Rob Larsen

If you're already working on accessible sites this may not be of interest to you, but if you're not and you've wondered what your web pages sound like when read by a screen reader, then this link is for you.

I know when I first started paying attention to accessibility and wanted to understand how the changes I was making would sound to users with screen readers I was initially confused by the myriad options and scared off by the cost of some of the tools. I eventually worked through it, with a couple of free tools, but it took some digging. This web-based service from the University of Washington clears up any confusion:

WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On the Go

WebAnywhere is a non-visual interface to the web that requires no new software to be downloaded or installed.It works right in the browser, which means you can access it from any computer, even heavily locked-down public computer terminals.WebAnywhere enables you to interact with the web in a similar way to how you may have used other screen readers, such as JAWS or Window-Eyes,

I haven't shared random bits of Internet with you for months. That changes right now.

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In the post announcing that Yahoo! search results now has natural language support, the YDN blog offers up two audio samples that illustrate a screen reader reading mixed language text with and without the lang attribute. As you can plainly hear, the lang="fr" attribute makes a great difference in the performance of the screen reader when handling mixed language text.

As they point out, the attribute also allows search engines to more easily parse stop words, so there's an SEO benefit as well.

The lesson here? Polyglots unite! In using the lang attribute.

(Now I run off to add it myself to all the French,Italian, etc. phrases I've got littered around the site.)

Colorblind Web Page Filter