I saw part of the title to an article, "lets blind surf" and I thought of two things that had nothing to do with the internet. The first, being a good California boy, was the Beach Boys:


The second was that in all my time growing up at the beach I had never seen any blind surfers, while I had seen plenty of blind skiers.
As a kid, I had always admired the heck out of people who were willing to fling themselves down a mountain, around trees and other skiers without being able to see any of it, but I could never imagine what it was like until a few years ago when I was skiing above the treeline in whiteout conditions. Not completely blind but still very disconcerting.

This article, however, had nothing to do with sports. It has to do with internet access on the go. The blind can get around the internet via screen readers, but this software has to be installed on the users computer in order to be used. But what about when you sit down to use a computer that's not your own? WebAnywhere is a step in the right direction.



Now we just need to get web developers to do more to make their pages accessible. It's not easy. I was at a screen reading demonstration at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and they had a screen reader read a few popular web sites. It was an eye-opening experience, no pun intended. Of the four or so sites that were read, the audience could only figure out what one of them was, the New York Times. One of the things that became obvious is that the better your site navigation is for screen readers, the better your site navigation is for everyone.

It's hard to adapt, and it's hard to step back sometimes and develop products, on the web or otherwise, while keeping accessibility in mind. It's not any harder than skiing blind though, so it's time to stop making excuses.