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Accessibility Angles

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Firefox Extension emulates screen readers

This is great! Even the name is fun. Fangs, an Open Source extension for Mozilla's Firefox, gives a text version of a page emulating the JAWS screen reader.
I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent listening to pages in JAWS, the popular screen reader from Freedom Scientific. This doesn't replace the need for JAWS testing - this simply emulates the "Say All" command from JAWS - but it certainly reduces a lot of tedious work listening to pages. I'd rather scan FANGS for obvious blunders on the page, then do actual JAWS testing for pages with complex scripting or other features to test. I just looked at my own page design and saw a major oversight -- time for some redesign of the Blogger template.
The version I downloaded today, version .80, has added new features -- a tab with the list of links and a tab with the list of headings. This makes it really easy to see what a good job (NOT!) I have done naming blog entries. Well, I have been at it for a month, so there is lots to learn.

For more information: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fangs/

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