Screen Readers

Screen readers are what most blind people use to surf the web. They are computer programs that read out what is on the screen in a computer voice. The commonly accepted king of screen readers is called JAWS, but even the standard version costs a whopping $895 (~£600). That's an enormous amount of cash, and certainly not something I can afford to test my websites. [As an aside, I found someone on the forums suggesting that developers should get a reduced price version, but it was pointed out that if developers get a reduced price version but they still expected the blind people to pay full whack that would constitute discrimination.] So, I had resigned myself to having to look over someone's shoulder sometime in the future when I find someone who uses it.

But then I came across pwWebSpeak, which is free to download. Ok, it's probably no where near as good as JAWS, but it gives you the idea of how a screen-reader will read your webpage, and it pointed me to a number of things I needed to change to make my website more accessible to these readers. For example, I had a "Skip Navigational Links" link at the top of the page that jumped all the menu items and went straight to the content. On the Dance Life website there is a context menu that appears for the classes main menu. If a screen-reader user brought up the classes menu they would either have to listen to all the main menu first, then the submenu, or jump past all the menus straight to the content where they couldn't access the individual class pages. It's a little thing like this that wouldn't show up on a validator but is very important to the accessibility of the page.

Tags:

• screen readers