The Chancellor’s Office has a set of videos online where students with various disabilities talk about their situation and more importantly show off their tools for using the interwebs.
Seeing how people use accessibility tools is really a must for any web developer. The first time I saw a person with limited vision use JAWS my jaw literally dropped. JAWS was reading through the page faster than I could understand, and then he told me that he had it set a lot slower for the demo than he normally has it set. Just think of all that “small print” disclaimers you hear rattled off at the end of commercials and then triple the speed.
Folks that use assistive technology know how to use it. Really, really well in most cases. It’s our job as web developers to not break their tools — just like we have to do for people who don’t use assistive tech. Simply writing valid, semantic HTML gets you most of the way there.
1 response so far ↓
1 Peter DiFalco // Nov 22, 2006 at 10:37 am
The other commonly used screenreader is supposedly even better - Windows Eyes. Microsoft has been doing development with WinEyes so that the new version of Office will natively support so much screenreader facilitiation that you can expect it to be pretty enthusiastically welcomed by the low-vision and blind community. I saw a demo and it was slick. However, the demo was back when Office 12 was committed to a “ribbon” UI which I believe has been scrapped, so mileage may vary.