Access for blind users? 1

[sohunter]

Does anybody know if "Jaw" - a screen reader (converts to voice) interprets Access forms? It would need to to read all important text on forms...from captions of buttons and labels, to text fields.

Somebody is interested in my making them a very simple info/referral database that could be used by the blind.

Input will just be by mouse or keyboard (blind users won't edit data.)

I welcome any tips or knowledge here. thank you, Sonya

 

[Netgainx]

Jaws is essentially the industry standard screen reader which is capable of handling a variety of situations/applications. The ability to customize is high, and I believe you should be able to use it successfully with Access, in a limited implementation.

Some problem areas typically include presentation of tables, use of symbols that do not have text interpretation included, and unstructured tab order.

You might want to check out the uiaccess.com web site for more help.

Mike

 

[Garridon]

Here are some additional links that should provide some good information on accessibility:

Microsoft Office XP Accessibility Information:

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/officexp/features.htm

Software Accessibility (a useful article on things to do)

http://www-3.ibm.com/able/accesssoftware.html

Fact Sheet on Accessibility:

http://www.afb.org/info_document_view.asp?documentid=198

The Section 508 Web site (though it covers primarily Web sites, there's a page of links that are useful. Do take the Web tutorial because it gives you verbal examples of how users hear the screen reader).

http://www.section508.gov

Tips:

The hardest thing will be understanding the difficulties of usability for someone who can't see. As an example, one of our web masters had a link in a title. Below the title, it said, "Click the title for a summary." A person with a screen reader would have to go through the title to the next line to understand what the link was for and then go back up to the title to get to the desired information.

Keep your fields and buttons in a logical, consistent order. Make sure you label each one properly (I have a database where they abbreviated to Correspondence to Corres). All the fields should have a label--I've also seen references that the label should have a colon following it.

And, of course, have keyboard shortcuts for each field.

You can also do a "skip navigation" in the database as well, for places where the user may need to jump to a particular section (i.e., a status field) instead of going through all the fields each time when they only need to update the one field (a screen reader would go through each thing every time). A button with a GoTo for the field would work.

Check on anything on database usability as well. There's a lot of good information in usability that can be applied to accessibility as well.

 

[Kraeg]

You could add your own voice functions; you could have it read out whatever you want it to whenever you want it to.

I can't recall how I went about it (I'd have to look it up), but I did do a small test database that greeted the user by name when they started the database, and said farewell when they shut it down.

 

[sohunter]

Thanks to you all. Advice taken... and I'm checking out the links.
Sonya