Dumb Question

[c0rnedfr0g]

At the risk of sounding ignorant and insensitive:

Can blind people surf the Internet?

I don't mean people with terrible vision that are "legally blind," I'm talking about people who can literally see nothing and read Braille.

Or are they just SOL when it comes to computers in general?

 

[Roger Wilco]

Yes, they can. There are braille-keyboards and programs that verbalise the text on the screen.

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

But with drop-down menus and advertisements and such, how do they navigate? Does the program just start reading aloud when it opens a new page, or do they have to move their cursor over the area to be read?

 

[Hermiod]

Generally, if a popular website is very unfriendly towards screen readers and no screen reader compatible version is available, disability groups will not hesitate to make themselves heard on the subject.

A recent example was the British Cinema chain Odeon whose old website was completely unfriendly towards screen readers. Someone created a screen reader friendly version of the site (which I prefered using even though I'm not blind) but Odeon sued him. Their new site has a screen reader friendly option but the whole site is still horrible.

 

[Roger Wilco]

Any kind of "gimick" on a website is a problem I think, even frames and java-scripts/flash especially.

I'm not sure exactly how the speaking-out-loud programs work, I'd guess it just reads the page left-to-right top-to-bottom completely, links, html tags and all.

Here's two pictures of a braille keyboard:

The blind person navigates with the cursor keys, and the braille keyboard shows him where the cursor is on the screen and what the text on the screen says.

It's pretty cool actually, I think with some training blind people can surf the internet very well, it's probably even a help for them, because they can access and read stuff that's not normally available in braille.

 

[ThankQ]

[Chris Berman] There are no stupid questions, only stupid people who ask questions. [/Chris Berman]

 

[Kryton]

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[Misfit Toy]

[Rick Astley] Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down. [/Rick Astley]

 

[Kryton]

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