Accessibility and Assistive Technology
Why Make Websites Universally Accessible?
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Introduction
In the United States, Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, a civil rights law for people with disabilities, said:
All newly constructed places of public accommodation and commercial facilities must be accessible to individuals with disabilities to the extent that it is not structurally impracticable.
As a result, when you go to a movie theater, you'll find assistive hearing devices. Public places are equipped with Braille elevator buttons, ramps, curb cuts, and widened doorways. The Internet is no exception to Title III. It, too, is a public space and must be made accessible to persons with disabilities.
Unfortunately, the Internet is not universally accessible today. But the people who write the specifications for HTML are changing that. And, as new web coding techniques become more widely known, web developers will be expected by law to comply. The Internet of tomorrow will be accessible to all persons, regardless of physical differences.
What is Web Accessibility?
How does BIRF.info meet accessibility standards?
When talking about the web, we talk about how information in websites can be accessed by people with physical disabilities. Visitors wishing to access websites may—
- Be visually impaired - color blind
- Use voice browsers or other operating systems
- Not speak or understand the language
- Have disabilities preventing them from reading or fully comprehending the text
- Be unable to use a keyboard or mouse
Accessible websites, simply stated, are made available for all persons to use because they support a variety of media, including speech-based browsers and Braille displays.
Browsing for Visually Impaired Users
There are tools and software on the market to help visually impaired persons surf the Internet. Over the past few years, some browsers have been developed especially for people with disabilities. These include products with optical character recognition, screen magnifier, screen readers, voice recognition, speech synthesisers. Among such products are—
- Braillesurf - BrailleSurf is an Internet browser for visually impaired users, which allows a simplified reading of the information available on the Web. BrailleSurf 4 shows this information in a text form. This information can then be displayed on a Braille bar, or it can be spoken out by a speech synthesiser. The text can also be presented on the screen according to the needs of partially sighted people.
- BrookesTalk - BrookesTalk is a under development by Oxford Brookes University and is a function key driven Web Browser for blind and visually impaired users, providing keyboard only accessibility using the function keys. It also provides a configurable large text window for partially sighted users and a standard visual browser so that users can work together with sighted workers. Quick views of web pages are provided using information retrieval and natural language processing techniques.
- ALVA Braille - Offering screen readers and Braille displays. A screen-reader is used to allow navigation of the screen presented by the operating system, using speech or Braille output.
Browsers and tools developed for disabled people read the source code of the web page and then render it either in Braille or speech output. If the web page is poorly constructed, however, the alternate browser is relatively useless—it will be obstructed from fluently interpreting the content. A website must be accessible to machine readers.