The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Browsing the Net made easy for the visually impaired

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 23, 2007
ePaper

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Browsing the Net made easy for the visually impaired

Staff Reporter

Yahoo India has launched the Classic version of the Yahoo home page

The version was launched at Mitr Jyoti Blind School
Users can check email and search for content with the help of screen readers and magnifiers

Bangalore: When you have the world at the click of a mouse, it helps if you can navigate it easily.

Visually impaired people who use the Internet often find that the speech software that helps them operate is incompatible with several websites and is slowed down by the high graphical content on web pages.

Magnifiers

Yahoo India (Research and Development) launched the Classic version of the Yahoo home page which will enable the visually impaired to use the Internet to check email as well as search for content, by using their screen readers and magnifiers.

This version was launched by Victor Tsaran, who has worked around his disability and helped Yahoo with its research to make the site accessible, at the Mitr Jyoti Blind School.

Heavy graphics

Visually impaired users said that the site in its present form was not accessible as it slowed down their systems due to heavy graphic files and too many advertisements.

The Classic version will help solve this problem.

Challenging

Mr. Tsaran, an Ukranian who is working in the U.S., spoke to the media about the accessibility factor and said that it is challenging because “we live in a world where technology is changing by the day”.

“It is difficult to keep pace but then there is no perfect world. Purists may not like to hear that but it is true,” he said.

“I hope society will work towards bringing blind people into the mainstream instead of looking at them as objects of charity,” he said. He spoke about the need for job opportunities for the blind and said that services for the blind should not be ignored.

When pointed out by members of Mitr Jyoti that creating a new Yahoo account required them to go through a stage of visual verification, he smiled and said that he knew he had that coming his way.

“Those things need to be worked on, we still have a long way to go,” he admitted. Companies such as Google have been working with Classic versions for some time now, and he said that they have “woken up a little late”.

He said that he was now working on making advertisement on the Internet accessible and said that research and development needs to keep this accessibility in mind. This Classic version is also available with a Hindi Interface.

“Yahoo wants to reach out to everybody, whether it be the rural population or the visually challenged.

“In this age anybody who is not clued in to the Internet will be left behind, which is why accessibility is so vital,” said Pranesh Anthapur, Chief Operations Officer, Yahoo India.

The team has been working on this for over two years, and there is a more to come, he added.

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