How a blind person ‘sees’ the Internet

Dragging and dropping, bringing up right-click menus on a specific part of the screen or just reading through a webpage become complicated tasks when you are blind.

There are organizations like Lighthouse and other tools that help the visually impaired navigate a computer. But Kevin Jones has been speaking recently at small software development conferences on how to make considerations for the visually impaired. “When you look at a computer screen, you think of it as a two dimensional array,” he says of sighted people, pointing out the huge amount of information — “the bigger picture” — available with a quick glance at a monitor. “But with a screen reader, it’s a one dimensional display.” Jones has a computer science degree and uses a Braille reader to read code, a device that generates the tactile language on a small pad. He’s learning AppleScript to, eventually, write accessibility improvements for VoiceOver. But Braille readers can come up short for navigating the Internet.