Positive and negative aspects of the approaches taken in the examples
The emergence of text-only web sites as an apparent solution to web accessibility can be attributed to the following positive and negative aspects:
Positive:
- Prominence of guidelines that specifically support access for blind web users
- The level of impact of web accessibility and its apparent barriers on blind people is matched by the levels of activity of organisations such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind in raising awareness of the need to design web sites that can be accessed by blind people.
- Tools began to emerge that automated the conversion process to some extent, easing the painstaking task of creating duplicate versions of web pages minus graphics, tables and colour information.
Negative:
- Many people are uncomfortable with the basic philosophy of text-only web sites as a solution to exclusion resulting from inaccessible web sites.
- Automatically converting a page with access barriers into text-only format will not remove all access barriers.
- Two versions of a page increases complexity and reduce navigability.
- For people with reduced reading skill or people with dyslexia, large quantities of text displayed on a web page may be virtually impossible to access.
The Speechlet Project
Positive:
- When the mouse is moved over the Applet window the student receives audio feedback of where the mouse pointer is and what it is pointing at.
- There is on-screen feedback.
- Speechlet also provides feedback to the student in terms of outputting a list of calls to the graphic drawing system as they are issued.
Negative:
- Speechlet is not able to give a whole-view of the scene in the way a person might, such as "the screen shows a smiling face".
- Lack of support for interface components.
Science Daily
Positive:
- Personal computers/screens that simulate notepads and a pen-based mouse.
- A tablet computer with a customised overlay, tablet pen functioning as a computer mouse, and alignment holes mapped to the tactile objects help facilitate the drag and drop function, which is the method that connects unit operations.