Web Pages Case Study Case Study | FAQ | Resources Imke and
Inaccessible Web Pages: A Case Study in Making the Web
Accessible to Students who are Blind My name is Imke. I am a
blind graduate student in Atmospheric Sciences at the University
of Washington. I use a refreshable Braille display to access
text that appears on a computer screen. Some data I use for my
research are available on the Web page of the Joint Institute
for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO). The site
includes plots of various climate indices that are not
accessible to me since neither refreshable Braille displays nor
speech synthesizers are capable of reproducing graphics. The
person responsible for placing the indices and accompanying
information on the JISAO Web site happens to sit in the
workspace adjacent to mine at the University of Washington.
Before I brought up the topic, he asked how he could make the
information on this Web site more accessible to me. I described
the challenges I was facing in accessing the content. Th