Last modified: 2013-03-13 11:21:58 UTC
Hello! I am a user of de.wikipedia.org since 2005 and would like to propose a probably very easy to implement feature for blind people. I have a brother who is blind and uses the JAWS Screenreader and a "Refreshable Braille display" and he experiences severe difficulties navigating wikipedia articles. The Problem is: At the beginning of the article the screenreader reads out Information boxes (with tables, showing on the right) for minutes, and you really cannot listen to that and white until its over all the time, while you just wait for the article introduction. If my brother tries to skip it, the screenreader jumps to the first headline and so he misses the articles introduction. In the rest of the articles the screenreader reads out picture box information and stuff like that for over 50% of the time. When i propose this i speak on behalf of my brother and several blind people whom we are in contact with My proposal: Please implement a feature like the "print version", maybe calles "pure text for blind people" that shows not much more than the article text and does especially not show - big info boxes - image galleries - edit buttons - missing sources ... tags for wikipedia users that edit So that blind people have a version they can just quickly read through. If that is possible i would like to tender 100€ for a easy-acessable and working text-only-output version for blind people! If you have further questions please answer to: user:nerdi in german wikipedia mail.an.leo@web.de Kind regards!
In theory, this can easily be implemented with Aural CSS: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/aural.html You can specify that infoboxes, galleries and other elements should have a CSS class "nospeak", defined with the following code: .nospeak { speak: none; } However, I have no idea how well Aural CSS is supported by screen reader software. Since it has been around since CSS2.1 support (at least for 2.1 elements) is hopefully good, but as I said, I have no idea.