Accessibility Issues for Visually Disabled Users
As previously mentioned, there are varying degrees of usability for visually impaired users and what effects their disability will have on their capability to use a website.
Colour blindness, dyslexia and other such impairments would revolve a great deal on how the website is laid out and what specific colour and text schemes have been decided upon.
Whereas users with total blindness would require a completely different way of accessing the internet as Visual Web Browsers would prove to be entirely unusable.
Fortunately there is a great deal of non-visual web browsers now available and further research is also being carried out for more varieties. These include the following:-
Web-browsers
There are a number of available web-browsers that have been specifically designed for the use of the visually impaired users; most of these would include a voice recognition system and a screen reader inbuilt.
Example :- Sensus Internet Browser
Screen-readers
There are a number of ‘plug-ins’ available for current web-browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape Navigator. These would read the text from the screen for the users to be able to discern what is on display and also some come with a refreshable Braille display.
Example :- Hal from Dolphin
There is still a great deal of investigation going into this field of usability from a wide variety of researchers. An example of this can be found here from the basis of a “Context-Driven Non-Visual Web-Browser”.
Here is a list of available browsers, products and services available to visually impaired users (please note these links may not all be up to date or relevant to this topic).
