Browsing Blind

This clever little interactive blackness gives us an impressively funny non-glimpse at how the blind experience the web. (Be sure your speakers are on.)

As we attempt to navigate across an empty screen, aided only by spoken instructions and descriptions as voiced by an unidentified and clearly unqualified source, the message becomes increasingly more vivid. By the time we've engaged the unseen foe in a titanically invisible laser battle, we get a hint that, for all the silliness of this web-enabled experience, there are ways to connect the blind to the Internet, and that the connection is a powerful and playworthy one for all of us connected ones.

Googling for " Interface for the blind" I came across some enticing academic papers, but nothing nearly as much fun as this well-designed, zero-graphic, interactive joke. On the other hand, the ideas more or less presented in these academic papers are, as I hitherto implied, enticing. Like Suzanne Vogel's "PDA-Based Navigation System for the Blind" and the very idea (which is all I could find) of a "3D Audio Interface for the Blind," as apparently presented at the 2003 International Conference on Auditory Display.