VI Guide's Assistive Technology page | Software and Web Accessibility

Assistive Technology | Software and Web Accessibility

Accessibility issues are concerned with how to make software and information, especially the Internet, accessible to individuals with low vision, blindness, color blindness, deafness, physical impairments, and language impairments. For instance, there are certain techniques that can be used when building a web page such as this, that make it more easily understood and "read" by a screen reader. There are also ways to make software packages such as Microsoft Word and Word Perfect more -- or less --accessible. It is important to keep up-to-date on this subject so that software makers and organizations setting universal standards are kept aware of how their changes (or lack thereof) can affect individuals with visual impairments.

Bobby

At the Bobby site, you can type in the URL of any web page. Bobby will then retrieve that page and analyze it and tell you if it has accessibility problems that could prevent it from displaying correctly on different web browsers. Lynx, a text-only browser, used by many blind web surfers, is among those supported.

Could Helen Keller Read Your Page?

Practical tips for web designers, to help them make their pages readable by all users. One it describes is "tag degradation" which a way of using tables in a web document, yet making them understood by a screen reader.

CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)

WGBH in Boston is the founder of descriptive video service (DVS), a technique for adding an extra audio track to videos and TV programs to provide its visually impaired audience with supplemental descriptions of visual activities occurring on-screen. This site contains information on that, as well as other projects for making web pages and other media accessible.

Guidelines for building accessible Web pages

This page, available under the Microsoft Accessibility site, discusses techniques to use or avoid to ensure a web page is accessible to people with disabilities.

Microsoft's Accessibility page

This site contains information on how Microsoft is making their software accessible and how developers using Microsoft programming tools can make their software accessible. It also contains links you can use to download text versions of some of their manuals, so that they can be translated into braille or read via a screen reader.

Universal Design, Principles & Guidelines

This site is part of the Trace R&D Center. It contains guidelines on addressing accessibility when designing HTML documents and web servers and describes enhancements that are needed in web browsers for better accommodation of accessibility issues.

WebABLE!

This site is a a project of the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation whose mission is to stimulate research and development of technologies which will ensure access to advanced information systems. Its accessibility database lists hundreds of Internet-based resources on accessibility.authoritative Web directory for disability-related internet resources. WebABLE!'s accessibility database lists hundreds of internet based resources on accessibility. , whose mission is to stimulate research and development of technologies which will ensure access to advanced information systems.

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