Proud Geek

I work with several people with visual impairments, and it has been an eye-opening experience (weak pun intended) for me to watch them work on computers. The things I take for granted — quickly steering the mouse to the exact button and then clicking on it — becomes a labor for some of them. One uses a screen-reader, and tabs from button to button or from text to text and listens until she finds the right button she needs (assuming, of course, the button has text on it with exactly what the button does, rather than just a mysterious “Click Here”). Websites I’m totally used to suddenly becomes a mysterious landscape when viewed through screen-readers or magnified 10 times.

And so it’s encouraging when I read that Yahoo Mail has made its classic interface (not the new AJAX-y drag-n-drop interface) more accessible to people who use screen-readers. I have not figured out yet exactly what has been changed, but it may be that frames (long the bane of screen-readers) have been eliminated in favor of columns that can more easily be scanned by screen-readers.

Good for you, Yahoo! Gmail, when will you do this?

(Thanks, DownloadSquad!)