A Study Of Web Accessibility And Usability Of Screen Reader For Visual Impaired Users

With the development of World Wide Web, it has become more and more important. It should be a service universally and be accessed by people as many as possible. But the most websites nowadays are designed mainly for the common people and common conditions and do not consider those special groups and needs. Especially for the visual impaired, it is more difficult to surfing on line. In order to learn and to improve the current circumstances of visual impaired users accessing to the internet, the author did some researching on it from the angle of screen readers.During experimental research, the author had perused amounts of literature and catch on the conception of accessibility. The author was tried to learn the visual impaired users' characteristics and screen readers. In order to learn and to improve the current circumstances of visual impaired users accessing to the internet, the author carried on the researching on visual impaired users' experience of accessing the internet to learn the circumstances and to give some advices on the design of the software. The author also tried some new methods of reading the webpage.In this paper, the conception of accessibility, the significance of studying web accessibility for the handicapped, especially for the impaired were provided. Based on these studies, the researches are carried out on two aspects: (1) A tentative study of the way of reading webpage content by analyzing webpage codes. In order to test whether it is helpful for non-visual Web access, the author developed a browse tool based on the method and found out it was helpful through user testing. (2) Visual impaired users' experience of accessing the internet. The conclusion of the research and direction of improve web accessibility were pointed out in the last part of this paper.