Sightless Surfing: By Victoria Knight, Wall Street Journal
Europe - May 2005 |
| On the day Saddam Hussein was captured in December
2003, Arnold Roth, chief executive of the Israeli company VirTouch
Ltd., decided to give a little demonstration of a product his
company is developing for visually impaired Internet surfers. |
| Mr Roth, who was in Portland, Oregon, for a business
meeting, asked VirTouch programmers back in Israel to take online
news stories, photos and maps about Saddam’s arrest and
using a process created by VirTouch, convert them into special
Web pages he could display at the meeting. |
| The pages were to resemble those of any news Web
site, but with an important difference: Their entire contents
- including visual images - would be in a format a blind person
could navigate and absorb using a mouselike VirTouch tool called
the VTPlayer. |
| Within hours, the completed pages were posted
on the Web and in the hands of Alan Holst, a Los Angeles-based
IT consultant who has been blind since birth. Guided by audio
prompts linked to different elements, he navigated the pages
using the mouse. And he read the headlines and articles in Braille,
using an already available technology that converts computer-screen
text into raised Braille characters on a connected device -
in this case, the VTPlayer. The characters are created by tiny
metal pins that move up and down in panels on the surface of
the device. |
| But the pins on the VTPlayer do more than make
Braille letters, and this is what makes the Israeli device unique:
The VTPlayer’s pins also rise and fall according to the
outlines and contours of pictures and graphic images on the
computer screen. Thus, Mr Holst could feel with his fingers
what Saddam’s face looked like in a photograph shot moments
after he was taken into custody - adding another dimension,
literally, to Mr Holst’s appreciation of the event. |
| “I was surprised by the length of Saddam’s
beard,” Mr Holst quips. |
| Innovative devices and software for years have
attempted to help the visually impaired harness the full potential
of personal computers and the Web. The most common tools are
software programs called screen readers, which use Braille and
synthesized-voice prompts to guide users through a variety of
PC programs, like spreadsheets, PowerPoint and more. However,
all but the most basic readers - those that work only with email
and word-processing - are expensive, with the most versatile
costing around a thousand dollars. And relatively few Web sites
have adopted the code that screen readers need to identify page
elements - a state of affairs that limits most blind Internet
users to a few familiar addresses. |
Unlocking Potential |
| All of this is changing , slowly, thanks to advances
in technology and to political pressure from governments and
advocacy groups. Web sites of government agencies in both the
US and Britain, for example, are now required by law to be completely
accessible to screen readers. This means all of a site’s
features must be tagged with a code that screen readers use
to recognize and identify the feature to the user. Laws protecting
the rights of disabled workers, coupled with pressure from advocacy
groups, are expected to help more blind people enter the workplace
in the coming years, which in turn should increase demand for
more advanced and affordable assistive products. |
| In the European Union, about 1.1 million people
are considered legally blind while around 11.5 million have
visual disabilities. Unemployment rates for the blind and partially
sighted vary widely, from 4.2% in Spain, where advocacy groups
are particularly strong, to 72.8% in Germany, according to a
2001 study conducted by the European Blind Union, an advocacy
group. |
| “The pace of change is accelerating as customers
continue to demand more, which drives the development of new,
more complex, technologies with more powerful features,”
Says Brad Davis, vice president of hardware product management
for Freedom Scientific Inc., a leading maker of screen readers,
in St Petersburg, Florida. The latest version of its Windows-based
screen reader Jaws 6.0, allows Web surfers to replace technical
terms used by Jaws to identify Web page elements, like links,
form fields and buttons, with labels of the user’s own.
The standard version retails for $895 (€711). |
| Another Windows-based reader, Window-Eyes, from
GW Micro Inc., of Fort Wayne, Indiana, now in its fifth version,
supports every test feature and command in Microsoft Word, including
the ability to navigate tables and columns. Users can find and
fix spelling and grammar errors, read editing comments and track
multiple editing changes, all with keyboard commands and audible
prompts. Window-Eyes 5.0 retails for $795. |
| Freedom Scientific and GW Micro, tapped by analysts
as the industry leaders, are privately held and won’t
release sales or profit figures. But one indicator of how this
market is growing is the recent arrival of a new competitor:
Apple Computer Inc. last month released its new operating system
for Macintosh computers with a screen reader built in. |
| Apple’s move came in response to demand
from Macintosh customers, advocacy groups and government institutions,
says Phil Schiller, senior vice president, world-wide product
marketing at Apple. The program, dubbed VoiceOver, focuses mainly
on applications like word processing, email and Web browsing.
