Friday, July 10, 2015

Expedia To Enhance Sites For The Blind

Bellevue-based Expedia is hoping to make it easier for the blind to use Expedia.com and Travelocity.com, the company said Friday morning. According to Expedia, it hass partnered with the National Federation of the Blind, to make sure blind visitors using both the company's websites and mobile apps can also use text-to-speech screen readers or Braille readers to access those two sites. Financial details of the effort were not announced. The inability to use websites has been a big issue for blind users, despite industry efforts to increase accessibility to blind and disabled users; those issues have been exacerbated in recent years by the use of slick visual interfaces using such technologies as Flash and graphical navigation techniques, rather than the easier-to-manage text navigation of years past.