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The Internet is not blind friendly. It sucks, and we need to do better, but for now, blind people are mostly locked out of the Internet. OS X has some really n

by a2tech 11y ago

The Internet is not blind friendly. It sucks, and we need to do better, but for now, blind people are mostly locked out of the Internet. OS X has some really nice screen reading/accessibility stuff builtin and you can have it do things like read books from the iBook's Store out loud. Mail.app has some support for voice control if you're willing to get it all setup before giving her the computer.

a3n 11y ago
> The Internet is not blind friendly. It sucks, and we need to do better, but for now, blind people are mostly locked out of the Internet. Really? This day and age? No one in my life is blind, so I just assumed at least some minimally level of accessibility. I wonder how many blind and sight-impaired people there are in the general population?
- walterbell 11y ago
  Work on "eyes-free" user interfaces can also be helpful to sighted users, e.g. for multitasking.
- DanBC 11y ago
  In US: about 1% of the population is blind; about 1.3m Americans are "legally blind" - which is defined as " visual acuity with best correction in the better eye worse than or equal to 20/200 or a visual field extent of less than 20 degrees in diameter" http://www.visionproblemsus.org/blindness/blindness-map.html http://www.visionproblemsus.org/blindness/blindness-map.html
clavalle 11y ago
Actually the screen readers are pretty decent these days. If web creators follow good form and images are annotated blind people can do ok. Javascript heavy sites can be a killer but screen readers do a fairly good job at reacting to those as well but that can definitely be more iffy. Source: I worked at a school for the blind and have completed accessibility projects for legacy web applications. Even those bloated beasts just needed a relative handful of changes and were mostly usable.
CJefferson 11y ago
Actually, Safari works fine with most of the internet (not everything certainly, but an awful lot of it) with the built in OS X screen reading/accessibility.
rconti 11y ago
I'm not so sure as to say it'd blind-FRIENDLY, but probably more so than much of the world. I have a couple of blind friends who have been using computers since the BBS days. Things have only improved by leaps and bounds in the past 20+ years.

by a2tech 11y ago

a3n 11y ago

> The Internet is not blind friendly. It sucks, and we need to do better, but for now, blind people are mostly locked out of the Internet. Really? This day and age? No one in my life is blind, so I just assumed at least some minimally level of accessibility. I wonder how many blind and sight-impaired people there are in the general population?

walterbell 11y ago
Work on "eyes-free" user interfaces can also be helpful to sighted users, e.g. for multitasking.
DanBC 11y ago
In US: about 1% of the population is blind; about 1.3m Americans are "legally blind" - which is defined as " visual acuity with best correction in the better eye worse than or equal to 20/200 or a visual field extent of less than 20 degrees in diameter" http://www.visionproblemsus.org/blindness/blindness-map.html http://www.visionproblemsus.org/blindness/blindness-map.html

clavalle 11y ago

Actually the screen readers are pretty decent these days. If web creators follow good form and images are annotated blind people can do ok. Javascript heavy sites can be a killer but screen readers do a fairly good job at reacting to those as well but that can definitely be more iffy. Source: I worked at a school for the blind and have completed accessibility projects for legacy web applications. Even those bloated beasts just needed a relative handful of changes and were mostly usable.

CJefferson 11y ago

Actually, Safari works fine with most of the internet (not everything certainly, but an awful lot of it) with the built in OS X screen reading/accessibility.

rconti 11y ago

I'm not so sure as to say it'd blind-FRIENDLY, but probably more so than much of the world. I have a couple of blind friends who have been using computers since the BBS days. Things have only improved by leaps and bounds in the past 20+ years.