WEB SITE DESIGN FOR THE BLIND
There are a steadily growing number of the half-million blind people
nationwide who regularly use computers for work, education and pleasure, and
technological breakthroughs are occurring almost daily in text-to-voice
scanners, Braille printers and specially designed software to help overcome
the barriers of icons and other graphics of the visually oriented World Wide
Web. Recently, Blind Industries and Services of Maryland in Baltimore opened
a fully accessible site -- including graphics -- that  contains information
for both blind and sighted people --  http://www.bism.com/ . The site was
specifically designed to include graphics:  "We didn't want just a plain
boring screen because sighted people use the site as well."  Creating the
graphics-friendly site required "a lot of major revisions" of conventional
Internet design concepts.  (Washington Post 4 Apr 98)