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RantWoman has done it. For an experiment RantWoman gave permission for the forces of Google to put ads at the bottom of her entries. RantWoman herself may just skip past these intrusions with her screen reader. RantWoman put the ad gadget at the bottom of her pages because she figures that is easier to go past although she would in fact hope the ad choices could unite people with things they might actually want to interact with. RantWoman can already tell she would like an option where she could screen the sort of advertisements that get associated with her rantings. For instance RantWoman would probably try to keep some of the more egregious perpetrators of subprime mortgage flimflam from hawking their snake oil on her site. Maybe RantWoman will do a bit more research.

RantWoman supposes if she keeps using language in no uncertain terms, some kind of ad choice trend MIGHT happen automatically. Well RantWoman supposes that could happen automatically, but her experience with her Gmail account is that Google does a couple different things. Sometimes it free associates from some word in the message. Sometimes Google shuffles the deck and puts a mishmash of ads both in line and almost exactly antithetical to the theme of a given message. Occasionally, it appears that the ad links are just random. Sometimes RantWoman devotes energy to envisioning the kind of workplace where people decide on these approaches, but RantWoman's schedule is already full and she, for better or worse, tends not to linger long on such visioning.

RantWoman is moved to post though because she noticed that her entry about her latest adventures at her optometrist attracted an ad from a competing brand. This is probably not entirely surprising, but RantWoman finds this choice highly comical in this case: RantWoman once took a glasses prescription to the competing brand. The customer service person nearly fainted but was able to choke out the information that their shop could not produce that prescription, which is one of the reasons RantWoman wound up at Davis Optical .

RantWoman realizes her previous posts also omitted some especially striking details of the attention she receives from her eye care place. The march of progress has brought really wonderful ways to make glasses lighter, thinner, stronger, more durable. The able staff at Davis Optical have more than once pored over the catalogs of lens blanks, ruling out some brands because they do not come in prescriptions strong enough for RantWoman and suggesting options that, to RantWoman's great delight are still lighter, thinner, stronger than anything she has had previously.

It's possible RantWoman's eyes or the competing brand's service practices have changed enough that RantWoman could try again, but why? Bear in mind that RantWoman tends to have friends who also have complicated vision issues and difficulty buying glasses at just any bargain basement shop. But knock yourself out competing brand.RantWoman certainly would not mind having readers who can shop at the competing brand, so knock yourself out.

But if this ad thing is going to do any good, RantWoman invites any of her readers who use screen readers to click through the ads once in awhile, bang around the site and offer the sponsors feedback about your experience. If the advertisers want blind people's money, they should build sites that work for blind people or at least take the trouble to understand that blind people ourselves do not necessarily agree about what we want in a website.

Sigh. RantWoman may even have to bang around the Davis Optical site and see whether the Flash stuff really needs to be whined about. Or maybe RantWoman will stick to justshowing up in person, steeled to, when necessary, plunk down real money for service that meets her needs.