Maintaining Lynx to the internet for people with disabilities: a call for action
1995; Emerald Publishing Limited; Volume: 2; Issue: 127 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2054-1678
Autores Tópico(s)Tactile and Sensory Interactions
ResumoThe combination of adaptive and the Internet opened the world to many visually impaired people. Before, they were limited to audio tapes and Braille books, and books with extra large type, all of which are difficult and expensive to produce. That meant that only a small portion of the literature and information available to everyone else was open to them. Then computer technology led to the development of a variety of devices that can turn plain ASCII text into voice or show it as extra large letters or even provide Braille output. And the Internet, through applications such as e-mail, newsgroups, ftp and gopher, provided an almost inexhaustible supply of information in plain text form. Many blind people became Internet gurus. The Internet was the ultimate equal-opportunity, global environment, where no one knows if you are blind or have three feet or your skin is purple. What does matter are your ideas and your ability to communicate them, as well as the respect and care that you demonstrate toward others in this public arena. For the sighted Internet user, the arrival of the World Wide Web and graphic browsers like Mosaic and Netscape was a glorious revolution. Suddenly, they could point and click their way with ease from one end of the world to the other, without bothering about complex addresses. The world of the Internet became like a CD-ROM (only slower), with information easily viewed and manipulated in a Windows environment, and with the welcome addition of great color graphics, the beginnings of video, and even audio. Over the last year, it seems that everyone has been scrambling to put up a Web server. Great work is being done. But if the only way to get to it were with a graphics interface, the blind would be locked out and consigned once again to the role of second-class citizens. Fortunately, a handful of people at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, (Lou Montilli, Charles Rezac, and Michael Grobe) developed a character-cell browser named Lynx, and made the code freely available over the Internet. According to Users Guide Version 2.3 (http://www.cc.ukans.edu/lynx_help/Lynx_users_guide.html) Lynx is a fully-featured World Wide Web (WWW) client for users running cursor-addressable, character-cell display devices (e.g. vt100 terminals, vt100 emulators running on PCs or Macs, or any other cursor-oriented display). It will display hypertext markup language (HTML) documents containing links to files residing on the local system, as well as files residing on remote systems running Gopher, HTTP, FTP, WAIS, and NNTP servers. (Lynx is currently available via anonymous FTP from ftp2.cc.ukans.edu/pub/lynx) Simply put, delivers documents from the World Wide Web as plain ASCII text characters. This means that they can be read by the blind, as well as people who are limited to character-cell (no graphics) access to the Internet. So there is a solution available for the blind, but lack of awareness limits its usefulness. Many blind people who could use this capability still do not know that it is available. And many people who now run or are building Web sites seem to be unaware of the importance of Lynx, and are designing their pages without taking into account that means of access. In other words, many exciting and interesting Web sites (such as HotWired--produced by Wired Magazine, and located at http://www.hotwired.com/) are so heavily dependent on graphics that it's impossible to gain access to them with Lynx. If you know an Internet user who is blind, tell them about Lynx. If you know someone who is building a Web server, remind them that they should design their pages with text-only alternatives for maneuvering from one place to the next and not depend on the user's ability to see icons and fancy graphics. If this issue is particularly important to you, then on your own or with the help of volunteers systematically visit and evaluate the usability of popular Web sites based on a LYNX view and send constructive criticism and/or praise to the Webmasters who designed them, to Web-related newsgroups, and to editors of Internet-related magazines (Interactive Age, Internet World, Web Week). …
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