Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997 00:19:02 -0400 Reply-To: "VICUG-L: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List" Sender: "VICUG-L: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List" From: Mark Senk Subject: ALL: newspaper article about someone familiar to this list To: VICUG-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU THE NEWARK STAR-LEDGER MONDAY, APRIL 14, 1997 Caldwell Grad Brings Unique Vision to Web By Allan Hoffman SPECIAL TO THE STAR-LEDGER The Web pages for Caldwell College look a lot like those at other schools, and that's the way Gregory Rosmaita, the college webmaster, likes it. Of course, Rosmaita has never "seen" the pages not in the conventional sense, at least. A 28-year-old graduate of the college, Rosmaita is blind. Rather than view the pages on a computer screen, he listens to them with the help of a "screen reader" and voice synthesizer. >From looking at the college Web site, there's no way you would know its creator is blind. "That's always been a point of pride with me," says Rosmaita, a North Caldwell resident who became blind while an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University at the age of 20 as a result of viral infections and encephalitis. "No one has any way of knowing." Rosmaita learned HTML, the language used to construct Web pages, by listening to the HTML code for existing sites, often improving on pages to make them more friendly to the blind--or anyone else using a text-only Web browser. A number of trends in Web site design, such as the use of pages divided into frames and the reliance on images, can make it difficult to understand some pages with a screen reader and voice synthesizer. If the page uses a complex format, the person listening to it might hear the text from two separate stories interspersed. Rosmaita urges Web publishers to take some simple steps, such as defining alternatives to images within the HTML code to make their pages more easily accessible to those with the text browsers. As someone who worked with desktop publishing programs before he became blind, Rosmaita understands the importance of the visual look of the page. Still, he stresses the need to emphasize the written content. "The Important thing is the information," he says. "The presentation is important inasmuch as it complements the information that is, presented." Rosmaita began his cyber-journey two years ago, when he was a student at Caldwell College. His first day on the Internet, Rosmaita searched for the term "blind." The search yielded thousands of documents. "Man, I've hit the mother lode!" he thought. Then, he discovered it wasn't quite the mother lode he thought it was. The documents were for Venetian blinds, the band Blind Melon, blind taste tests and lots of other subjects. "I went through 1,000 entries," he says, "before I found anything on blindness." On the whole, Rosmaita believes the Web holds great benefits for the blind. "The Internet affords the blind, for the first time the history of blindness, the ability to find information in real-time," he says. Rather than wait for a newspaper or other publication to be recorded or printed in Braille, Rosmaita can often find it on the Web. Aside from the Caldwell College site, Rosmaita's work on the Web includes Camera Obscura (http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus), a site with a wonderfully organized set of links to academic destinations, collection of blindness-related resources on the Internet, and a handy set of search-engine forms for use with text browsers. Anyone who works in Web development would be wise to visit the area of the site devoted to designing Web pages. It includes links to a number of resources such as "Picture This" (http://www.northcoast.com/~res/browsers/speechfriendly.htmi) and "Levelling the Road Ahead" (http://www.rit.edu/~easi/itd/itdv02n41/article6.htmi), with advice and guidelines for creating sites accessible to the visually impaired.