J-1: Creating Better Connections: Access to Website Content for the Sight-Impaired
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
8:45:00 AM - 10:15:00 AM
Tools for making your website more accessible:
Separating Presentation (the look & feel) from the Content of your website will make it easier for you to make your site accessible:
- Makes it easier for text to speech readers to handle the content.
- Better for the webmaster in the long run, because if your content is not application specific (html) you can use it for other things than just a website (brochure, printer friendly documents, website to calendar or vice versa).
- There are several useful tools for this. We currently use Zope ( http://www.zope.org ) at the University of Tulsa (http://www.utulsa.edu/law/)
Betsie (BBC Education Text to Speech Internet Enhancer)
- Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/betsie/
- Developer's site at: http://betsie.sourceforge.net/
- Used at http://www.utulsa.edu/law/ - click "Text Only" in upper left of page, and at our library website at http://www.law.utulsa.edu/library.
- Created in 1998 by the BBC
- Is a Perl script, which is easy to install & maintain (with some knowledge of Perl).
- Betsie parses web pages for your web browser or text reader. It removes all images & formatting so that you only see the text of the page. The administrator of Betsie can also change its settings so that navigation bars always appear last, instead of requiring the viewer/reader to wade through the navigation material for each page before getting to content.
- Betsie is not magic:
- Tables, and frames will not display correctly (Currently replaces all table tags with < br >).
- Do not depend on color or images to convey information (Images display only the Alt tag, or lacking that, nothing.).
- Betsie might fail with bad html - validate your page.
- Betsie is free. From the Betsie site - "- it's free if you want to use it but you can't sell it."