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Neil Williams wrote: | |>Supplementarily, may I ask : |>(1) seriously, what browsers do visually-impaired users have, or prefer ? | | | Not many are available to ordinary users - they may rely on specialised | hardware like voice synthesisers and braille output.
Hmm the majority of the visually impaired are probably using IE, with either the standard accessibility features from Microsoft, or third party screen reader (JAWS is pretty common from what I gather).
Braille devices are pretty rare, because very few people are visually impaired sufficiently to need it, and of those many don't know braille.
| Generally, if you site is usable in Lynx (the text-only browser), a | text-to-speech user will find it significantly easier than any other website | out there.
I think the more motivating case for degrading well to text is making a page accessible to "search engines", lets appeal to self-interest first.
But also many other low end web access devices still degrade pages deliberately to conserve either bandwidth, screen space, or some other scarce resource, not to mention attempts to make hands-free web access for people who spend too long driving.
| If you ensure that every image has a *descriptive* alt tag that is actually | relevant and useful, if you ensure that the site can be navigated with all | images turned *OFF* and if you allow those without access to a mouse to skip | easily between sections without waiting for a text-to-speech browser to | render 20 lines of introduction that the user heard last time, you are | getting the idea.
When you have heard Jaws read through a few web pages you quickly appreciate that a page that looks clean in Lynx is a godsend for those relying of text to speech. Indeed a lot of the cruff we sighted people can just glance and ignore gets laboriously read out.
"aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash dub dub dub dot google dot com forward slash"
I got enough grief from one member on the blind Linux list for using PGP inline signatures which one of the members email clients didn't "hide" from him. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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