Portrait of the 'Net: A Short Report on People with Disabilities

He hasn't been to the official Olympics website yet, so I give him the address—www.olympics.com—and he types that into the browser window. The first thing he decides he wants to know about is the swimming results, that being a sport he is very good at himself. The home page itself comes up pretty quickly, and as it does so, a voice drowsily drones out the number of links on the page -more than a few hundred.

Y A L E COURTESY DALLAS LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE BLIND (www.dallaslighthouse.org)

He tries reading through the links one-by-one, running the tips of his fingers over a metal strip, but it is taking too long and he gets impatient. He hits a button on the keyboard, but just then page dynamically reloads—and the disembodied voice resumes reading at the very top over again. It intones its way through the navigation bar: "Image Map Link - Every Sport", "Image Map Link - Every Athlete", "Image Map Link - Every Country", "Image Map Link - About the Games", ...

That list finally reaches its end, and the cursor jumps around on the page as he tries to find the event links. "12," "13," "8," "33." He blinks, and tilts his head to the side ever so slightly. "Hmm, what's that?"

I peer at the screen, and find a table on the upper right of the page. "It's the medal stats," I tell him. " Gold, silver and bronze, and then the total number of medals. That's for . . . " squinting, " . . . France." Not bad, I think, glancing at the other entries in the table.

In the meantime, the voice has discovered the Quote of the Day, and proceeds to recite it aloud. The earnest statement about baseball pitching takes on an eerie impersonality in the "organic" near-monotone of its speech, and we burst out laughing. "Okay-y."

He enters a combination on the keyboard, and a Find dialog box pops open. He types in the word "swimming," and the result comes back a few seconds later: the word was not found on the page. But I am looking at the screen over his shoulder and see a link to the Swimming section, right after the link to Synchronized Swimming. He uses the up arrow to move the cursor back, and the voice calmly skips over the link to Swimming, and calls out "Sailing" instead. Then "Hockey," and after that, obligingly, "Volleyball." He grimaces slightly, and turns to me. "This thing is crazy,' he says. But he can get the information he needs from other sites, and he goes back to one of the web pages he had open earlier, leaving Sydney 2000 far behind.

Welcome to the cyber-world of Birkir Gunnarsson, MC '02, guitar player extraordinaire, future Wall Street kingpin, alternative music lover, with a double major in Computer Science and Economics. Um, did I mention that he can't see? At all?

The World Wide Web has changed the world, and it has changed the way the world does things. People with disabilities, in particular, have found a definite niche for themselves on the Internet. As individuals, they are able to interact with other individuals with similar interests in ways that would have been difficult or slightly awkward in RL—real life, that is.

Paul Schroeder, the editor-in-chief of AccessWorld, a magazine published by the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), describes the web as "a great untamed environment," and he says that while the statistics are mostly true, they paint a bleaker picture than necessary.

The statistics he is referring to claim that while almost 75% of people with disabilities of one sort or another use the web (a higher figure than that for the general population), only two percent of the web is accessible to them.

The truth is both better and worse. Even as Schroeder states that much of the web is still viewable, the fact is that some of the most useful sites for a sighted user turn out to be too much trouble to navigate for someone using text reading programs like JAWS and WindowsEyes.

The trouble pops up with some of the most common elements in web pages. Frames, tables, navigation bars, and graphics: either the reading software ignores them, or it gets mired in the tangle of code. Since the World Wide Web is based on the concept of multimedia, and currently the greater part of this media is visual, a lot of the information encoded in web pages is lost to those who cannot access it visually. "A major challenge for sighted people," Schroeder says, "is to understand how much interpretation is done by the eye-brain connection that a blind reader doesn't have."

These problems and limitations of the current tools have been acknowledged and there are already many approaches to solving these problems both available and in the works. There are programs to reformat HTML pages to rearrange 2-dimensional tables into the 1-dimensional lists that a text browser can deal with; many accessible pages have a link at the top that lets the browser skip over the navigation bar at the top of the page; and special tags in stylesheets lets web designers insert longer descriptive text for images into pages than is currently allowed by the ALT tags provided by conventional HTML.

Yet the main problem for a person with disabilities surfing the web is the same problem that facing anyone who uses the web: how do you find what you need among all the millions of pages out there?