Hi! My name's Chris Edwards and I'm the Senior Technical Officer at RVIB.
I'm using here to access the World Wide Web, Jaws, which is a screen reader program, and Eloquence, which is a software voice synthesizer. A screen reader is basically an application, just like any other computer application, that runs in the background and interprets what's happening on the screen, and verbalizes it into something a blind person can understand.
Action: Chris browses the web.
You can speed up the voice or slow it down.
Action: Chris demonstrates the voice options in eloquence.
The World Wide Web offers vision impaired people and totally blind people, fantastic access to information.
When information is put electronically, it saves someone actually reading out information to them or putting it on audio-cassette. Basically using software like JAWS, someone can go into a WEB site, and look up their own information and have it read back to them.
While JAWS can do some re-formatting of pages, a lot of people who use the WEB don't have such facilities, and will be accessing the WEB through text-based browsers or using other technologies that cannot re-format the page. So it's very very important that WEB pages are designed right from the start in an accessible manner.