Shayna Productions - Sandy Clark

From the Home Page Reader Mailing List an announcement that IBM is discontinuing Home Page Reader.

For those of you who didn't know, Home Page Reader in its latest iteration (3.04) was a viable and inexpensive way of screen reader testing. It didn't do as much as Jaws or Window Eyes which are the big two screen readers, but it also was much more inexpensive (just over $100 versus the $799-$1,200 for the other two). It was a reasonable alternative to testing.

With the discontinuation of Home Page Reader, the developer has some options, but they aren't great. The most viable option seems to be that both Jaws and Window Eyes offer demo versions of their software for testing purposes. The bad news is that they are time sensitive (40 minutes for Jaws and 30 minutes for Window Eyes) and require a complete reboot.

A more palatable way of dealing with this seems to be to install these programs within a Virtual Machine, thereby giving yourself an option of rebooting the virtual machine instead of your entire computer. I've spent some time doing this in the last weekend and while it wasn't an easy install, it is a solution, since a Virtual Machine will use your sound system.

1. VMWare creates a player that you can install on your computer which will run virtual machines. The player will run on any Windows or Linux machine.
2. Create a virtual machine at Easy VMX, here you create an environment for the type of system you want to run. Note, this doesn't create the Operating system for you, but simply the machine that will run the operating system. You can create operating systems for Windows, Linux, but I didn't see a Mac OS there. (No matter. Jaws and Window Eyes will only run under Win2000 or WinXP anyway).
3. After installing VMWare and opening your virtual machine, now you need to install the operating system (for which you must have a valid operating system cd or install). This is where I ran into major problems. I first tried to install it via my regular working laptop. It kept getting stalled. So I ended up installing it on my file server and then simply moved the directory when the install was done to my laptop. This worked well. Make sure you have network and internet connectivity.
4. Download and install into the virtual machine the demo versions of Window Eyes and Jaws

Also make sure to download Firefox into your Virtual Machine if you haven't done so.

Tutorials on using Jaws can be found

• Freedom Scientific - Documentation
• TACITUS
• HTCTU

Tutorials for Window Eyes can be found at

• GW Micro - Documentation

Keep in mind that neither of these screen readers show the text as being read (which I found extremely helpful with Home Page Reader). For the best testing, learn the software, turn off your screen and attempt to use your web site with only your keyboard and your ears.

For the best testing for screen reader use, its actually best to let someone who uses it all the time test. For this, you might want to consider hiring someone with disabilities to do your testing. Of course that isn't always an option, in which case, consider spending some time learning these two programs.