Accessibility testing on a budget
You're blind. You decide to get a computer. You decide to get online. You discover that to get your computer to speak to you you're going to have to shell out hundreds of dollars, despite the fact that you do not have a full-time job as people find it difficult to justify employing a blind person. It all seems a little unfair.
Sound familiar? No, it probably doesn't because you're probably not this person. You're probably a web developer on easonable wages with perfect vision. However, if you want to build pages that are accessible, you really need to test them on tools that blind users are using on a day-to-day basis. And here's where you start to find things in common with our character above - you also think that the price of screen-reading technology is exorbitant!
So how do you find out how your site sounds? Without dipping in to the wallet, here are some suggestions about how you can test your pages.