I DON’T usually read 91av. Nothing so strange about that, you might
think, but neither do I read any other magazines or newspapers.
For the first three-quarters of my life (I’m 40) I didn’t have the choice: I
couldn’t read 91av or any other publication because they weren’t in
Braille.
Braille is a terrific system, but only a tiny fraction of printed material is
transcribed into it. In any case, only 10 000 of the nearly two million blind
and partially sighted people in Britain read Braille. Like them, I grew up
without the magazine habit.
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So not only was I visually impaired, I was culturally impaired. I missed out
on everything from the Bridget Jones phenomenon to Page-Three girls. Did I feel
deprived? You bet, which is why in 1990 I became excited about a new technology
known as a talking computer, which converts text into speech. Suddenly I had
access to things I’d been missing all my life.
Take The Little Oxford Dictionary, which I already owned in Braille. Little?
It came in 16 doorstep-sized volumes. Imagine my delight at discovering a
dictionary on talking disc that allowed me simply to type in a word and
immediately get a definition. This was soon followed by disc versions of books
and magazines, and then online services giving me spoken access to cinema and
theatre listings, travel information, job vacancies—and even New
Scientist. I became even more excited with the advent of the World Wide Web. If
the Web was to be people’s main source of information, entertainment and
education, then blind people could look forward to unprecedented access.
Or could they? Full of hope, I went to the new Encyclopaedia Britannica
website. Nothing. Not a squeak. www.britannica.co.uk site, you see, uses Flash.
This is a piece of “plug-in” software designed to make sites look more, well,
flash. It also makes them totally unreadable to all known speech systems. Thus
Britannica has effectively barred blind people—who stood to benefit
most—from using its site.
The use of Flash and other tools that inadvertently discriminate against
disabled people has led to the formation of the Web Accessibility Initiative,
which tries to persuade website designers to use software that is compatible
with speech systems and other aids. It is an uphill struggle. Designers of
commercial sites, anxious to be at the cutting edge, seem to fear that making
their sites accessible to everybody will compromise this aim.
Their fears are surely misplaced. I am not suggesting that sites should stop
using devices like Flash, only that there should be alternative ways in for
people like me. If you design something so that as many users as possible can
access it easily, you end up with a better-designed system for everyone. You
also have a larger market.
Why is it so difficult to convince Web designers of this? I think in most
cases it’s simply something they’ve never thought about. With the few who are
fundamentally sceptical, it’s necessary to point out that it may soon be illegal
to maintain a site that isn’t usable by disabled people. AOL has been challenged
on just these grounds.
Usable does not mean dull or degraded. There are lots of glitzy, high-profile
sites out there that I can use easily. But then there are others that just shut
me out. It would be a pity if the Web became discriminatory just for the sake of
a few fancy graphics.
(For further information on designing usable sites see www.rnib.org.uk/digital)
