Annahar Launches Newspaper For The Blind. What A Gimmick.

Ask yourself: How many Lebanese people can read a Braille newspaper?

Sure, there are some blind people in Lebanon who might benefit from this, but if Annahar really cared about accessibility, it would have designed its websites to be friendly to the blind, and that’s not a difficult task, it’s simply a matter of abiding to a few international web design standards.

To make your website accessible, you have to design it so that software can read it out loud to visually impaired people. Naharnet and Annahar fail miserably in that domain. They still use deprecated technology that makes it impossible for automatic readers to find the various sections or to differentiate between the content and the design. (In case you’re wondering, Beirut Spring and all other Wordpress sites are accessible)

If you were blind, would you rather have one page of a Braille daily, or a computer that reads out loud any article in any website you want?