Details at: http://lists.becta.org.uk/pipermail/oats-sig/2007-March/000919.html

It uses the following: 1. FireVox - the screen reader add-on to Firefox giving access to both browser and the web 2. CLiCk, Speak - the add-on that speaks and highlights the web under user direction 3. NVDA - the open source windows screen reader.

Another issue I had was with links, which sometimes NVDA would read out in full (the href — a long, tedious, and unhelpful link). I don’t know why it chose to do that sometimes and not other times. There seem to be a number of toggles which I imagine you’d turn on or off depending on the page. But you have to be familiar with the tool to know what to do when.

In the end I got a couple ideas of small things we could improve, but only small things. Actually getting into the site revealed problems with NVDA that I didn’t know how to get past. I’ll be giving some other tools a try as well.

There was an important message I got from your talk that deserves mention: the web is filled with bad HTML and we are stuck with it, so let’s learn to deal with it instead of despise it. Accessibility purists have a hard to time coming to terms with this.

On a personal note, I am highly grateful for your work on lxml.html because it has been the only reliable way for me to apply xpaths to ebay HTML descriptions (for a project where I want to analyze thousands of auctions). Anyone who is familiar with the site knows these descriptions are created by sellers and quality wise are on par with geocities markup. Yet for my purposes contain information I want to parse and there is nothing I can do about their abuse of HTML. So, thanks!

With unobtrusive scripting, you can provide an “accessible version” which is actually just the regular site but with all of the window.onload style handlers disabled. A simple checkbox (hidden off screen with CSS if you like) which sets a cookie and you’re done.

I’m all for empirical testing of the accessibility of web pages, but I suspect you’ll find that after you play with the screen reader on a representative sample of code, you’ll gain an intuition on what works and what doesn’t very quickly, and will use the software less over time.

I don’t understand all the technicalities being discussed here, but maybe a few comments would be helpful.

To me, a good web page is just a well-structured page, with content that I actually want to read. Get the structure right and most other things will follow.

I visited a friend’s site because he wanted accessibility comments. It was great - the screen reader told me everything I needed to know, and it did it without any glitches.

But when I ran the code through an HTML validator, the validator moaned about various supposed accessibility problems. These amounted to stylistic niceties. The id attribute for some of the paragraphs wasn’t explicit enough. Well, big deal, who cares? It didn’t stop the page reading fine.

It’s hard to imagine anyone getting heated over the longdesc tag. Don’t use it, is all I’d say. Use succinct alt tags instead and nobody needs to break their brains trying to make graphics accessible. Alt tages being absent altogether can be a major problem, however, if you’re expected to hit buttons that just look like a series of blobs - something you often come across on the Web, and in desktop programs, for that matter.

There are freely available screen readers, and some are getting very good. NVDA at http://www.nvda-project.org/ is possibly the best of these. It is fairly JAWS-like in some ways, but costs a thousand dollars less, and doesn’t do horrible things to your video display or your registry.

There’s also System Access to Go, which has been made available free as a web based screen reader at http://www.accessibilityisaright.org/

Then there’s Thunder, free from www.screenreader.net. Arguably Thunder is the weakest of these screen readers, but whatever floats your boat… It does seem to go down well with less expert computer users.

What do blind people actually use? Well, moot point. Most don’t use anything, and don’t go near computers, which are too alien to deal with. At the other end of the market, the elite of screen reader users are relatively well catered for, not least because many get access tech paid for so they can do a job, and get subsidies from Governement agencies. That’s the only reason that things like JAWS can exist. The point, though, is that accessibility has been pretty much formulated for screen reader users, and other people with disabilities don’t get anything like so much of the action. I have an axe to grind as a once partially sighted computer user. Then there are dyslexics, colourblind people, those with minimal dexterity, deaf people and on and on, who also deserve a slice of the cake. But in the end, so long as web designers don’t put up unnecessary barriers, they won’t cause any of those people too much grief.

Less well known, and cheaper, screen readers are Window Eyes, Hal, and Serotek System Access (paid version). Although JAWS is the well-known one, it doesn’t seem to rule the place like it used to. Every screen reader has its advocates, but then, once you’d paid up and mastered all those dastardly 4-finger keystrokes, you’d better believe you’re using something really good! At the moment, it seems that the jury’s out on which screen reader will prevail longer term.

I can’t believe JAWS cam’t recognise paragraph markup! NVDA does it fine, but you need to spend a minute setting up the config so that it does it. JAWS, I understand, has a jungle of verbosity settings, and with enough fiddling about, I’m sure it can be made to treat the markup of pages in many different ways.

Worth mentioning that JAWS and the others I mention are confined to the Windows platform. Voiceover on the Mac is now a serious contender, not least because it’s included in the price of the computer. Then there’s Linux……..

Quick mention of CSS - a great way for sighted people to have their eye candy and for blind people to eat it too.

I don’t like the sound of a separate layer for blind people. I don’t know what it means technically anyway, but let’s stay mainstream, please.

http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20071211-accessibility/

The resources for the presentation, including the slides and video, are available.