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Re: Preferred OS for screen readers

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Sep 4, 2002 9:49AM

At 10:29 AM -0400 9/4/02, Mark Rew wrote:
>My question is:
>Does purchasing a Screen Reader serve your purpose. Consider getting a review
>team outside of your organization to review your products for all
>accessibility. And, of course, use the standards such as the W3C and Section
>508.

I second this. Non-blind people trying to use screenreaders will
almost certainly fail -- by getting false positives and overlooking
true negatives. Why? Because screenreaders are such a complex,
specialized piece of software that in order to use them correctly,
you have to practice a lot and be highly motivated. Blind users
fit those criteria and are able to distinguish actual problems
with a Web site from difficulties in using the screenreader or
the browser. Non-blind people do not.

If you want to test your page with a screenreader, get yourself one
or three blind folks on-call and hire them as necessary. If you really
must attempt to hear a Web page, try something like IBM's Home
Page Reader which is a fraction of the cost as well as less
complex -- it does everything you (assuming you're not blind) need
to do in order to get a sense of Web page problems.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett < <EMAIL REMOVED> > http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com
Next Book: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 http://cssin24hours.com
Kynn on Web Accessibility ->> http://kynn.com/+sitepoint


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