One per cent compliance

Rowland noted that in 1999, her organization surveyed 100 higher-education Web sites. Twenty-three per cent of the opening pages were compliant, but compliance dropped to 3 per cent for pages one link away and fell below 1 per cent for pages two links away. Meanwhile, a recent survey of random university Web pages found only 1 per cent compliance.

"In almost 10 years, there has been almost no improvement," she said.

Leventhal said it's fairly obvious when Section 508 guidelines have been followed. "You will find an invisible link -- which the screen reader can see -- that lets you skip the junk and jump to the main content. For some reason, many Web sites have large groups of repetitive links that you'll want to jump over. Meanwhile, not using the ALT tag is like not using punctuation. It's maddening."

Such frustration can produce lawsuits, and the National Federation of the Blind is currently involved in a class-action lawsuit against Target because the Target site proved to be inaccessible for blind users. Chong said the basic problem was a "next" button that was coded in such a way that it was invisible to screen readers, leaving blind users stranded. The problem has been fixed, but the lawsuit continues because Target hasn't committed to accessibility, Chong said.

Rowland noted that similar lawsuits in the past never produced any legal precedents because they were settled out of court, so this one will be watched closely. The federation's lawyer, Dan Goldstein, said the lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in March 2009. He wouldn't comment on the possibility of a settlement, and Target didn't respond to requests for a comment.

But what literally frightens blind users is the rise of so-called CAPTCHA technology for Web site security. (CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test.") To deny access to bots, the user must input a password that is displayed in a moderately distorted image that a machine can't read. Of course, the screen readers can't read it either.

"Many blind people are aware that they can't use particular sites, but they don't know why," Leventhal said. He said his own site simply asks a question whose answer would be known to human beings, such as, "What color is the sky?"

Some sites have an optional button to play an audio file that reads the password. However, this still leaves out the deaf-blind.

Beyond computers, sources complained of cell phones so complicated that they, too, need expensive screen readers. Many have small, flat buttons that are useless to the blind, culminating in the iPhone with no buttons. The iPod and its imitators don't have buttons either, and even kitchen appliances today often have digital readouts that are useless to the blind.

But Rowland noted that such considerations need to be weighed against the vast increase in electronic information during the past several years, at least part of which is accessible to the blind.

"You can't say that cup is half full, but there is something in it," she said.