On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 20:59:04 +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw=Rn4VEauK+AKRv+LV9MX5uipxlwaOVQ5f@public.gmane.org wrote:

Does anybody have experience with making websites accessible for blind people ? I think this is important in long-term, but I don't have any experience with that.

So could someone with such experience please describe what is best current practice in this domain ?

I've never actually worked alongside a blind web user, but I have experimented with for or five different "talking browsers" and tested my sites with them.

The current situation is that most products simply read the text that is written to the screen. THere is only one browser that understands aural css (emacspeak) and it's still in development, and only runs on unix/linux. But the author is on the W3C's aural css committee. Opera has some sort of deal with IBM over voice technology, but It's not very clear what that is about.

I would regard "best practice" as: 1) Punctuate everywhere! - current screen readers are totally unaware of the HTML and just ride roughshod over boundaries between structural elements. So if your H1 doesn't have a full stop at the end, the reader will run straight on into the next sentence without pausing. You get a short pause for a comma, a longer one for a full stop or question mark. Navigation lists also tend to get run into one gooey mass.

2) Use CSS positioning to get the actual page content as high as possible in the page source. So if the navigation bar is at the bottom of the source and rendered as a left (or right) column via css, a blind user won't be forced to listen to the entire site navigation on every page. In table- driven layouts, content on the left, auxiliary material on the right is more accessible than the opposite layout.

Note that this does not reduce navigability - the user is NOT forced to listen to the entire page in order to get to another. This is because most talking browsers use a separate function which reads a list of all the links on a page.

Come to think of it, some of the talking browsers I tried did not announce hyperlinks "inline", which might be a challenge for richly-linked material such as Wikipedia.