Comments on: Teaching a Blind Person HTML?

By: haftpflichtversicherung Rechtsanwalt

haftpflichtversicherung Rechtsanwalt — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:52:22 +0000

Ian, start with Css, this will be the easiest.
Greetings from Germanany

By: BIll

BIll — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:30:34 +0000

Ian,
CSS is actually very important for him. It allows the removal of the visual affect of the code from the structure.

By: Latest Accessibility News on Accessify » The blind leading the non-blind

Latest Accessibility News on Accessify » The blind leading the non-blind — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:06:00 +0000

[...] suggested in the comments on my previous post, avoiding any kind of IDE and sticking with Notepad seemed to be the order of the day. However, [...]

By: kelvinj

kelvinj — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:13:08 +0000

You could try contacting Richard Heyes at http://www.phpguru.org.

He’s an active member of the PHP community who had a stroke a few years back causing him to lose his sight. Maybe he would be willing to give to a tip or two.

Good luck, and please do let us know how it’s going.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:55:22 +0000

Thanks for your comments all. From his helpers, I understand that he’s created a web page before but this was the old PowerPoint ‘Save As Web Page routine’. I think my approach will be to let him show me how he does it first and assess how it sounds/reads. Then we’ll try the notepad simple page approach. Great suggestion abut the vberbosity level – I’ll switch that over before we start. I only have about 5 hours to go through this, so I’ll definitely keep things simple – get some headings in there, some paragraphs, some list items … and I will completely skip CSS. After all, what would be the purpose for him?

By: Léonie Watson

Léonie Watson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:44:07 +0000

Notepad is probably the best to get started with. Advise him to turn his punctuation settings to “All”, so that all the etc. characters are read out. He may also find it easier to slow down the rate of speech a little until he gets used to listening to all the HTML tags.

Code indentation will probably be a bit eratic. It’s a visual concept and it’s something I always forget about unless I know I’ll be sharing my code with someone sighted later on.

Don’t assume this chap will know Braille. If he lost his sight as a child and/or was born without sight, there’s a good chance he’ll be a Braillist. If not, there’s a good chance he won’t use it at all. Surprisingly few people actually use Braille these days it seems.

Comments from others about starting with the semantics make perfect sense. Also creating a tangible example page is a good idea, as John suggests. The really tricky bit will come with the CSS though, particularly layouts. It’s very difficult to get your head around the concept of visual layout versus source order, but I’m guessing it’ll be a while before you get that far.

By: John F Croston III

John F Croston III — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:47:31 +0000

Why not create a simple page with header, navigation, content, footer, etc. and print it out in braille or have a refreshable braille reader with you so the person can see how a normal web page is laid out using web standards. Or you could place the on the page as content, that way you could use a screen reader to show him the code.

If that is understandable to the guy with simple text and headers (H1, H2,etc.) why not show him how to make FORMs and other more complex things, like UL.

By: Thom

Thom — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:46:28 +0000

I completely second Matt’s comment about Braille and the need to start from semantic markup (rather than the seemingly standard practice of designers/developers/coders REDUCING their code to semantics). Only additional suggestion I’d have is to use Notepad ++ rather than a plain text editor, if only for the time-saving macro sequences that can be saved and deployed by keystroke (you’d not believe how many tags I’ve not had to type, working for an organization which overwhelmingly uses an acronym for its name).

By: Matt Obee

Matt Obee — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:16:11 +0000

I found the best approach to be to start from the semantic angle, beginning with some raw text and then explaining how we put tags at the start and end of something to describe what it is. If he knows any braille you could use that as an example. Braille includes something similar to HTML tags to indicate things like capitalisation, the start of a number, email/web addresses etc. I’d definitely get him going in notepad rather than confuse him with an interface if possible. If he’s using a screen reader, maybe tweak verbosity so that it announces everything.