 My name is Cheryl Burgstahler and I direct accessible technology services at the University of Washington in Seattle. Our services also reach out to our branch campuses in Baffle and Tacoma. My name is Hadi Rangan and I'm a member of IT accessibility team at the University of Washington. Using a screen reader. Hadi is an accessibility expert and he's also a user of accessible technology. He uses a refreshable Braille display and screen reading software that reads everything on the screen. I am blind and I use a screen reader program at home and here on everywhere. A screen reader program is a software that communicates with the operating system and conveys the information to me. Welcome, land, accessible pages, design features, office, and design officer. Even if you are reading as a sighted person, you do not read every content at the same speed. Sometimes you have to make a pause and then review what you have read and then digest the information. For us, it's the same thing. When we are reading, for example, a normal conversation, we can read it very fast. But when we are reading technical content, then we go a little slower, we make more pauses. Accessible University One. I have slowed down my screen reader program. Better. Ten in level one traffic accessible university. Better end. But if it is, for example, about email, I can go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. Make a notification. Show me the keyboard shortcuts button. I can go that fast. But it's not enough for Hadi to have a screen reader. Websites must be designed excessively in order for the screen reader to provide a full experience of the webpage. I would like to show you two pages that are visually pretty much consistent, identical. But one of them is accessible, one of them is not accessible. You will see in an inaccessible page how difficult it is when those accessibility features are not present. An accessible website. This is the accessible version of a fictional university that we have developed here. We call that accessible university. Here, for example, on this accessible page, I can ask my screen reader to show me the major component of the page. It tells me we have a banner section. We have a main menu section. And the main body. And then there is another region. And content information, which is the same as footer section. So, assuming the page has been developed correctly, I have a good idea about the major component of the page. An inaccessible website. Let me now go to see this page, the inaccessible version of this page. A home page, a mozilla file, an accessible university, a demo site, an accessible university. This looks pretty much the same as the other one, the accessible version. But here, when I ask my screen reader to convey the major component, it says the no region found. So, for me, practically, is that I have to read from top to bottom. And if those accessibility features are not present, everything has the same weight. So, there is no way for us to say that where a major section starts or where it ends. It is really not just the fact, reading the content. It is also about the navigation. We have to discover the page, and then that is the most time-consuming problem. Because, you know, once you know where you are, what you are reading, then it is usually fine. But the discovery process or navigation process is the most complicated process in an accessibility field. In order to do it, I have to read from top to bottom. Whereas in the accessible version, I could easily see what the major component was and then select the desired one and move to that section quickly. Headings is also a means to get information about the structure of the content. It gives me a good understanding, a good overview about the major or minor component of the content. So, I see that here. Welcome to Featured Stories Like Show 2, Accessible University 1. Accessible University itself is heading 1. And under that, we have Featured Stories Like Features Story, which is heading 2. It automatically conveys the information that this section is a subsection of the heading above. You know, see that also the overall get an outline of the page and the major sections of that. That is the difference between accessible and inaccessible. That screenwriter can only access the text that is presented on the screen. And so if someone just scans in a document and puts an image up on their website, that screenwriter is not going to be able to read that content. And so the web developer in that case needs to know to create all their materials so that they're accessible to a screenwriter. In other words, so that they can access the text for that screenwriter to read it aloud to a person who's blind. It's essential that people with disabilities have access to assistive technology, but that's not the end of the story. In order for them to be effective users of technology, the technology that other people develop like websites and software and PDF files and so forth must be designed in such a way that they can use it with their assistive technology. For more information about IT accessibility, consult uw.edu.accessibility. This video presentation was created with funding from UWIT. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2017, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.