The Savvy Technologist

Check your accessibility

I usually recommend that Web designers use lynx to get an idea of how well their site will work for visitors who use screen readers. As a text-only browser, lynx quickly exposes overly complicated markup, images without alt tags, and other basic Web accessibility faux pas. Lynx is installed by default on most Linux distributions and Mac OS X, but Windows users will have to work a little harder to get it installed.

In a perfect world designers would use an actual screen reader to test their pages. Unfortunately, the software is pretty much Windows-only and quite expensive. JAWS for Windows, one of the most popular screen readers, costs almost $1,000 for the standard version. So what’s the budget-conscious Web designer to do? Install Firefox and the Fangs extension. When invoked from the browser’s context menu, Fangs “creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.” (View a screenshot.)

If you build Web pages for your school, add Fangs to your developer tool belt.