I am starting to develop a site which requires good accessibility for blind people. Which are the appropriate software solutions which use voice to interpret what is written on the browser screen? Other problem would be updating. I need to have the text content which would be shown to be interpreted to sound and I’m interested in the best available open-source solutions and best practices. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
I am starting to develop a site which requires good accessibility for blind people.
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Text to speech software
One of the most common text-to-speech solutions for web browsing is JAWS. There are alternatives like Window Eyes and Web Anywhere. There’s also light-weight browser addons like vozMe.
Authoring accessible web pages
You don’t need special software to author accessible web pages. A basic text editor is all that’s required, but something like EditPlus (Windows) will of course make it easier.
Start reading the Getting Started with Web Accessibility and basically just keep with the best practice of authoring HTML and follow the HTML specification. It contains a lot of information on each element and its attributes and how they should be used to increase accessibility.
The authorative specification of what should be done to meet the highest level of accessibility on the web is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. I’d recommend reading the WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference before delving into the specification, though, since the specificaiton itself is rather heavy. It’s great for diving deeper into certain issues, but reading it from beginning to end is a bit of an undertaking.
While the support for it might still not be great, you can make your web pages easier to understand for text-to-speech engines, with aural style sheets that indicate how portions of the markup should be read. Opera has a good guide on getting to know voice which is a good starting point.