On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 4:00 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
We were discussing it with an association of blind people in Poland - and they told us - that for them the most important thing is clear and logic structure of the website - plain main text, menu/navigation in plain text and descriptions of media in plain text. They are using their own free text-to-speach software to which they are used to. Such software simply reads everything on the screen in the same neutral way. So they don't need any other tools for voice reading - if other websites provide it - they usually do not use it. Maybe in some other languages the situation is different - but it would be better to discuss it with relevant associations before investing time and money for such solutions. Fortunately, Wikipedia actually is quite text-to-speach friendly at the moment.
Anecdotal to Tomasz's point, there was an editor on IRC the other day in -commons that is Deaf/Blind and considers Wikimedia sites to be, in its current state, one of the friendly- to disability-adaptive software of any website. Mucking that up would be...bad.
What I suppose I'm challenging, James, is this: are our websites playing well with accessibility? What are the specific points of failing? It is subject to the disability, there's no patch to make it all right. What is the path to make it right? How can I help? Where can we document this?