True Acessibility Testing: Where are the developer tools?

I work on web sites. I am not visually-impaired and do not personally know anyone visually-impaired, but I'd like to make my sites accessible to those who are. And although there is much lip service paid to accessibility, there seem to be very few tools to truly test accessibility.

Developers know that the only way to determine whether code works is to, well, test it. Although I learn and use best practices for making accessible sites ("alt" in image tags), I don't know how accessible my sites are because I can't afford to test them with expensive browsers for the hearing-impaired.

I wouldn't do time-costly audio testing, and I don't need a full-featured auditory browser. Just a text readout of the audio would be fine. So I contacted the people who make the JAWS browser (seems like the most popular of its kind) to see if they offer a free program to test sites against JAWS. It is in their interest to ensure that sites work well with their product, after all. But they have no such program: they suggested I buy JAWS to do testing. OK, that is not a possibility.

So I searched the web for programs to simulate the auditory browser and the only thing I could find was a Firefox extension called Fangs. It's not bad, but the latest version came out in 2006 and is pretty minimalistic.

So I wonder: what am I missing here? How is it that verifying a site's accessibility by actual testing is not done? Or perhaps there is a program that does what I'm asking. Any suggestions?

UPDATE: I have discovered the Thunder screen reader. Apparently "screen reader" is the term for these. Who'd have figured it?

Corn Ethanol is not only a joke, but causes massive food price increases...

You can't make corn without petroleum for fertilizer and tractors. Corn ethanol gets maybe 34% more energy than what goes into it. But Congress is mandating and subsidizing ethanol use. You get less gas mileage from ethanol. But you can't stop the mandates or subsidies because corn-growing states love that Congress pushes ethanol.

• Editorial Cartoon about Haiti

And now corn prices are creating huge food price increases, and not only in corn, because corn is used as animal feed.

I'm sorry, your domain name is already taken.

"New Domains -- Just $5.95/yr!" Reading that makes me cringe. Sure, I'm glad I can save cash, but even still, I'm don't like it.

Why? The supply of decent domain names is inherently limited, and it seems to be running low. Thought of a good name for your new site? Don't worry, an ad farm beat you to it. Or a registrar's "parked page" for someone who hasn't done anything with their domain yet. Or a single "Site Coming Soon!" line. Or, on rare occasion, an actual website.

Why all this useful web space wasted? The obvious causes: ad profits, a site idea that was never really that serious, or because some fool wants to be the next Jack Marshall.

But the real culprit is the mechanism that allows the ad page making a couple bucks a month to be profitable, that allows the dude who thinks "maybe I'll make a site around this cool name sometime" to grab it for a few dollars, that allows the next site scalper to go on a binge. It is low domain prices.

One might think that domains can switch hands and the market will adjust things. A fair point. But is the reasonable price necessarily going to be enough money for the unused domain owner who still dreams of making The Next Great Site, or maybe scoring a few thou' from a Web2.0 startup who wants it more?

It'd be much easier to register the site yourself at a rate above what the casual domain purchaser would pay, but below what they might charge you. After all, if you're putting in the effort and server costs into making a real blog or website, $6 a year is a pittance--you can go a little higher.

I'm not saying that higher domain prices would shut down the ad-farm moguls like Kevin Ham. It doesn't have to, because his really profitable names probably aren't the ones that most businesses and creators want. His portfolio seems to be, firstly, generic domains like greeting.com or weddingshoes.com that only a significant business could afford, and that only online businesses would name themselves. And besides, these names have already long belonged to someone. Secondly, he registers typo names that no real website would want.

But, then again, looking at the math from the Business 2.0 article: "Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue." This 300,000 probably contains more than just generics and typos.

Well, $70,000,000 / 300,000 names = $233 per name per year. But with sites such as weddingshoes.com earning him $9,100 per year, some other domains probably earn much less the average, so a greater yearly fee might release them to the public.

I'm not saying I know who would collect a higher rate or what it would be used for. I don't know why registration used to cost $100; putting a name in a list isn't rocket science. I have no real proposal, but am just making the point that higher-cost domain registration might solve some problems.

Well, now I have to confess that I am part of the problem. I had a couple decent domain names that I never used, but I decided to let them expire. On the other hand, I still have NewsWick.com. Don't ask.