Accessing HTML by blind people: an example of electronic newspaper

The aim of this paper is to discuss different aspects of accessibility to a WWW site by blind people. Several organizations and researchers have studied the problems blind people encounter when accessing HTML documents via Internet. In the framework of the National Project on Telemedicine, supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific and Technological Research (MURST), these issues have been the focus of analysis at IROE (Inst. of Research on Electromagnetic Waves of the National Research Council) in attempting to create a daily newspaper that is fully available to blind readers, with effective navigation and selection of what they really wish to read. This task is being undertaken in a project devoted to the development of access systems for disabled people, coordinated by CSELT of Turin. The creation of such a newspaper for blind people also brought about the design a WWW site devoted to the broader issue of blind people's access to the information available on the Web. In particular, we have considered three different aspects of accessibility: (i) the application of guidelines concerning the correct use of HTML code, interpreted according to the real possibility of application; (ii) the effective navigation within the hypertext, taking into account the characteristics of the alternative displays; (iii) distribution of the newspaper to ensure that the greatest number possible of blind people can benefit from this service, at the lowest cost.