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Blind cannot access major websites

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The websites of McDonald's and 3, the mobile-phone brand, are the most user-unfriendly to blind surfers, a Blind Union survey found.

Webpages may be eye-catching for the sighted, but blind people were denied access because they were not coded to work with the programs used to help navigate the web, the union said.

'For blind users, when they come across a Flash page, it is like they have entered a blank page,' said the union's information technology advisory committee chairman Kevin Chow Kin-chun. 'The screen reader cannot read anything and so we do not know what to do.

'The key is coding a page right. There are barriers like having websites that are all images or flash that cannot be read.'

Worse still, he said, McDonald's also put a song on its opening webpage. 'It is too loud. And even if our software can decode the text and read it out, we may have difficulty hearing the text clearly,' Chow said.

The union's survey, conducted between May and September, covered 30 websites that members visited, or wanted to visit, the most. The sites included those of banks, news media, public utilities, and telecommunications companies.

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