DingoAccess » Refreshable Braille and the Web

Fascinating demonstration of a refreshable braille peripheral used to read content from the computer. I can see how being able to actually read the content in your head is vastly preferable to a synthetic screen reader, and watching reinforces the importance of good mark-up structure which provides a far more significant navigation aid than in the visual rendering.

As ever, it’s assistive technology that does far more interesting things with the semantics of web documents than their conventional visual desktop brethren. Like screen readers, the tool inserts annotation and description of the page semantics (announcing headings, and so on).

The demo is good, but reminds me again that we need a way to make some of this alternate presentation available to developers in forms they understand, too. Relying on a handful of those of us most interested in the field is not going ensure a quality web experience for all. Via: dingoaccess.com.