Comments on: A Call for Accessibility

By: lawyer in tucson

lawyer in tucson — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:29:47 +0000

Most of what you say is supprisingly accurate and it makes me wonder why I hadn’t looked at this in this light before. This piece really did turn the light on for me as far as this topic goes. But there is one point I am not too comfortable with and while I try to reconcile that with the central theme of your point, let me see what the rest of your readers have to say. Well done.

By: Christophe Strobbe

Christophe Strobbe — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:23:46 +0000

Robert Hahn,
The screen reader that comes with Windows is known as “Narrator” and is not considered as a replacement for powerful screen readers such as JAWS or Window-Eyes. See for example the comment at http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=AW030206 : “Narrator is a basic screen reader that provides speech output for blind computer users. It is not intended to replace more powerful commercially available screen readers. Rather, it is intended to help you when your normal adaptive equipment is not available.”
Microsoft Narrator even has an entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Narrator.

There is also work being done on free screen readers for Windows:
* NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access; http://www.nvda-project.org/), which is also open-source, and
* Thunder (free, but not open source; http://www.screenreader.net/).

By: John G

John G — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:36:27 +0000

The link (http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete/) appears to be broken. The complete list of tools is available at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete.php.

By: roberthahn

roberthahn — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:26:07 +0000

I’ve since learned from the last post that Windows XP and Vista both contain built-in screen readers; why are you suggesting web developers spend at least US$900 on a license for JAWS?

By: roberthahn

roberthahn — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:35:29 +0000

Not bad; it’s a good start. Some points for consideration:

Some of the language in the first handful of paragraphs feel like handwaving. Consider: “When I started on the Web, college students were a majority of the population on the net. Today theyâ€™re probably less than 10%, and are vastly outnumbered by senior citizens.” When I read that, I thought: “Care to cite a source?”
I feel like the first 5 paragraphs are ‘fluffy’ – they’re not adding a whole lot of value, and they’re making the same (or similar) points over and over again. Could you try cutting it down by half?
I am such a minority case that it’s not even funny, but I found your comment about buying JAWS and surfing with the monitor off extremely amusing, and this is no reflection on what you wrote. I’m profoundly hearing impaired, so for me to test my pages for accessibility, I have to turn on my screen reader, and turn on voice captioning to read what the computer is saying to me. Clumsy as it is, it works though.

Elliotte, in this book, are you making any recommendations about having access to Windows, Linux, and OS X as part of the development process (for testing layouts)? If so, then it may be useful to indicate that on OS X, you have access to built-in screen-reading software that works rather well (and is far cheaper than a JAWS license — heck, for the price of JAWS, you could pick up a Mac Mini for browser testing and get the screen reader for free!)