How do blind people experience websites and electronic devices? That was the subject of the last webtuesday. One of the presenters René Jaun is blind and gave us some entertaining insights into how blind people see websites, coffee-machines and mobile phones.

Some interesting points:

• iPhone 3GS is one of the first phones that is accessable out of the box, because it has a screenreader built-in.
  • for a normal Nokia you pay about $300 for a screenreader + you need to download and install it, which a blind person can not do without assistance)
• WAI-ARIA Landmark Roles (HTML-attribute “role”) help blind people to quickly find navigation, main-content etc.
• More and more electronic entertainment- and household-devices have an ethernet-interface to control them via the web.
  E.g. Blind people can read the error messages of a coffee machine on their computer or on their iPhone, which have a screenreader.
• “Access for all” created a checklist how to make a website handicapped accessible (German), based on the WCAG 1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

The whole talk was a  great sensibilisation for the need for accessable devices and websites. Thanks to René Jaun and Sven Jenzer for the interesting talk!

The slides of the talk can be found here (German):
http://access4all.ch/blog/?p=1036