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For Gregory Rosmaita, surfing on the Web can feel like “land swimming” in an empty room. By feeling the surfaces, “I can say the room has four walls,” he says, “but one may have the Last Supper on it and I couldn’t tell you.”
Rosmaita, a webmaster, programmer, and site designer, went blind at age 20, but you wouldn’t know it judging from his work – which is exactly how he wants it. Using the text-based Lynx browser, Pico editor, and a JAWS (Job Access With Voice) screen reader to speak the code, 29-year-old Rosmita currently oversees two projects – the Caldwell College site, and his own extensive blindness/academic resource Camera Obscura – both impressively dense with information. In fact, their sheer efficiency is precisely his point.
“Let’s bring HTML back to what it’s supposed to be – to present information,” says Rosmaita, “and let’s leave the [graphical] desktop publishing aspect to the browser.”
But just as hundreds of thousands of blind people have come online, many of them are nervous about what will happen next. At the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind conventions this week, concerned blind users worried that their many advances and training with DOS-based systems may soon be rendered obsolete by the rise of the graphical-user interface.
Curtis Chong, president of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science, says that when blind people first got onto the Net in the early ’90s with the help of assistive technologies like WebSpeak or JAWS, “the first big boom was email, because you could now see and send mail without having to pay someone to read it.” But with the onset of graphical email and the active desktop, Chong stresses that “the danger signs are on the horizon.” As Rosmaita says, “the problem with the Web is that it’s point and shoot, but if you’re blind, you can’t see the target.”
In response, Rosmaita has in recent months become something of a Web watchdog. One of a growing number of concerned (and visually impaired) webmasters and developers, he’s determined to confront obstinate GUI designers who are either ignorant or insensitive to the blind online.
“Lynx would encounter a page that just said “image map,” so I would write to the webmaster and say this is what your page looks like in Lynx, proving to them that it was butt ugly,” Rosmita says. “They would blow me off or say ‘you’re right, but I don’t have the time.'”
Coordinated through the WebWatch listserv (just one of an exploding number of blindness-related mailing lists), Rosmaita and others would deluge the sites with complaints or simple counsel “just to add alt tags.” (Some sites with poor accessibility records, like ABCNews have been cataloged by the WebWatch list.)
But some sites remain a frustrating mystery. Because the screen reader prioritizes text horizontally, sites using frames are broken into indecipherable slivers. For the blind, “frames are living hell,” says Rosmaita.
For developers, BOBBY, a free application developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology, takes URLs and reposts pages the way they seem to blind people – usually a humiliating test of a site’s accessibility. Sun and Microsoft have downloaded Bobby to help them design their applications, says CAST director Chuck Hitchcock, but critiques and guidelines aren’t enough. “People just don’t read [guidelines],” says Hitchcock, adding that the next version of Bobby will actually suggest simple programming solutions for problematic pages.
T. V. Raman, a technology consultant for Adobe Systems who is also blind, believes that attempting to retrofitting speech onto graphic environments is a mistake. While you could get away with speech readers in a very poor visual environment 10 years ago, says Raman, speech readers in the GUI world are like “standing around and feeling the different parts of an elephant to figure out it’s an elephant.”
Raman believes that Rosmaita’s approach of graphics-as-difficult-to-access and text-as-simple-to-access presents a false dichotomy, especially considering the many confusing ways in which text can be formatted.
Raman designed an audio desktop that builds speech capabilities directly into applications, as opposed to adding speech capabilities afterward. At Adobe, he’s currently working to take the graphic PDF files and make them “useable in as many ways as possible.”
The highest levels of the industry have already started looking to standardize solutions for accessibility. The World Wide Web Consortium announced in April the creation of an Accessibility Initiative, but the body still struggles to create a working group. Rosmaita says Microsoft has been remarkably receptive to adapt the Windows OS for accessibility, and the company’s accessibility division has recently released standards for Java and Windows developers to follow.
W3C’s guidelines, however, may not be easy to enforce, and software standards are critical to secure Web access for blind people, says Rosmaita. He likens the problem of technical standards to the trouble of elevators. “The ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] made sure there is Braille by the buttons, but there’s no standard place for the panel, and you don’t know if the Braille corresponds to the number above or the number below,” he says. “By the time you figure it out, you’re way past the floor.”
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
