From: Janina Sajka 
Subject: Posted for the author (Forward From dandrews@visi.com)
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aloha, y'all!
the following is a wired news story for which i was interviewed on tuesday
and wednesday...  the reporter didn't quite get everything verbatim, and
completely screwed up one main point, and anyone who's heard me rant about
internet exploiter will look (or listen, as the case may be) askance at
the microsoft reference, but, hell--at least this time, my name was
spelled correctly...  what's that?  it wasn't?  damn the fifth estate...
one (un)amusing and disheartening sidenote--the link to the ACB actually
leads to the AFB site...
the story is followed by a copy of a note i sent to the wired news staff
regarding their site...
 gregory.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 97 17:48:35 -0000
From: Austin Bunn 
To: oedipus@hicom.net
Subject: Blind Online story
Gregory:
Here's the story--thanks so much for your involvement. You'll see--you're
the center here. The url is
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/4934.html, but I hear Wired
News is a nightmare for screen readers, so the story follows in its
entirety.
Good luck with your work.
feel free to call anytime.
best,
austin
____________________
Austin Bunn
Wired News, New York
bunn@feedmag.com
www.wired.com
212.742.1819
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Wired News
The Blind Leading the Blinkered
The visually impaired are getting online - and getting nervous - about
the rise GUI interface.
by Austin Bunn
For Gregory Rosmita, surfing on the web can feel like "land swimming" in
an empty room. By feeling the surfaces, "I can say the room has four
walls," he says, "but one may have the Last Supper on it and I couldn't
tell you."
Rosmita, a webmaster, programmer and a site designer, went blind at age
20, but you wouldn't know it judging from his work - which is exactly how
he wants it. Using the text-based browser Lynx, Pico editor, and a JAWS
(Job Access With Voice) screen reader to speak the code, Rosmita
currently oversees two current projects - the Caldwell College site,">http://www.caldwell.edu">site, and his own extensive
blindness/academic resource Camera">http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/">Camera Obscura - both impressively
dense with information. In fact, their sheer efficiency is precisely his
point. "Let's bring HTML back to what it supposed to be - to present
information," says Rosmita, "and let's leave the [graphical] desktop
publishing aspect to the browser."
But just as hundreds of thousands of the blind have made it online, many
of them are asking anxiously - what happens next? At the National">http://www.nfb.org">National Federation of the Blind and the America">http://www.afb.org">America Council of the Blind conventions
both meeting this week, concerned blind users now worry their many
advances and training with DOS-based systems may be soon rendered totally
obsolete by the rise of the GUI interface.
According to Curtis Chong, the President of the National">http://www.nfb.org>National Federation of the Blind in Computer
Science, when the blind first got onto the Net in the early 90s with the
help of assistive technologies (like WebSpeak or JAWS), "the first big
boom was email because you could now see and send mail without having to
pay some one to read it," says Curtis Chong,. But with onset of graphical
email, and the active desktop, Chong stresses that "the danger signs are
on the horizon." As Rosmita says, "the problem with the web is that it's
point and shoot, but if you're blind, you can't see the target."
In response, Rosmita has in recent months become something of a web
watchdog. One of a growing number of concerned (and visually impaired)
webmasters and developers, he's determined to confront obstinate GUI
designers who are either ignorant or insensitive to the blind online.
"Lynx would encounter a page that just said "Image map" so I would write
to the webmaster and say this is what your page looks like in Lynx,
proving to them that it was butt ugly," Rosmita says. "They would blow me
off or say you're right but I don't have the time."
Coordinated through the WebWatch">http://www.teleport.com/~kford/digest.html">WebWatch listserv (just
one of an "exploding" number of blindness-related mailing lists) Rosmita
and others would deluge the sites with complaints or simple counsel "just
to add alt-tags." (Some sites with poor accessibility records like ABCNews">http://www.abcnews.com">ABCNews have been cataloged">http://www.teleport.com/~kford/improve.html">cataloged by the
WebWatch list).
But some sites remain a frustrating mystery. Because the screen reader
prioritizes text horizontally, sites using frames are broken into
indecipherable slivers. For the blind, "frames are living hell," says
Rosmita.
For developers, BOBBY, a free
application developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology
(CAST), takes urls and reposts pages the way that the blind see them -
usually a humiliating test of a sites' accessibility. Sun and Microsoft
have downloaded Bobby to help them design their applications, says CAST
director Chuck Hitchcock, but critiques and guidelines aren't enough.
"People just don't read [guidelines]," says Hitchcock, adding that the
next version of Bobby will actually suggest simple programming solutions
for problematic pages.
T.V. Raman, a technology consultant for Adobe Systems who is also blind,
believes that attempt to retrofitting speech onto the graphic
environments is a "mistake." While "you could get away with speech
readers" ten years ago is the "very poor" visual environment, says Raman,
speech readers in the GUI world are like "standing around and feeling the
different parts of an elephant to figure out it's an elephant." Raman
points to a false dichotomy in Rosmita's approach of
"graphics-as-difficult" to access, "text as simple." With text
specifically, "I can send you email text that would make no sense if you
were blind," he notes. "A complex layout of 3 columns and 4 rows with
another table in the center would be completely useless." (He adds that
Hotwired's site for the blind is a "total abomination")
Instead, he's designed a  an
audio desktop which builds speech capabilities directly into
applications as opposed to "retrofitting speech into the interface"
afterwards. At Adobe, he also currently works to take the graphic PDF
files and makes them "useable in as many ways as possible."
