Screen reading web browsers

[chrisvenus]

Given I have worked in the web industry for some time I really should know more about this sort of thing.... When looking at accessibility and how easily an audio web browser can cope with your site what is a good product to install to test?

I'm sure most people won't have a clue but I'm too lazy to filter this to just those I think are likely to know the answer. :)

Comments

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

Can't remember the name (sorry) but a few years ago there was basically one market leader for Windows environments. Use your Google Fu grasshopper.

[chrisvenus]

I tried briefly but I have a hundred other things to do so decided to be lazy and jsut ask people. :) I'm sure somebody else will use their google fu just to prove to me how easy it is and how much I suck for failing. :)

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

I will now not do so on some sort of general principle. Not sure which one though.

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

I have remembered that it's name begins with G

Thus reducing the universe of possibilities by a little over 96%.

Surely you can do the last bit from there?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

No, no - lateral thinking beats Google Fu.

Always look in the obvious place first!

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

The RNIB site might have some useful links too.

[logmplus1.livejournal.com]

I just use Lynx and the W3C validation, including the outline summary thing. If the site's usable in the first, and it passes validation, and the outline for the page looks sensible, then it should work with most screen readers and so on.

It's not exactly thorough testing, but it'll give you a relatively good indication of how well the site works.

[chrisvenus]

yeah, I've done the basic stuff like that. Its more that I haven't got great idaes of how audio browsers work so want to be sure that in addition to being standards compliant that it actually works too. :) Tables are a great example where you have metadata like header attributes that help you to line up table cells with their header cells so that data makes sense in a non-visual context. You don't need to include them and things work fine in lynx, validate properly, etc. But do table make sense on screen readers or will they just become an unmanageable mass of data?

[chrisvenus]

P.S. You have just made me notice that I haven't close a link tag properly so my page isn't validating at the moment. Ooops. :)

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

Also check out the w3 accessibility tool guidelines. There's also a section about tables somewhere, but I ought to get some work done ;)

[trs80.ucc.asn.au (from livejournal.com)]

Something like 5 years old now, but http://diveintoaccessibility.org/ is a good read, and has JAWS as the main screen-reading browser thingy.