item. You then click. And for an analogous reason web layouts aren’t very helpful to a blind person, the cursor paradigm-hell, the full button-input paradigm-sucks. With a touchscreen, though, your fingers provide your sense of place. iPhone users can switch on the VoiceOver function, tap anywhere, and hear a narration of what’s happening. Tap the upper left element of your screen, right near the amount switches, and a voice might read, ” Camera app.” Tap the bottom left, and you’ll hear ” Phone.” With buttons, mice and keyboards, you’re stuck back in that slow, linear screen-reading world. With touchscreens, a screen, and a chunk of software, can actually be surveyed. Memorized. Used.

So that’s pretty neat. Nonetheless it’s a rosy take. Asked about smartphones, Schroeder painted a glum picture: Apple and Google may well be doing these things right, and building solid text-to-speech into their operating systems, but other companies are lagging. And anyway, text-to-speech in an OS is superb, but today’s smartphones are all about apps, developed by thousands of folks in thousands of configurations. On the iPhone, as an example, some apps work perfectly with VoiceOver. Plenty more don’t.

Messy as it really is, the capital ” W” Web appears inching towards universal accessibility. It has a guidebook, at minimum. But a lot of these apps, and all their stores, could be setting progress back a number of years. Suddenly, blind users’ experience is at the mercy of each individual app developer, or with any luck, companies that offer their tools, and grant them access to their app stores. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it surely’s an issue.

In any case, whether you’re an app developer, web designer or just a dude who likes to update his blog every on occasion, keep in mind that someone, somewhere, may well be listening to what you’ve written. And that alt texts in images aren’t just for jokes . And that it’s still alright to make your computer recite the word ” penis” , for kicks.

Illustration by Sam Spratt. Have a look at Sam’s portfolio and become keen on his Facebook Artist’s Page .

Source

This post is tagged: blind, Giz, Gizexplains, people, Web