Web Access for the Blind: Can it Build Community?

The web's usefulness to the blind and low-vision community is not obvious. Images, Java applications, search forms, tables, and frames all have limited accessibility for people who cannot see well. If you try to surf the web with the text-based browser Lynx, or if you turn off your images to make up for a slow modem, then you can appreciate how quickly the web is leaving many users behind in the drive toward more complicated webpage design. Blind and low-vision users share that boat.

In Fall 1998, a $25,000 project grant was given to the Ann Arbor District Library (A.A.D.L) and the Washtenaw County Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled (L.B.P.D). The grant allowed the libraries to equip public computers with PW Webspeak software, which reads text out loud and increases font size so that blind and low-vision users can surf the web. Greg Stein, Linda Williams, and I tested the software as part of our Community Information class project at the University of Michigan School of Information. Our ultimate goal was to write a software tutorial. But along the way, we learned a great deal about the blind and low-vision library patrons who would use the software. We learned that, despite the considerable difficulties web-surfing presented, there was a great deal of potential for the web to help build the community.

How can such a graphics-oriented medium possibly be useful to the blind? Well, if you are blind, digital information can actually be more accessible to you than print materials! You can get your computer's screen-reader to read for you, instead of asking a friend or relative to read for you. You can increase font size and create high-contrast colors much more easily with digital text than with print sources. And digital information can be more portable than braille, which can be bulky to carry around because the pages are not flat. You can carry a bus schedule on a palm-sized handheld computer, while carrying around the braille version would have been like toting War and Peace. Furthermore, because the internet is accessible from a variety of places (potentially the library, your home, your office, etc.), you may not need to carry as much information around with you. Finally, because more content is available on the web than in braille or large-print books, the internet makes a lot of information available that would not have been accessible otherwise.

When my classmates and I visited a low-vision support group for elderly folks who used to have sight earlier in life, we discovered a huge need for current news and for local news. When asked what they missed most about seeing, several people mentioned that they missed reading the newspaper! People who did get to read the newspaper tended to rely on volunteer readers, family, or friends. They complained that the radio service of the local newspaper (the Ann Arbor News) was often incomplete and out of date, and that television tended to ignore the local scene.

When asked where they did get their information, many mentioned magazines as a main source, for they listened to magazines on audiocassette from the Library for the Blind. However, while sighted magazine readers can easily browse and skip articles, these folks had difficulty skipping around the cassette tape. Now, if the web is good at anything, it is good at letting readers jump from place to place! We were struck by the frequent mention of news and magazines in this group. This told us that current information, one of the Web's greatest strengths, is a gap that desperately needs filling. The web has huge potential for keeping blind people informed and current, not just about the world, but also about their local community.

Another reason the Web can help the blind community is by supporting the convenience of home-shopping. For example, one of the patrons we talked to used the web to buy groceries. We learned that many blind people are not mobile enough to get around town easily: many cannot drive, and it can be expensive to take cabs all the time if public transportation is not convenient. For blind people with mobility problems, shop-at-home websites can be a lifeline. While the L.B.P.D. and A.A.D.L. only provide Web access at the libraries, the training users receive there could help them become competent enough to use the web at home.

The Internet also has the potential to connect those with mobility problems to the rest of the community. This could be through email and chat groups -- the L.B.P.D. librarians said that some folks like the anonymity of the internet; no one has to know you are blind and you can manage to avoid some prejudice. Also, email can be an effective and convenient way to communicate to government officials, companies, and media, increasing the blind community's political and consumer power. A final reason this web project can help build community is that the libraries are providing training sessions and public computers for their patrons. When we visited the L.B.P.D, we saw that it was more of a mailing facility than a library in the traditional sense. Most patrons borrowed and returned their material through the mail, and some L.B.P.D. patrons had never met one other, nor the librarians, in person. But because the A.A.D.L. and L.B.P.D. are providing public computers and training, many patrons will get out and meet their librarians and fellow patrons. This is another community-building side effect of this web project: group training and group problem-solving.

Unfortunately, there are still a great number of obstacles to web use. For one thing, the web is very graphics-oriented. This is not necessarily a problem, but web designers often forget to use ALT-TEXT to describe their images. So, a lot of websites sound like this to the blind user: "Image. Image. Link Image. Link Image. End of page." Such a site is practically useless to blind users, and it can be very frustrating. It would have been much more helpful to hear: "Image: Company logo. Image: Map of store. Link: Click here to search site. Link: Click here to contact us." It makes a huge difference, both for blind users and for those with slow modems, and it is not hard for a web designer to make the improvement.

Another difficulty with the web is very simple: typing can be a chore. In our software tests, we found that some patrons were spending as long as 4 or 5 minutes just typing one U.R.L! Most of the patrons we worked with did not touch-type, and had to lean down very closely towards the keyboard just to see what they were typing. Blind and low-vision users also often miss the visual cues (a misspelled word on the screen) which would help them correct spelling mistakes. The web can be very unforgiving of spelling errors when you are typing a lengthy U.R.L. (or any search term, for that matter). This problem can be helped, however. Keyboards with large print letters, tactile clues like cotton balls or raised dots on keys, and short, sensible U.R.L.'s can make typing much easier.

Another problem is that the web is often not designed for people to hear it. For one example, the web uses lots of acronyms, like "URL" and "FAQ" -- the computer reads them out loud as "earl" and "fack," and the user has no way of telling what they mean. When asked to comment on the web, one of our patrons said, "I spent so much time just trying to figure out what those terms meant!" Again, this problem can be helped by good basic training on the part of librarians, and explanatory notes on the part of web designers.

For another example, in most non-web situations, a document's title usually has something to do with its content. Webmasters, however, are not always careful about giving their pages a descriptive title. Often, a web page's title is by default its file name, so the blind user hears a very confusing: "Title: arch12932_57." This is highly unnecessary. It takes very little effort for a web designer to add a decent title, and such an improvement would also help sighted users in their navigation (as history lists are more useful when they use descriptive titles).

Finally, there is a problem with the way most web pages are organized. For most non-web documents, the top of the page is the most important clue to the page's content. But on the web, the top of a page often has advertisements and menus which do not indicate anything about the page itself. Such design is okay for sighted people, who can instantly tune out the noise at the top and focus attention on the page's center. However, blind and low-vision users listen to the top first, before they get to the middle. It can be very confusing when you think you are supposed to be hearing a page about railroads, but the first thing you hear is some irrelevant advertising about airfares! This problem can be helped by training new users how to skip down a page. But it would also be helpful to have advertisements marked and descriptive titles at the top, so that users know they are in the right place even when they hear irrelevant content at the top.

I've outlined several ways that the web can be difficult for blind and low-vision users. However, all the problems are surmountable, as long as web designers are mindful of accessibility issues. And the benefits of web access for the blind and low-vision community are significant enough to be worth the effort. If you want to learn more about how to do accessible web design, the following sites have helpful resources:
The Web Accessibility Initative
The National Center for Accessible Media

Three software products that make the web accessible to blind and low-vision users are:
JAWS (download a free demonstration)
PW Webspeak
Home Page Reader (download a free demonstration)

Read the report that Greg Stein, Linda Williams, and I wrote for our class project (School of Information 695-2: Community Information Systems)