[real-eyes] Fw: programmers try to keep web access up to date

"Reginald George" <sgeorge@xxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:10:41 -0600

Incredible article Alan unearthed for us on the NFB Blind Law list.  Lot's 
of stuff here for web designers that I wasn't aware of.

Reg

Programmers try to keep Web disability access up to date

January 18, 2007

By Brian Bergstein Associated Press

WESTFORD, Mass. - Cynthia Ice is blind and lives in the suburbs, so
shopping on the Internet can make her routine easier. But it also leads
her into odd

dead ends - like the time a technical shift in a Web grocery site made
its meat department inaccessible to her screen-reading software.

"Everybody could go on the Atkins diet but me," she joked.

Such troubles are especially common for computer users with disabilities
as the Web takes on many features that make sites appear more like
dynamic programs

than static documents.

While that design trend gives many people more engaging Web experiences,
good old static documents can be much easier for screen-reading software
to decipher

and narrate to the blind. Such software has trouble interpreting newer
"Web 2.0" features, such as text that pops up without a mouse click, or
data that

automatically update in real time.

"The new technology being implemented poses even more of a threat to the
small accessibility wins we have made," Steven Tyler, who heads
disability access

services at Britain's Royal National Institute for the Blind, wrote in
an e-mail. "Around 80 percent of Web sites we estimate as having
accessibility problems,

some considerable."

However, progress is being made on programming hooks that would help
screen-reading tools grasp the new Web's advanced layers of content.

Web architects at IBM Corp. have been laboring on a system called
iAccessible2 that addresses some common scenarios bedeviling
screen-reading software.

For example, consider software "trees" where clicking on little plus or
minus signs in boxes expands data or rolls it up. To the ears of someone
using screen-reading

software, the setup can present a hard-to-visualize jumble.

To deal with this, iAccessible2 makes it possible for a blind user to be
told where text on the screen lies in the tree. A bit of text might be
the second

item on a list of five, for example, at a "depth" of two - meaning it
required a click to be revealed.Aspects of iAccessible2 are being
integrated into

the open-source Firefox Web browser. The technology also is entering
IBM's Lotus and Workplace office-productivity programs. Ice, 48, who has
been blind

for 20 years because of diabetes, helps lead the effort in Lotus at
IBM's facility in Westford.

A longer-term goal is to make it easier for blind people to deal with
Web pages that offer complicated stews of changing information.

IBM Web architect Aaron Leventhal pointed to basketball box scores that
dynamically update dozens of statistics as a game progresses. A sighted
person easily

can zero in on the most vital information - the game score - and glance
only occasionally at unfolding data of lesser importance, such as
free-throw percentages.

But how can a screen-reading program know to utter only certain stats as
they are updated and not every single one?

Leventhal and colleagues believe one answer is to encode parts of a Web
page - in this case, certain statistics - as "rude," "assertive" and
"polite." Screen-reading

software could be programmed to vocalize "polite" information anytime
and the "assertive" data less frequently.

This concept is still in development, but Leventhal hopes it becomes
part of Web production tools so site designers bake it in as they create
pages.

"We don't want accessibility to be the thing that limits what people can
do on their Web sites," Leventhal said. "We're not trying to slow down
the world.

We're trying to say, take accessibility into account."

For Web designers, more foresight surrounding inclusiveness could become
crucial to their business, as the aging baby boomer population requires
more assistance.

Already, Target Corp.'s Web site is the subject of a closely watched
federal lawsuit testing whether the Internet falls under the Americans
With Disabilities

Act.

While much of iAccessible2 is geared toward blind people's navigation of
the Web, it also is aimed at desktop software - including open-source
programs

that are alternatives to Microsoft Corp.'s dominant Windows and Office
products.

Because of Microsoft's enormous market share, makers of assistive add-on
software have devoted most of their resources to ensuring compatibility
with Windows

and Office. As a result, software outside that fold is often troublesome
for blind people.

Screen-readers' access to Microsoft programs relies on the company's
Accessibility Architecture, a programming system invented a decade ago.
IAccessible2

is essentially an update of it. Meanwhile, Microsoft has spent the past
few years honing a new approach it believes will be more powerful.

Generally, Web sites have had to inform assistive technologies which
specific controls or inputs they were using. That's why advanced Web
sites with "slider

bars" and other dynamic functions can befuddle screen readers -
essentially, the assistive programs hadn't been told they might
encounter those particular

Web environments.

The fix has generally been to constantly update the list of functions
that assistive technologies would encounter, and add the necessary
programming links.

But under Microsoft's new system, known as User Interface Automation,
Web and application designers don't have to label the names of each
function.

Instead they select from a list of 18 criteria to describe what each
function does - it pulls down a menu, for example, or it makes text
expand.

This way, screen readers react to the behavior of a particular function
on the Web and not whatever label it happened to get in the programming
code.

"It lets them deal with controls that have yet to be invented," said Rob
Sinclair, who heads Microsoft's assistive technologies group. The
process no longer

has to be "a continual maintenance nightmare."

For now, programmers and assistive technology vendors still have to
figure out how to incorporate User Interface Automation with other
technologies, including

iAccessible2. However, Doug Geoffray, vice president of development of
GW Micro Inc., a maker of software for the blind, said his field always
expects

such complexities.

"It's a never-ending battle," he said.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070118/BUSINESS/7
01180301/1006/BUSINESS

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