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NEW YORK—Low vision accessibility advocate Lighthouse International’s director of advanced accessible technology, Dorrie Rush, is a low vision Web site user herself. She uses text-to-speech product ZoomText to enlarge Web site text a minimum of seven times the normal text size in order to see what’s on a computer screen.

Rush laments that online shopping is next to impossible for her. “The Web is a minefield for me,” she said.

Regarding the National Federation of the Blind’s (NFB) Nonvisual Accessibility Web Certification program (read related story, " Nat’l Federation for Blind Offers Nonvisual Web Site Accessibility Certification"), Rush points out that there is a whole different Web site accessibility criteria for blind users and low vision users, and she questioned being able to certify Web site accessibility since Web sites are not static (a non-compliant file could be added to a certified Web site the day after certification, for example).

For Rush, it’s all about universal accessibility—the usability that is the underlying principle of the NFB’s certification, according to Clara Van Gerven, access technology content specialist for the NFB. Rush applauds Google’s products, in particular, as thought leaders in the accessibility space. “They build their products to be accessible for all users,” she said. “Before Gmail, I could not use any Web mail [with ZoomText].”

Lighthouse International released a free tool last year called LowBrowse, which enables low vision Internet users to view original versions of Web pages, as well as read the text versions tailored to their vision needs.

“This technology enables all the text on a Web site to be presented in the same readable format—size, color, font and spacing—regardless of which page is being viewed and without having to navigate to the next line,” said Dr. Aries Arditi, Lighthouse’s senior fellow in vision science, president of the International Society of Low-Vision Research and Rehabilitation, and creator of LowBrowse.

Arditi created the tool with a grant from the National Eye Institute in an effort to gather research about low vision user interface design. LowBrowse can be downloaded at the Mozilla add-ons site.