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This is a demonstration of screen reader software.
I'm using the jaws for Windows
screen reading software. It's a very commonly used
type of screen reader. What it does is it reads the text of a web page
out loud. So I've opened up Internet Explorer on a Windows Vista machine.
I've turned the volume way up on my computer so I hope you can hear this.
I'm going to start Jaws and let you hear what it sounds like
for someone who has a visual impairment or blindness
and they rely on these machines. This is kind of what they would hear.
I'm going to start with the top os this web page. [The screen reader is reading the text on the page]
[The screen reader is still reading the text]
Okay so hopefully you were able to hear that.
That's what a screen reader does. Now, Jaws is a very commonly
used
screen reading software. But it only runs on Windows.
So what if you're on a Mac. Well you can search the web and look for a screen
reader. I had a hard time finding
a good one. So we have an alternative.
We have a tool which is an extension or an add-on
for Firefox called Fangs. So that should make sense... We are using Jaws for the
screen reader and Fangs is an emulator.
It puts it in text format. So if you have installed fangs
and that was on the syllabus and linked from the assignments page
then when you click the Tools menu you should find Fangs
in the menu list. Now if you don't see it there then it's not installed or
maybe you need to reinstall it.
But what Fangs will do is
show us what a screen reader would see
essentially and puts it in text form. So
this web page will
be interpreted like this by a screen reader. So it would start reading. This page
has four headings and 13 lengths... accessibility hot links --
Internet Explorer and so forth. So this gives you a
text representation of what a screen reader would do with that page
so you can tell pretty quickly whether or not your page will make sense to
someone
with blindness or other visual impairments who
require a screen reader to access
the content on the page. Now if it's all mixed up in here, then there's a problem
with the web page design and its not
accessible. So that's what we're doing with Fangs. We are using that to
take a look at the page and see if
the information there can be accessed by a screen reader and what that would look
like.
So that's Jaws and Fangs in a nutshell.
Now again if you don't have Fangs installed
and you don't have the link before you, try doing a google search for the
Fang
extension for Firefox. I will show you where I got it.
It was from this standards
schmandards website. They have a place to install Fangs right there.
That is
at www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs/
That will get you
to the download page for Fangs
for Firefox. Go ahead and install that and you can test your own page
whether or not you can run Jaws (because it only runs on Windows again)...
you can still test your pages and see if the information
is going to be interpreted in a meaningful way
by screenwriters. Okay well that's it for this presentation.
Thank you for watching!