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.

Lately it seems as though the tech world hasn't been keeping up with accessibility. It's easy to overlook accessibility issues when you're in a rush to get things out to market, and it seems that closed captions have been one of the casualties of the market. I recently sat in on a conference session that dealt with accessibility issues in the Web 2.0 space, and as aware that all the cool whiz-bang features AJAX and Web 2.0 methodologies bring us aren't always developed with everyone in mind. It's still a young market, and I'm glad to see efforts made to close the gap here. What I didn't realize was that closed captions had taken such a hit.

It's understandable with the explosion of video podcasts that not everyone is adding captions to their videos they make in their mother's basement. We haven't done so with the X-Interviews - yet - and really, a lot of people are just starting to get the hang of getting video on the web at all. What surprised me, however, was that HDTV shows and digital downloads were either missing captions or they were difficult to access. I don't know anything about HDTV standards, but it seemed to me like this was a ridiculous problem to have with a technology that was designed to allow more information to be included in the stream, not less.

The digital downloads were less surprising, but still - Quicktime has included closed captions since 7.2 and the iTunes store sells TV shows that have already been captioned. Seems to me that this is a no-brainer. Somebody at Apple must have thought so too, as the new version of iTunes with it's highly touted ringtone feature also includes support for closed captioning. My iPhone is perpetually set to vibrate, so there's little concern that people watching a movie with me will be interrupted by the Commodores "Brick House" if my partner calls me. For me, the closed captioning support is a much more relevant and welcome addition.

It is supported in podcasts as well, as you can see in this SpaceGeek podcast. It's also a nice way to take video shot in one language and make the content available to people who speak other languages.

Hopefully, Apple will update the listings soon to provide an easy way to tell if a video is closed captioned or not. Right now, I can't tell what is or isn't. I searched for closed captioning and came up with one season each of 24 and Stargate - but neither mentioned if they actually were closed captioned. Still, it's a step in the right direction. The new iPods are also supporting captions, though I haven't seen that myself as of yet.

I should also note that Google Video supports closed captions, and has a nice, visible marker denoting videos as such. It's great to see this start to happen, and it will be interesting to see how it progresses. Hopefully there will be some decent, inexpensive automatic captioning applications soon so that everybody can include them in their videos easily whether they are filming on a big Hollywood sound stage or in their mother's basement.