How You Can Help The Blind

There are many ways you can help the blind and most of them don't involve donationing money. The premise of these pages is simple, "Blind People Need Equality Not Random Acts Of Senseless Kindnesss," so remembering The Courtsey Rules Of Blindness is a good place to start; what else can you do?

Web Page Design

You can make your web pages more easily accessible to blind people. While the newer screen reading programs have a somewhat easier time dealing with things like frames, many blind people don't have the money to get or upgrade to the latest and greatist program.

Frames

While the idea behind frames is nice the actual implemention of them is, more often than not, terrible. The newest screen reading programs seem to have an easier time dealing with frames than older verions but for those of us who need to enlarge the text, frames pose a real problem when they devide the screen into left and right windows because the space available for text is greatly reduced forcing us to page down more often or, much worse, scroll from left to right in order to read the material. This situation is made even worse when there are 3 or more frames.

If you're going to use frames your best bet is to devide the screen into top and bottom sections so the full width of the screen is available for enlarging text. Even having three sections, top, middle, and bottom is better than deviding the screen into left and right sections.

Text

When creating your page it is helpful to make it possible for the viewer to highlight the text, for example using Control-A in Netscape or Explorer. This is not needed for screen reading programs but is very helpful for programs like Text Assist which won't work otherwise. Use the Alt= tag for images or put a link beside the image that goes to a page with the description of the picture. Provide text links to all the pages in your site since images of words can't always be read by screen reader.

Send your questions or comments