# Accessibility

The purpose of this activity is to experience what it's like to use a web page with screen reader software.

Go to WebAnywhere, a free, public screen reader implemented as a web proxy. Look over the instructions (particularly the keyboard shortcuts!) and play with it a bit on WebAnywhere's home page.

Then use WebAnywhere to visit this page (note that you won't see anything, but you'll hear it), and try to answer these questions:

1. What page is this?
2. Who is profiled today?
3. What is today's spotlight?

Assuming you figured out the answer to #1, now go to the real web page and see how easy it is to answer these questions visually by comparison.

## Other Resources

WebAIM (an organization at Utah State University) has created several good simulations of accessibility problems.

Mac OS X has a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver (which you can turn on using System Preferences / Universal Access). For Windows, the screen readers JAWS and Window Eyes both have time-limited trial versions that you can install to see what screen reading is like.

ADesigner helps you check the degree of accessibility of a web page to a screen reader. Among its nice features is a visual display (for the sake of sighted designers) of the time cost of reaching each HTML node in the page using a typical screen reader.