Are there any blind people using screen readers to visit this site? If so, I'd love to hear from you, either here in the Open Forum or by private message.
I am curious to know because I know of a number of people who are not truckers and never will be, but are still interested in the trucker's life and work. I have heard from several who regularly read trucker blogs and forums. Their interest is akin to that of an expediter who has never driven a train, and never will, but is interested in all things railroad.
If it turns out that even a few non-sighted people are reading these words, it will help me to know that building screen reader accessibility into my web site, and rising to comply with Web Accessibility Initiative guidlines, is worth the time it takes.
Phil,
I have a message from one who is legally blind. I just had to call him about this, he is one of my former clients.
He is on the phone and says that “yes I read all different sites with two different readers, one I test for IBM and the other I bought. I have read EO recently and am curious about trucks. I never rode in a truck… and most likely won’t for a while. My last ride was in a B17 and it was not what I expected, like skydiving. A-team, don’t worry about setting up your website for me or others like me, just keep it simple and the reader has no problems reading it. If you put Ads and have a lot of b******* flash or make the page flashy with more crap than substance, the reader chokes on it and is really useless to anyone. For many of us blind people, the issue is not accessibility but usability and we can’t have that with flash menus, you know what I mean?”
Oh and “wouldn’t the question be more appropriate on some web expert forum, than here?”
Dreamer,
After dealing with this gentleman on building his website for him (and others in the disabled community) and who has me on hold now for 15 minutes, I got to tell you that simple pages are the best. I used his readers (IBM and Adobe beta products) to test things out when I was developing the front end of his site (the non-ecommerce part of it) and I think that there are issues with accessibility strictly with commercial sites, like an ecommerce site or health care sites. This is where efforts should be focused, not blogs or forums.
See when you use Blog software, like Word Press, some of these issues go away if you have a valid style sheet site. I went from home built templates to professional stuff because I got tire of dealing with the style sheet redress on major overhauls. All my sites are validated, the three new ones I put up for people are more then validated, they are mobile. It goes for forums to a point, there are some special things that need to be done with many of the out of the box software but that is for another time.
I know that some website developers use the latest technology, like the up and coming Microsoft silverlight or some other stuff without understanding compatibility issues outside of an IE browser. I try hard to tell my ‘clients’ not to fall into the trap that you need to have flash or some other ‘web tool’ to make your site look good. But I also push two other issues with them, mobile web services (or what I call thin services) and compatibility across the 7 or 8 browsers.
With this gentleman who still has me on hold, he has an ecommerce site running for fellow blind people (I use that term because he will remind me that he is not visually impaired or some other PC term he said to me the first time I said visually impaired that people see him clearly, he is not naturally blurred) and he has used the same software that I setup for a lot of places without modifications.
Well back to the conversation… bye…
