Campaigning is part of life for 91-year-old columnist Peter Leith. Today, he takes aim at websites that ignore a big proportion of their prospective clients.
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We are told that “more than 100 rural and regional newspapers will close”. Some will be replaced by aptly named ‘blogs’ and websites.
Being vision-impaired, I have for many years had trouble reading newspapers and been forced to explore the alternative – blogs. Generally speaking, and of necessity, their reportage of events is very brief and often superficial – like that other visual news medium, television, which relies greatly on not-always-relevant visual images and sensational headlines.
Many blogs seem unaware or unconcerned that 575,000 Australians are vision-impaired and more than 50,000 are legally blind. Many blogs persist in visual ignorance, using grey typefaces and light blue for emphasis! Apparently they are unaware (or unconcerned) that those colours are almost invisible to the vision-impaired.
There is something disquieting about a society, and us as a people, that newspapers and all the human involvement their name implies, from the Town Crier to the invention of movable type and the printing press, can be replaced with something with a name as common as ‘blog’.
Are some websites and blogs simply unreadable for you? Do you have a story or an observation for Peter? Send it to sunday@yourlifechoices.com.au and put ‘Sunday’ in the subject line.
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