For the this week's activity, we were introduced to the open-source screen reader WebAnywhere developed by the University of Washington. WebAnywhere is a web-tool designed to assist individuals with reading website content.
The service itself is fairly easy to use but is limited to online content. WebAnywhere was designed to be, as the university describes, a web-based screen reader that, "requires no special software to be installed on the client machine [to] enable blind people access to the web from any computer." Since the technology is web-based, it will run on any computer operating system that supports a web browser. Users simply type, or copy and paste, a website address (URL) and the site then loads within the WebAnywhere service.
I was pretty impressed with my experience. WebAnywhere worked very well despite it's simplicity. The service performs well on professionally built websites where accessibility is a concern. However, with that said, it performs best on simpler sites that are highly organized. I visited my blog and I noticed some formatting issues appeared which disrupted the screen reader. Grammatical content such as ellipses [...] and symbols such as the number sign/pound symbol [#] affected the way content was read which ultimately affects the experience some individuals could have while visiting a website.
I was also impressed upon my reflection that people actually use this technology and are using it efficiently. I know this service is used and a blessing to those who are visually impaired, but I personally found it hard to understand. I'm sure visually impaired individuals have heightened hearing skills and I imagine my difficulties relied on my ability to read versus my ability to listen, which is something I have obviously taken for granted. I did find it easier to decipher if I closed my eyes and wore headphones to focus on hearing the produced audio.
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