World Wide Web (WWW) pages with lots of images and tables are typically
very difficult for blind people to use. A common browser used by
blind people to access the WWW is "lynx." To see the information that
a blind person can get from your WWW page, just access your page with
"lynx." [Just trying typing "lynx" on your machine, and see what happens.]
Two things that you can do to improve your WWW pages:
There is a WWW site that analyzes your WWW pages for their
accessibility. I've tried this on a few of my pages and it seems to
provide useful ideas.
More extensive discussions on making WWW pages accessible to blind
users can be found on the following WWW pages (taken from the New York
Times "Bringing the visual world of the Web to the blind," 26 March 1998):
1) National Federation of the Blind
WWW accessibility guidelines.
2) The World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Intiative is to
create guidelines to make technology and WWW pages more accessible
to blind, deaf, and disabled users.
3) The Center for Applied Special
Technology analyzes WWW sites for accessibility.
1) Include a sentence describing each image. This is done as follows:
<img src="image_source" alt="Sentence to describe the
image.">
An alternative to this practice is to write a figure caption for the
image that describes the image and 'alt="image"' (no single
quotes) inside the hypertext reference. I am trying to do this for the data directory pages as most
readers can benefit from a simple characterization of a figure or analysis.
2) Don't use the HTML tables construct as lynx tends to remove all blank
spaces between columns. Instead, write out the table using the "preformatted" (<pre> and </pre>) tags.

Todd Mitchell mitchell@atmos.washington.edu October 2001