WAI linked in Wired article on pop-up stoppers

excerpt taken from http://wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,45306,00.html

While many users find pop-ups to be simply annoying, there are some for
whom pop-up ads cause even more serious headaches. 

Jim Allen, webmaster and statewide technical support specialist for the
Texas School of the Blind and Visually Impaired, said these programs
make a big difference for the people he works with. He's been suggesting
Pop-Up Stopper to his blind Web surfers who use screen-reading software.
The problem is that when a pop-up ad comes up, the screen reader jumps
to it and starts reading that instead. 

"You don’t have a back button because there’s nothing to go back to and
sometimes they don’t have a close button either, so (blind users) have
to get reoriented to where they are," Allen said. "It’s analogous to
watching a TV and someone else is playing with the remote control. Suddenly
you don’t know where you are and you have to wrestle with them to get
control back to what you were watching." 

"We’ve had e-mails from attention deficit disorder and visually impaired
people who haven’t been able to use the Web recently and say that with
our Ad Subtract software they can now go back online," interMute's English
said. 

Allen and others who work with the blind are creating a set of guidelines
in association with the World Wide Web Consortium, which may offer a
feature to stop pop-up advertising. They’ve received input from companies
including Microsoft and hope these guidelines will be implemented on
the browser end. 


- -- 
Alex Piner
apiner@onebox.com - email
(310) 309-3500 x2941 - voicemail/fax



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Received on Saturday, 21 July 2001 13:01:45 UTC