[单词大师] 第43课：Web Accessibility

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AA: Im Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble has the week off. This week on Wordmaster -- making the Web more welcoming to the disabled.

John Slatin is director of the Institute for Technology and Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. He travels near and far, promoting ways to make the Internet more accessible to persons with disabilities.

His fellow frequent flier is Dillon. Dillon, a golden Labrador retriever, is a guide dog for the blind. John Slatin was an adult when he lost most of his sight.

Professor Slatin says the key to making a Web page more accessible is what he calls "principled redundancy."

JOHN SLATIN: "Rather than just providing the information in one form, say a paragraph or a complex image, youre providing both things. So theres both an image that illustrates a process or an idea or whatever, and a prose description of that same idea, a prose explanation -- so that, for example, a blind person who cant see the image can read the prose description.

"Whereas somebody who for whatever reason cant read the prose -- perhaps they have dyslexia or a brain injury that makes it difficult for them to process information in text form, or perhaps theyre not familiar or very comfortable with the native language in which the explanation is written -- the image can help them. And you might go even further and add a sound explanation, perhaps somebody saying the same thing or explaining the same idea, and yet a slightly different form."

AA: Since the late 1980s, John Slatin has concentrated his teaching and research on information technology. That was a switch from his earlier passion: twentieth-century American poetry.

Ironically, John Slatin says the elements that go into making a Web page accessible go against his conventional training as an English teacher.

JOHN SLATIN: "We would have talked about that as redundancy and meant something negative about that, whereas now in Web design were looking for principled ways of allowing the use of multimedia, different media and different formats, to help different people with different needs get to the same idea."

AA: "In general, how accessible is the World Wide Web to the disabled?"

JOHN SLATIN: "The short answer is, not very. The longer answer is that it depends partly on what kind of disability you have. For people with visual impairments, in particular, its still a very, very difficult environment to operate in, because its a very visual medium and a lot of the people who design for it are primarily visual thinkers, and thats what theyre focused on.