Blinded by the Sight

This extension raises awareness for a very common accessibility problem on webpages: the missing alternative description for images.The project Blinded By The Sight by Dominik Horb and Felix Niklas tries to raise awareness for one very common accessibility problem on webpages: the missing alternative description for images. It’s a representative for the underlying structural problems in the web industry concerning handicapped people.

Blind people rely on screen-readers to access webpages, which in turn rely on an alternative description to read aloud for every image. When it is not present, screenreaders will read something like “logo-big_105x75_09-07-2012_16-56.jpg” - the filename of the image. Try to pronounce that letter by letter and you can imagine how annoying this can get.

Since this problem is often times not understood and simply not encountered by sighted people, we try to raise awareness for it by simulating the annoyance factor visually. We do that by overlaying images with a very basic braille representation of their filenames.

We know that being a web developer can be challenging enough on it’s own. Even without having someone (like us for example) coming around pointing a finger at you about some dubious accessibility problems that you never had to experience for yourself. Our intention though is not to put the blame on anybody, we are not even near considering ourselves accessibility-experts and you would likely find many problems like this on things we built, but we hope this at least visualizes the problem.