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Making WWW pages accessible to blind users



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:
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.

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.

Todd Mitchell mitchell@atmos.washington.edu
October 2001
JISAO