It requires the user to learn only one set of commands, no matter
which application is being used. But perhaps most important
of all is the price: At $129 - included in the price of the
new Mac OSX system -VoiceOver sells at a huge discount to most
screen readers. |
Price Breakthrough |
| Louis Herrera, chairman of the technology committee
for the California Council of the Blind, believes VoiceOver
will “revolutionize the way computer accessibility is
treated,” because it makes assistive technology far more
affordable to blind people with low incomes, and to potential
employers of the blind. Indeed, a $499 Mac Mini computer with
VoiceOver in the operating system can be purchased for less
than the cost of a single Jaws or Window-Eyes program. |
| VoiceOver is not without its faults, nor is it
as sophisticated as the main Windows-based screen readers, says
Mr Herrera, who has been blind since birth and whose organization,
based in Hayward, California, provides services and acts as
an advocate for the blind and visually impaired. |
| He finds VoiceOver’s spell-checker difficult
to use, for example, and says getting VoiceOver to read pull-down
menus is tricky. But he expects the product to improve, adding,
“Apple has built this product into the operating system,
which shows it’s committed to it.” |
| Windows-based readers hold a huge lead in this
market, reflecting the dominance of Windows operating systems
world-wide. But Microsoft Corp. has no screen reader of its
own. Instead, there is a speech-recognition feature in Windows
that allows users with disabilities to operate their computers
by speech. |
| A Microsoft spokesman declined to say whether
the company plans to include a basic screen reader in the next
version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn and expected to be released
in 2006. |
| Longhorn could, however, pose a challenge of a
different sort to screen-reader and assistive-product makers.
Software industry insiders say that Longhorn will present significant
changes in how Windows works and the way in which its applications
are designed. That means development costs for screen-reader
makers could rise significantly - as they have been already
for years - as they try to keep their products compatible. |
The Main Challenge |
| Therein lies the main challenge facing the industry
right now: making increasingly sophisticated products that keep
up with changing technologies. Perhaps nowhere is the challenge
greater than in efforts to promote wider screen-reader accessibility
to Web sites. |
| For screen readers to work seamlessly on the Web
there has to be co-operation from Web programmers and Web-page
designers; they must include special coding for screen readers
to detect and correctly identify different elements of a page.
Without such coding, surfing the Web for the blind can be, at
best, a very frustrating experience. |
| Jaws user Liz Cooke, a visually impaired editor
at the London-based Royal National Institute of the Blind, says
she’s comfortable using Jaws while working on her PC offline.
But the first time she used it to open a Web page, she says,
“Jaws was speaking gibberish. I didn’t understand
that he was reading the banner.” |
| A screen reader navigates a coded Web page the
same way it navigates a document in Microsoft Word or any other
compatible program. It reads aloud tags on each element that
identify whether it’s a headline, say, or a registration
window, or an ad. As users move between elements using keyboard
commands, like the tab and arrow keys, audio prompts let them
know roughly where they are on the page, what it says there,
and what their choices are. The reader also reads text aloud
or converts it into Braille. |
| After some practice, “now I understand how
(Web) pages fit together,” Ms Cooke says. But she still
finds the interface somewhat awkward, and unfamiliar Web sites
confusing. So, like many users of screen readers, she says she
limits her surfing to a few Web sites that she knows, like the
Guardian newspaper. |
| net-progress, a UK-based Internet consultancy,
is rating Web sites according to their user-friendliness for
visually impaired people. “There are plenty of search
engines, like Google, that blind users can use but the problems
is they return pages without giving any indication of how accessible
they are,” says Paul Crichton, net-progress’s founder. |
| His database, called net-guide, contains around
2.000 Web sites. Most of them are government and education sites,
but net-guide also features news, football and music sites. |
| While a handful of countries have enacted laws
pushing for Web accessibility, no law exists in the US requiring
private companies to make their Web sites more accessible to
blind visitors. Some have adopted the coding anyway under pressure
from rights-advocacy groups. Britain enacted a law enacted in
October that requires all UK-based companies to make their Web
sites accessible by screen readers, but the law is having little
impact. |
| Help could come from the World Wide Web Consortium,
a group backed by some of the world’s largest computer
companies that encourages standardized and improved Web programming
language. The consortium is lobbying alongside research institutes
and other advocacy groups for a global standard of accessibility
coding - an effort supported also by the European Union Commission. |
‘Saddam’s Beard’ |
| Web accessibility is crucial for Mr Roth’s
VTPlayer. While VirTouch already offers a Windows-based, offline
version of the product, for about $970, the Web version is still
in development. |
| No special coding is required to render simple
line drawings, like a skeleton or a building plan, into a tactile
surface on the VTPlayer’s panels. But more complex images,
like the photo of Saddam, contain different colors and shades. |
| These require a special VirTouch code that produces
the tactile outlines and embossments on the pin panels, as well
as audio prompts that identify areas within images, like, “This
is Saddam’s beard.” |
| Obviously, it’s not possible for one company
or institute to annotate even a small fraction of the images
found on the Internet. VirTouch’s proposed solution is
to host a collaborative Web site that would make its coding
publicly available and encourage others to help code more images
for use with the VTPlayer. |
| Meanwhile, Mr Roth reckons his company is about
five months away from a product that will help the visually
impaired fully navigate the Web and work with all Windows applications.
Says Mr Roth, “We are trying to see how close we can come
to the holy grail.” |
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