[Users] Fw: Speech software helps blind stay in touch.

[Cory McMahon]

Hi lists,
I thought you may want to read the information in the e-mail below:


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <blindnews at blindprogramming.com>
To: "Blind News" <BlindNews at blindprogramming.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2007 11:56 PM
Subject: Speech software helps blind stay in touch.


>
> Speech software helps blind stay in touch.
>
>
> By Jeffrey Pieters
> Post-Bulletin - Rochester,MN,USA
> 7/27/2007.
>
>
> For most of Jan Bailey's 56 years, being blind meant that if she wanted to
> read a book, her bills or a letter, she had to have another person read 
> them
> to her.
>
> "When the reader was coming, I had to be ready to spend four to six hours
> reading, whether I was in the mood or not," said Bailey, today a
> rehabilitation counselor with State Services for the Blind in Rochester.
> "Then, if the reader was sick, it all got delayed."
>
> Personal computers equipped with speech software changed that. Now, Bailey
> and others who are fully or partially blind have access to a world of
> information available on demand.
>
> Bailey rarely needs a reader anymore. What she needs, she says, are better
> writers -- specifically the ones who write computer codes that underlie
> pages on the World Wide Web.
>
> Many Web pages aren't built -- coded -- in a manner conducive to blind
> users' reading software.
>
> Ken Trebelhorn, a Rochester-based technology instructor specializing in
> blind issues, explains.
>
> "There's an easy way and there's a right way" to code a Web site, he said.
>
> Among the common problems:
>
> . Pages are top-heavy with too many links, logos and other items that bog
> down computerized readers, which work their way methodically down a Web 
> page
> from top to bottom, left to right. But even that's not a problem, so long 
> as
> the page includes an "anchor" link to the fresh contents of the page -- so
> the blind Web user can just skip ahead to those. But -- you may have
> guessed -- most Web pages don't.
>
> . Some pages include too many links, period. One way the computerized
> reading software, called JAWS (or "Job Access With Speech"), helps blind
> users speed through a site is by letting them pull up a list of all the 
> Web
> links on a page. But when a page includes 100 or more links -- and many
> do -- that's not a shortcut, it's another morass.
>
> . Pages lack descriptive text, called "tags," for images, graphics and
> animations. The tags act as a substitute for the image. Sophisticated 
> blind
> Web users can learn to appreciate Web images that are sufficiently
> described; however, too many are tagged "newsphoto001.jpg" or something
> equivalent to that.
>
> Earlier this year, Bailey and Trebelhorn pointed out problems on 
> Rochester's
> public transportation Web site, www.rochesterbus.com.
>
> They met with city Transit Director Tony Knauer to demonstrate the 
> problems
> and suggest fixes.
>
> "I was amazed," Knauer said. "As far as we knew, everything was
> ADA-accessible."
>
> The fixes, though, were easy and cheap.
>
> "It was probably an hour or two of somebody's time," Knauer said. "It was
> done pretty quickly."
>
>
> http://news.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=31&a=301588
>
>
>
>
>
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