Even Grounds Blog

It starts with a few harmless minutes of surfing the World Wide Web. You eventually become engrossed in surfing the Net and begin to do it more frequently. And if this is not managed and controlled at once, it may turn into a harmful habit that can affect your work or studies, social life, and even your health.

This disorder known as Internet addiction can affect anyone of us who uses the computer and the World Wide Web. We believe it is therefore important to identify its causes and symptoms, and the ways to treat this addiction.

Earlier I posted about how Google made its front page inaccessible to many people with disabilities. In the meantime, the problem got resolved, but this is not the end of story.

Just to recap, what happened was ten seconds after opening the Google front page, a sound started playing. It made it next to impossible for blind people to navigate the page with their screen reader. When you hear music, it is hard to understand your screen reader.

First of all, I would like to express my appreciation to Google that they have resolved this issue. However, there are still some things to talk about here.

Once or twice while surfing the Net, you may have felt your eyesight become blurred or find it hard to focus on the screen. This is normally not a problem as you can always rest for a while to regain your perfect vision. But try to imagine yourself having limited vision all the time. What do you think are the challenges you may face as you browse web pages? How can they be solved?

The answers to these questions as well as additional related information are what we’ll focus on in this post. As you may know, we’re running a series about the challenges of Internet users with disabilities. This is the third installment in that series of posts.

Our friend Marvin will help us in identifying the common problems faced by low vision individuals. You may remember Marvin as that guy who shared with us A Day of a Low Vision Person. Let’s see what he’s been up to lately.

Before you think I went totally crazy, let me explain where this question is coming from. Recently I was checking this blog's traffics statistics, and I found that somebody asked this same question in Google, which led to this blog: "Can blind people see?". First, I thought it is just some nonsense, they can't. That's why they are blind. but the more I thought about it, maybe for some reason somebody asked this question in all sincerity, so let me answer it.

When somebody is blind, there are whole lot of things which are given for many, but the lack of sight takes it away. By default, blind people are not able to enjoy many things which eye-sight provides. They cannot enjoy a harmony of colors, cannot explore the environment farther than their arms' reach, they cannot read regular print books, etc. However, as these things are very important to function in life, many technologies were developed to compensate for the lack of site. Here I will discuss some, and will provide links for additional reading.