Page 1 of 1

Screen readers and layouts (opinions)

Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 5:50 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Mainly out of curiosity but...

According to the W3C (and I agree whole-heartedly on this), everybody should be able to view your content. If that content is only available online and you use a table based layout you are effectively (perhaps without even knowing it) discriminating against visually impaired users.

I do use CSS to build all layouts to valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and therefore (to date) minimize the toll that HTML layouts can take on a screen reader but I have, until now, never considered actually experiencing my content through a screen reader in order to best improve my coding therefore increasing the enjoyment for visually impaired users. I mean, we all keep checking our layouts on-screen and make judgements and improvements based upon what we see. Why not do the same with a screen reader?

I'm just curious if anybody else does this and if everybody agrees that this is worthwhile thing to do?

For me... the more people that enjoy my content, the more I enjoy coding it ;-)

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 11:54 am
by phpScott
now with a screen reader but using the bobby tool i think it's called. I don't remeber it's at work and I just run my pages through it.

Since the company I work for has done several sites for town and city councils it has to comply with the uk legistlation that requires this sort of access.

oh what fun. but yeah i think it is important as most of the changes that you need to do are minor and don't take that much time.

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 1:58 pm
by vigge89
I don't use screen readers for testing, but I always test my pages with css, javascript and everything else not html, turned off, which gives you a basic view off how it will look like in browsers without those features, but you also get an idea of how screen readears will represent it.

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 3:13 pm
by onion2k
I test with Bobby and the W3C validation tools. Testing with one screen reader would be as much use as only testing in IE. Just like testing with web browsers you need a variety to get a good idea of what works, and I never have the time. I probably would if clients were willing to pay an extra day or two for it.

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 5:27 pm
by Roja
An easy way to test a variety of screen readers is to use Firefox's web developer extension. It has an option (Miscellaneous->Linearize) that allows you to view the linear version of the page, which is generally what the screen readers all see.

Posted: Wed May 11, 2005 2:46 pm
by wwwapu
In new Opera 8 there is Voice http://www.opera.com/voice/ with which one might play a little. There is also some support for CSS 3 Speech module. Quite exciting... http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/css/

Posted: Fri May 13, 2005 8:34 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Now there's an interesting development...:) I can see it now - IE7 being CSS3 compliant.

No chance...;) Good to see Opera putting taking another step forward...