Internet accessibility for people with disabilities

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Internet accessibility for people with disabilities

The Internet has quickly become one of the most beneficial tools in use today. With the click of a button, you can find information on practically anything. In fact, Internet use is so widely used, that it is no longer an eminent skill, but is an ability that is now expected of people. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, not everyone can take advantage of this useful tool. With over a half-a-billion disabled people in the world, there should be steps taken to make the Internet more disabled-friendly, which indeed there is. By taking advantage of adaptive technologies, using proper etiquette when sending email, and designing web pages with the disabled in mind, the Internet will soon become useful to more people than would otherwise be the case.

One of the major advances in helping the disabled is the use of adaptive technology. Adaptive technology can be described as any hardware or software used to provide alternative methods of input and output. There are two distinct forms of disabled-friendly input devices on a computer, pointing devices and voice recognition. Pointing devices do the same job as a mouse; move the pointer to a certain location on the screen. This equipment comes in different forms, trackballs, oral fixtures, and eye-coordinated input devices are all examples of special pointing devices. The other form of an input device was voice recognition. This form does the job of the keyboard. The user talks into a microphone, and his speech is translated into text by the sound card. Though voice recognition has been around for a couple of years, it is just now getting to the point where a user doesn’t have to pause between words. Companies such as Dragon Systems, IBM, and Lernout & Hauspic, are the leaders of voice recognition software.

However, changing the output of a computer for disabilities is much more common than changing the input. The most common way of changing the output is by screen magnifiers, screen readers, and Braille displays. A screen magnifier is a program that follows the mouse pointer and magnifies that area. This is idea for people with limited or damaged vision. The software used to magnify will do so from about 1.5 to 20 times, depending on which program it is. Products such as MAGic, ZoomText, and InLarge are very popular right now, also Microsoft includes screen magnification in versions of Windows 98 and beyond.

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