WINGS Accesible Browser

The following list of browser capabilities was generated through experimentation with current browsers and HTML authoring techniques as a first attempt to inform the WINGS staff of what would make a browser accessible. This list does not take into account the possibility of in-home use and talking fingertip access to touchscreens (see Vanderheiden, 1995) which would require further investigation.

1. Screen Reader Capabilities and Non-verbal Audible Cues

Non-verbal audible cues help the user navigate to and identify items on the screen more efficiently. This list includes functionality that screen readers could perform that would facilitate better speech production. However, this is not an exhaustive list of current screen reader capabilities.

1b. The presence of a tone or some other cue which notifies the user that a boundary between windows, frames, etc. has been crossed.

1c. The ability to notify the reader of the positioning of horizontal and vertical information such as the existence of different levels of white space in an outlined document and the occurrence of a new line, paragraph, or title.

1d. The ability to include and configure audible cues. For example: a clock ticking as files are being downloaded.

1e. The ability to turn speech on/off.

1f. The ability to turn show sounds on/off and show text alerts instead.

1g. The ability to control the volume, pitch, and rate of the voice.

2. Graphic and Text Display

The following user-adjustable formatting parameters enhance visual and audible rendering of information.

2b. The ability to display meta information of data formats, such as the description field of Portable Network Graphics (PNG), the URLs of a client side image map or the AXES and AXIS attributes of tables (HTML 3.0). Currently, the most common form of this is the alt-text attribute of in-line images.

2c. The ability to produce a page layout summary. For example: This page has X images, Y header ones, etc. This could also include information about the author, last date updated, etc. OR produce an outline of the page, making it easier to identify changes in header or level. Make the level of detail adjustable (like More 3.1)

2d. The ability to change the font, color, and size of buttons and menus.

2e. The ability to turn autoload images "off" and show alt-text in their place.

2f. The ability for the user to overwrite HTML author settings of background color, text link colors and font size.

2g. If FRAMES are supported, the ability to turn them on/off

2h. If BLINKing is supported, the ability to turn it on/off.

2i. The ability to turn placeholding images on/off.

3. Controls

The following items facilitate navigation on a keyboard-dependent system. Hot-keys are not specified in this document.

3b. The ability to process different size "chunks." For example: tab through the page by links, by links visited, by paragraph, by header size, etc.

3c. The ability to read each cell of a table along with both the row and column title of that cell.

3d. The ability to tab through and highlight current links on a page.

References

Vanderheiden, Gregg. (1995). The Talking Fingertip Techniques.

Available: http://trace.wisc.edu/TEXT/KIOSK/T_FINGER.HTM