Screen Reader Easier Than Magnifiers

I had the pleasure of sitting with Rebecca Stallings of the Asheville Services for the Blind to gain her perspective of JAWS with Web 2.0 sites.  Rebecca gave me a tour of JAWS and we visited a few sites.  What I found interesting was her amazing proficiency with JAWS. I wondered aloud, “How could this be?  How could she be more proficient with JAWS than I am with a screen magnifier?”.  She gave me some great observations.

1. Screen readers keep everything within context.  Magnifiers lose context.  JAWS can provide the user with immediate lists of links, images, form fields and other web artifacts.  She can get that information instantly.  The screen magnifier user cannot.  
2. Jaws uses keyboard shortcuts for every access of the web page.  Magnifier users have to move the focus and hunt for things within a new context.
3. Magnifier users often are not aware they are missing information because they are only viewing a small part of the screen.  JAWS users can know all artifacts across a web page, (provided its is accessible).

There is the rub.  Not everyone values accessibility.  Rebecca and I depend upon it.  It would be great if others could design and implement web pages for accessibility.

Section 508 & SEO, Good For Each Other

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural algorithms.  Because effective SEO may require changes to HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design.  The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site design, menus, content and forms that are easy to optimize.  ”Spamdexing” or the use of “link farms” to draw traffic to a web site from search engines degrade the relevence of search results and the user experience.

In many ways designing a web site for SEO improves the user experience as well as makes the web site more readable for visually impaired users who use screen readers.  Think about what search engines do to index a page and what a screen reader for the visually impaired do to read a screen.  Both the search engine and screen reader depend upon text to do their jobs.

1. Google and Jaws use alt tags and HTML tags to read pages for SEO and speech to text for the visually impaired respectively.
2. The same elements that a screen reader does not pick up are also ignored by search engine spiders, namely graphical images.
3. Clear and well written text is easiest for a user of a screen reader to understand and it also makes for better natural language rankings in a search engine.  Search engines use tools to analyze the language in a paragraph of text for ranking purposes.  Better written text will naturally rank better in a search and will be more understandable to a visually impaired listener.

Want to improve your SEO? Make your sie Section 508 compliant.

Tags: Accessibility Standards, Visually Impaired