In response, Ladner’s group has developed the WebInSight tool to infer the contents of a Web page and automatically insert alternative text. In addition, students Jeffrey P. Bingham and Craig M. Prince at the University of Washington are spearheading WebAnywhere, a low-cost, Web-based browser and self-voicing screen reader. (Commercial screen readers typically $1,000.) WebAnywhere can also be used by developers evaluate the accessibility of their Web designs.

World Wide access

When it comes to the World Wide Web, a host of accessibility technologies are in play or under consideration around the globe. The ACM Special Interest Group on Accessibility, SIGACCESS, has been showcasing novel ideas about computers and accessibility at their annual ASSETS conference for more than 10 years.

University of Manchester researcher Simon Harper is chair of this year’s conference, which will be held in Halifax, Canada. “What we’re doing is not just for a small subset of people, but for everybody,” says Harper. “Global positioning systems, for instance, got started as speech recognition and positioning systems for people who are blind.”

Harper is among those at the Human Centred Web Lab at the University of Manchester working to increase Internet accessibility. “Web designers make a lot of mistakes when they’re designing Web sites, so we are studying how users interact with a dynamically updating page and where their attention is drawn to on the page,” says Harper. “We believe by understanding

Like many
accessibility
researchers, simon
harper believes
accessibility starts
with the design.

how users who are blind interact with a page, we can create novel methods of making obfuscated structures, information, and semantics more explicit in the design. We can help designers better understand which things on a page should be spoken and which should be more silent.”

Like many accessible technology researchers, Harper believes accessibility starts with the design. “It would cost nothing and would be very easy to make a Web site from the outset that’s supportive of accessible technology.”

Vicki Hanson, chair of ACM SIGACCESS and a researcher at IBM’s T.J. Watson Center in New York, agrees. She adds, however, that the decision to design for accessibility is more than just a matter of cleaning up the Internet–it’s a matter of law.

“Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act pertains to all businesses that the U.S. Government works with,” Hanson says. “Every Web site for those businesses, and for all governmental agencies, has got to be designed for accessibility. Of course, if the costs

are too prohibitive, it won’t happen for small businesses, so people in SIGACCESS are working to make accessibility features in software the standard, not something separate or different.”

Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI), says the move toward accessibility is a matter of international law. “When the U.S. government–the largest procurer of technology in the world–adopted Section 508 in 1998, people around the world started to realize they had better start to comply with best practices regarding accessibility. As of today, 126 countries have signed the 2006 U.N. Convention guaranteeing access to Information and Computer Technology (ICT) for people with disabilities. So much has happened over the last 10 years, it’s almost unbelievable!”

ICDRI chair Mike Burks says accessible technology is about economics. “Some people maintain that pursuing accessible technology is too expensive, but people in the U.S. who have disabilities have an approximately 70% unemployment rate,” says Burks. “That’s a huge price for any society to pay for ICT not being accessible to all.”

Simon Harper, however, says accessible technology is about choice. “Every one of us is bizarrely unique, and in the real world we do things in many different ways,” he says. “There is no single solution to accessibility technologies. The solution is to have a whole menu of solutions from which each of us can pick and choose.”

 

Peggy Aycinena is a freelance journalist based in Silicon Valley.

Internet
Dangerous Web Domains

Are some Web domains inherently more risky than others? According to software vendor McAfee’s second annual Mapping the Mal

Web report, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

In its analysis of 9. 9 million heavily visited Web sites in 265 different country and generic domains, McAfee found that the most dangerous Web domains

are those ending in “.hk” (Hong Kong), “.cn” (China) and “.info” (information). According to McAfee’s report, almost one in five .hk sites ( 19.2%) are dangerous. Nearly 12% of both the .cn and .info domains were classified as dangerous.

A Web site with an .hk or .cn domain isn’t necessarily located in Hong Kong or China; the owner of a domain name could

theoretically situate his or her business anywhere.

As for the world’s most popular domain, “.com,” slightly more than 5% of .com sites are deemed dangerous.

The three safest domains are “.gov” (government), with 0.05% classified as dangerous; “.jp” (Japan), with 0.1%; and “.au,” (Australia) with 0.3%.

An unhealthy percentage of

Internet frauds involve the sale of fake pharmaceuticals.

“My advice about surfing behavior is that if you’re really desperate for cheap Prozac and the pharmacy ends in .cn, don’t do it. Just don’t do it,” said McAfee research analyst and report lead author Shane Keats in an interview with the Associated Press. “Find another place to get your Prozac.”