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?
