One cannot open a newspaper or magazine, listen to the radio, or watch television without being inundated with references to some aspect of the Internet. The list of things we can do online is growing, it seems, faster each day. One can purchase nearly anything, apply for loans and credit cards, and obtain access to governmental services. There is no end in sight to how much commerce, entertainment, and access to information of all kinds is going to be available to those who can successfully use the Internet. It is not surprising, therefore, that more and more people are getting online every day, and while it might be argued that a relatively small percentage of the population is currently using the Internet, that percentage is growing at a remarkable rate.
Blind people are no exception.
We want access to the Internet as much as anyone else. Because of improvements made to screen reading programs and a little cooperation from commercial software developers, this access is becoming easier to accomplish. These improvements have made the World Wide Web a far more rewarding and productive venture for the blind than it once was. Because of its insistence that users run proprietary AOL software, the blind have been effectively shut out of AOL and any access to the Internet they might have hoped to obtain through the AOL service. America Online is the largest provider of Internet access in the world.