alt.tech

While in France a couple of weeks ago i made a friend who’s completely blind since just over a year. That makes him one of about 45 million blind and 190 million visually impaired (WHO estimation) who are to a big extent unable to access public information on the Internet. While governments continue pushing public services on the net it seems to me that the visually impaired is still not getting enough attention. And even though government agencies, like the Swedish Administrative Development Agency (Verva), are taking the accessibility issues seriously, it just doesn’t seem to reach all the way to the user services. Accessibility continues to be a problem.

The city I live in, Stockholm, have been working on making their website more accessible. They even include a voice reader on the website. Problem is, you seem to need your vision to be able to start it. And the don’t seem to have understood that blind people normally wouldn’t browse the web using an ordinary browser and a mouse. They would use a voice reader to start with, wouldn’t they?

What’s really needed to make websites accessible is knowledge. It’s not about employing expensive new technology on your website, it’s about using the right standards and presenting your information correctly. Accessibility is about doing it right from the start.

Still, even when using the standards correctly we have a long way to go. Accessibility may not be expensive for the creators of websites, but the costs for all those blind who wants to access it is still to high. My friend in France had a hard time getting a paid job with his handicap, and purchasing the software he needs is not cheap. So, basically, the same software that all the seeing people get for free he has to pay for. And even then, information is harder to access, not least because it’s limited by the reading speed of the voice emulation. It’s obvious that if public information is supposed to be free, so should the software needed to access it.

And once gain, the free software movement is providing solutions. But it’s not progressing fast enough. But with 190 million visually impaired, corresponding to more than 3% of the world population, the need is very real. The conclusion should be obvious to everyone. Accessibility software should be free, and it needs public funding – now! The only result of not taking that step is leaving 3 out of 100 world citizens without proper access to public information and services.