- From: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>
- Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 10:27:15 -0400
- To: "'Web Accessibility Initiative'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
- Cc: "'Anne Pemberton'" <apembert@crosslink.net>, "'Jonathan Chetwynd'" <jonathan@signbrowser.free-online.co.uk>
Dear Anne P., Jonathan C, et al., A while back there was discussion on this list about how to best make web pages accessible to non-readers. I would be most interested in hearing if any the products below have been useful for general purpose web browsing by persons with severe cognitive impairments. I have summarized the screen readers and special purpose browsers that were suggested, along with my experience. Henter Joyce JAWS (Job Access With Speech) for Windows (JfW) is a general purpose screen reader which is both reasonably easy to use and powerful. It is very popular (as far as screen readers go) and the authors have gone to great length to ensure that current version are fully compatibility with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 and latter. Since this is a product designed for the blind, the speech it generates closely follows the focus as indicated by the keyboard. Using the Windows operating system from the keyboard ONLY is non-trivial. My experience is that mouse-oriented users find that the speech does not follow where there eyes are looking, and therefore they have limited success with JfW. http://www.hj.com/JFW/JFW.html AI Squared ZoomText Extra is a screen magnification program, but it can be run in 1x mode and does include speech. It is mouse-oriented, so while it is not quite vocal enough for a totally blind person, it can work well for people needing speech reinforcement. My experience is that it is not quite easy enough to use for persons with severe cognitive impairments. In particular, to read a whole document one invokes "DocReader" which strips away all graphics and does not read the current web page in place nor in context. http://www.aisquared.com/products/zx.htm Productivity Works pwWebSpeak is a special purpose browser designed for the blind. I have used it only a little, but I would think that it is not useful for this population because (from what I saw of it) it strips away all graphics from a HTML document. http://www.prodworks.com/pww32.htm IBM's Home Page Reader is an add-on for Netscape Navigator that provides speech only for that product. I have not tried it. Does it leave the graphics in place? Knowing the other products better, this is the one (by virtue of elimination) that I have the most optimism for in addressing the non-reading web browsing audience. http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/hpr.htm All of the above products have demonstration versions available for downloading. Thank you very much for your time. Bruce Bailey http://www.dors.state.md.us/
Received on Thursday, 14 October 1999 10:29:03 UTC