Fangs: The Screen Reader Emulator Plugin for Mozilla

http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?show/fangs

A few years back now my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon brought a blind student with him to one of our BC Ed Tech gatherings to have him demonstrate accessing a course within a CMS via the screen reader JAWS. JAWS is, as far as I know, a market leader and often held up as a de jure standard for accessibility.

What the demonstration showed me and others was that, even though on a technical level the CMS (in this case WebCT) was accessible through JAWS (e.g. JAWS could read it and the student could access different parts of the course) it was absolutely UN-USABLE – a streamingly long scream of text and navigation links one after another that even for the student, who was used to both JAWS and WebCT, presented difficulties. (To be fair, this isn’t an anti-WebCT screed, and from what I know they have made improvements in this regard).

The point is, meeting accessbility standards is a bare minimum, but it doesn’t make the content usable for those using assistive technolgoies.

And here’s where this plug-in comes in. The free, open source ‘Fangs’ plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox avoids one of the challneges designers have with creating accessibly usable pages, which is that JAWS has a license cost associated with it and so many people simply assume that if it conforms to W3C WCAG or Section 508 guidelines, that’s enough. It’s not, and it’s a case where ‘seeing’ (actually ‘hearing’) is believing. ‘Fangs’ allows you to read web pages more like how the users of an assistive reader will hear them. And trust me, usually it ain’t pretty. – SWL