Hiya,

After talking to a blind lady who uses the net and also reading about it at another place as well, I began to realise how neglected that aspect of the community is when it comes to designing a site.

Content based sites e.g with information etc, should be made easier to navigate and read for blind people. I can understand more for services etc it might not be as relevant but in general it just came to my head because I work on a couple of websites which provide information on them and I know blind people would read it.

Just wondering if anyone has ever thought about it and also if anyone has any tips/links on places that might explain the needs of blind people more?

p.s. most of the blind people use screen readers to read what is off the screen to them, and some even have a special computer with a braille screen i think (forgot how it worked).

Salsabil

I'v created a couple university sites for the blind, its basically a text only page with information about whatever web page they are viewing.

http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp <--- this may help you as well. If you're going to target the vision-impaired for any website marketing, this will let you see a site (roughly) as they do. As a semi-related thought, I also believe that the later versions of Windows include things for the blind in their Accessibility Tools (I just don't know what exactly they are or how they work).

Exactly how do blind people surf the net? Do they have software that reads them the content out loud? How do they pick which link to click on?

Originally posted by salsabil
Just wondering if anyone has ever thought about it and also if anyone has any tips/links on places that might explain the needs of blind people more?http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/hints.htm

well as far as im aware, most of them use the screen reader where it just reads everything off the screen

i know that with my website that would be virtually impossible since so much of the text is in graphics format

also in terms of navigation it would be hard too

i remember reading there might be ways of putting links inside the document so that they can skip the part they need

too lazy to read... but yeah... they are making it where.. if there is a piture or something... then you will need an <alt> tag and it will read the alt tag.... some wacky stuff about it.... you know

Accessibility for the blind can be closely linked to following web standards <http://www.w3c.org/>. Great resources include the Web Standards Project <http://www.webstandards.org/> and Website Tips: Accessibility <http://www.websitetips.com/accessibility/index.shtml>

A google search will also yield tons of information.

An online poker game for blind/sighted:
http://zform.com/new_to_zform.html?google
The Blind and Technology:
http://www.nfb.org/tech.htm

Just as a by line.
One of my customers is totally blind, however he wrote his autobiography, which was published, using a computer. He had a text to vocal program. Basically the program said each letter as he typed it. He was using a standard keyboard, however he had put tape on a few of the keys to help him recognised them quicker. He has only been tottally blind for about 4 years.

It would have been hard going from being a writer of some note with normal eye sight to total blindness.

Doc

look here www.nextup.com

Just on a lighter note for a moment.

Do they have Porn sites for the visually impaired.
If so How ?

hahaha....


"ive got a secret that i cant put on the web - press p to 'cum' see me"

or something like that, im sure we have all heard it