The highest levels of the industry have already started looking to
standardize solutions for accessibility. The World Wide Web Consortium
announced in April the creation of an Accesibility">http://www.w3.org/WAI/">Accesibility Initiative, but they still
struggle to create a working group. According to Rosmita, Microsoft has
been remarkably receptive to adapt the Windows OS for accessibility, and
the company's Accessibility division has recently released standards">http://www.microsoft.com/enable">standards for Java and Windows
developers to follow.
W3C's guidelines, however, may not be easy to enforce, and software
standards are critical to secure web access for the blind, says Rosmita.
He likens the problem of technical standards to the trouble of elevators.
"The ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] made sure there is braille by
the buttons, but there's no standard place for the panel, and you don't
know if the braille correspond to the number above or the number below,"
he says. "By the time you figure it out, you're way past the floor."
>From the Wired News New York Bureau at http://www.feedmag.com"
target="_top">FEED magazine.
---------- Second forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 22:55:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: "gregory j. rosmaita" 
To: feedback@hotwired.com, bunn@feedmag.com, king@hotwired.com,
    erik@hotwired.com, danko@hotwired.com, kpk@hotwired.com,
    chip@hotwired.com, gary@hotwired.com, emily@hotwired.com
Subject: Re: The Blind Leading The Blinkered
aloha!
while i applaud your exposition of the challenges that confront blind
cybernauts, without incorporating such basic access features as ALT-tags
into your site, however, the story can only be classified as mere
conscience-satiating window dressing...
i am not asking you to radically redesign your site...  nor am i asking
you to maintain a "text-only" version of your site, as i have no desire to
be shunted into a cyberghetto...  what i am asking is that you incorporate
the pre-existing accessibility features of HTML into http://www.wired.com
(consult either http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Disabilities/ or
http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/lynx.html#atp for more information on
accessibility in theory and practice)
and, while i have every confidence in the competence of the webmasters at
wired to effect access, i would like to make one suggestion...  while you
might consider using null ALT arguments to blank out most of the purely
decorative elements at your site, as they can distract far more than they
inform, it is imperative that you use clear, concise, descriptive, and
meaningful ALT arguments whenever a graphic is defined as a hyperlink
at www.wired.com...
while it is possible to negotiate un-alt-texted links using a text-based
browser (using, i might add, educated guesswork:  that is, basing one's
decision whether or not to follow the link based on the filename contained
in the URL--which is not only a tricky proposition, given the uninformative
nature of so many URLs, but an unproductive and unwelcome waste of one's
time) had i been using a graphical browser, in conjunction with a
windows-based screen-reader, without alt-text, i would not have even known
that the graphically defined hyperlinks existed...  why?  because, as i
explained to austin bunn, when it comes to graphics and icons, a 
creen-reader
is a lot like a blind person--it is incapable of knowing what the graphic
is, unless the content of the graphic is defined for it...
here is the full analogy to which austin alluded in the article:  as
someone who is totally blind, i can walk into a room, tell you that it has
four walls, and that each wall is plastered, but unless someone tells me
that one of the walls is adorned with a fresco, i have no way of knowing
that the fresco exists, much less what it portrays...
now, picture yourself in that same room, plunged into impenetrable 
arkness...
after a thorough tactile examination of the walls, you have discovered that
the room has neither doors nor windows...  unbeknownst to you, however,
there is, within the room, a holographic trigger which enables instant
egress from the room...  yet, in the complete absence of light, or,
rather, without recourse to your sight, how are you to discover the trigger?
and even if you have been told that you need to find it, how could you,
unless the holographic trigger was marked by some sort of aural clue?
an extreme analogy?  no:  a daily reality for the hundreds of thousands of
blind and visually impaired cybernauts world wide who are routinely
reduced to roadkill on the information superhighway...  again you accuse
me of exaggeration?  turn off your monitor, unplug your mouse, and try to
surf http://www.sony.com
HTML was intended as an expeditious, platform-independent means of
efficiently organizing, indexing, and presenting information, not as a
virtual desktop publishing medium...  i and millions of others like me,
who--for whatever reason, physical, financial, or philosophical--either
prefer to, or have no choice but to, access the web via a text-based
browser, eagerly await the wider implementation of the W3C's CSS and ACSS
initiatives (consult: Web Style Sheets [URL 
ttp://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/],
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) [URL http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/css/],
and Aural Cascading Style Sheets (ACSS) [URL
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/css/Speech/NOTE-ACSS"]), both of which
are means of ensuring a more accessible and hardware-independent web...
sincerely,
gregory j. rosmaita, webmaster
 The BLINUX DDP  http://leb.net/blinux/
 BLYNX   http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/
 CALDWELL COLLEGE http://www.caldwell.edu
 CAMERA OBSCURA  http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/
 READ 'EM AND SPEAK http://www.njin.net/caldwell/books/
 VICUG-NYC  http://www.njin.net/caldwell/vicug/
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CYNIC, n.  A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not
as they ought to be.  Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out
a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
      Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_
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