Reading the Screen Digitally

In this golden age of communication, even blind people have enough tools to go out and experience different sites and services that the internet offers. So one might naturally wonder, do they get click-baited often? Or is their blindness helpful in evading these advertising sharks.

Do Website Ads Affect Blind People?

Some of you may already know this (but I have to say it for the rest of you), blind people can use screen readers to “read” sites on their computer. There are a lot of different options available on the market you can check here.

Apart from the fact that some screen readers are not that good even now, some require keywords to distinguish normal content from ads. Its was all well and good till aggressive marketing started sometime ago. Companies started hiding these keywords for ads as they enabled ad blocking by using software (called Ad blockers). The screen readers thus read ads indiscriminately in between segments of the webpage being viewed. Here is a story concerning Facebook and its strategies of aggressive advertising that led to a huge crisis for screen readers.

What is worse? Pop up ads! Apart from the fact that some screen readers get stuck on infinite loops reading all the pop up ads, blind people often find it hard to locate the tiny X mark on the top right corner to close them. Even after closing some ads reload the page, thus, they wind up at the top of the page and again have to navigate to where they previously were. At times it becomes really difficult to distinguish the site from the ads as screen readers indiscriminately read up anything and everything coming at them.

In short, ads affect blind people more than they affect others. I was the amazed by the diversity of screen readers and how effective they are while navigating through your computer (and some sites). I wanted this post to be a serious one as it may help others realize how their aggressive marketing can knowingly (or unknowingly) affect a group of people that are already burdened by other issues. Hope everyone who reads it will help spread awareness regarding the same.