Web Site Accessibility Blog

Google wasn’t the only web property to announce something new yesterday; AOL and Yahoo have also taken steps to make browsing and other services easier for screen reader access. The Pittsburg Post Gazette has an excellent article not only on the changes, but also provides a human element of the problems that people face and a good explanation of the assistive technology that they use.

However, even assistive technology cannot provide information that isn’t there. In what has the potential to be a very liberating experience for a blind person, shopping online tends to be one of the most frustrating. here is an excellent example, provided in the article,

“Unless accompanied by alternative text, code embedded beneath a graphic, photos and video are incomprehensible to a screen reader and its user. Kathy Brack, a 55-year-old blind Internet user, was recently shopping online at LLBean.com for a bathrobe and slippers but got stuck when she couldn’t get any verbal information on the products. . . .”Online shopping sites are terribly inaccessible,” she says. “I often have no idea what the product looks like.”"

AOL announced that they will update their web mail to make it more screen reader friendly. They plan to eliminate the need for users to switch to a separate text-only page.

Yahoo has improved its homepage by implementing additional topic headings, which allow for better scanning by screen readers. Most screen readers users listen to pages, just as sighted users read them, by scanning headings and looking for relevant information.