62. Updating Screen Readers to Translate Web Content

Page layout information is often key to a full understanding of text presented on a page. The minimum requirement to comprehend a page involves understanding all the words on the screen. However, the blind may not achieve complete understanding of the most important points because these points may only be obvious from the way the words have been physically presented and placed on the page.

Most adaptive technologies were designed in the text-based DOS era and do not work well with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and Web browsers. Screen readers read the screen similar to the way a sighted user does ? left to right, top to bottom, one line at a time. Designed to translate text to speech, they work well with pure text content, but cannot translate much of the content on the Web and in applications with GUIs if page layout is due to the inaccessible presentation style.

The blind user can most likely deduce that the incoherent output is due to column formatting, but will not be able to understand the screen content. This problem can be resolved by presenting the information in an alternative format such as a list with three items in it, or by designing screen readers that can understand tables and columns. Many text-only screen readers are available, but very few are compatible with cyberspace.

Compatibility of screen readers with different versions of applications and operating systems is difficult to maintain because screen reader manufacturers cannot foresee future software developments and many software developers are not providing accessibility features. Most DOS screen readers supported a wide variety of strategies for navigating a document based upon text blocks such as next and previous character, word, line, sentence, paragraph, and screen. Existing Windows screen readers offer a limited selection of these features, and none permit searches based upon next sentence, paragraph, or title.