Web Sites Improve Service for Blind People

WEB SITES IMPROVE SERVICE FOR BLIND PEOPLE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Jessica E. Vascellaro jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com]
There are roughly 10 million blind or visually impaired Americans, according to the American Foundation for the Blind, a New-York based advocacy group. The group estimates that roughly 1.5 million people who have difficulty seeing print even with glasses have access to the Internet but only about 200,000 who cannot see print at all have access. The numbers are expected to grow as technology improves and Internet companies offer new services. Major Internet companies are moving to better meet the needs of the hundreds of thousands of blind people who regularly browse the Web. Blind Internet users generally use software that reads a description of a site's features aloud, sometimes in conjunction with some hardware that displays portions of the site in Braille. But navigating increasingly feature-heavy Web sites, whose messy and complex programming can be difficult for the software to translate, poses problems. Aiming to increase use of their popular products even more widely, Internet companies are now launching new -- and tidying up old -- services for easier use by the blind.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115335999151511973.html?mod=todays_us_pe...
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