Blind Wiki:About

What Blind Wiki is
Although this Wiki is for blind readers and contributors, seeing visitors are welcome as well. This Wiki is the first of it's kind worldwide. It will contain blindness related information about accessibility, technology, helpful tools, tips and links. It could also be a platform for publishing tutorials and translations of manuals and for activism on blindness/accessibility issues. It shall demonstrate the possibilities of Wikis for blind users and give them first instructions.

More blind persons will hopefully join Wikia's Blind Wiki after the accessibility and usability for screen reader users has been improved a little bit, see Main Page. Users are allowed to use their user pages as they want, of course within the policy of Wikia and licence terms. User pages are useful starting points for blind beginners to make first experiences with a Wiki user interface.

What Blind Wiki is not
It's not a platform for company promotion but it could offer tips how to use their products effectively and could be a place to compare prices and services.

What Blind Wiki could be
After a while this Blind Wiki should become multi-lingual. Thereby it could also be useful as a online presence and working platform for blindness related non-profit organisations, initiatives and schools and their staff, volunteers, pupils and students, especially for those in developing or newly industrializing countries. Because Wikia's Wikis allow anonymous users without account to read and edit every page, a solution would be an autonomous Blind Wiki which can be customized for blind users in a perfect manner. This would allow an accessible CAPTCHA, an usable view/layout on special pages and a right management system with selectable reading/writing permission for niches of non-public collaboration and to minimize the effort of spam and vandal fighting by blind admins and active blind users.

Another point: In Wikia the Google ads are causing problems while editing with a screen reader software. This problem is perhaps solved in newest screen reader versions but e.g. with Jaws7 it's disturbing. This topic is also an argument for an independent Wiki without an ads frame. You can find a potential to do list on the page Wikis and Accessibility.

There should be lots of potential sponsors for such an unique, global and helpful Wiki. If one or more parties would give money, a professional Wiki programmer could be hired to optimize the MySkin CSS and JS for screen reader software. After that, the results and experiences could be used for a screen reader skin or gadget for the MediaWiki software. A few volunteers at the German Wikipedia have already began with this work. Organisations and companies such as the Mozilla Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Canonical, Novell, Google and many other parties already support open source accessibility projects. Examples?

Why shouldn't we find similar help for MediaWiki and thereby for the great and well known Wikipedia? The costs would be low and the benefits significant. The WikiMedia Foundation and the global blind community will surely appreciate sponsored accessibility improvements.

You can also find sources of inspiration at the sections Blind links and Accessibility links.

Questions or suggestions? Please use the community portal or contact Per.