Web Guru To the Blind 43
the_newsbeagle writes "Chieko Asakawa went blind at age 14, learned to program mainframe computers by sense of touch, and has spent her 27 years at IBM-Tokyo bringing personal computing and the Internet to the blind. From the article: 'By 1997 she had developed a plug-in that worked with the Netscape browser, mapping Web navigation commands to the computer keyboard's number pad and using text-to-speech technology to read out content. Computer stores around the world sold IBM's Home Page Reader, and Asakawa says its effect on the blind community was immediate, electric, and sometimes touching. ... Other browsers for the blind followed IBM's groundbreaking efforts, and Asakawa moved on to addressing a deeper problem: the fact that designers were unintentionally creating inaccessible websites. She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do and to suggest ways to improve navigation for audio browsers.'"
Not the Only One ... (Score:3, Interesting)
See also T V Raman, author of AsTeR and Emacspeak. Has worked at Xerox, Adobe, IBM, currently at Google.
This could be a useful tool (Score:4, Interesting)
As a web designer part time, I find it frustrating to try to tell my clients "that's not a good idea" when they think because they stand over the shoulder of their 15 year old and watch him surf the web that they are experts on UI design and web compatibility. NO, really, you are going to piss people off and alienate them with that! I usually have to use the "Google won't see it either" trick to get them to agree to simple stuff like redundant text-based menus.
Looks like it's still in beta, but will see what's up anyway.
Ironically enough, the Eclipse web site that hosts the install files has a menu that won't work in Chrome.