Alternative Nonvisual Web Browsing Techniques

People with vision impairments typically use screen readers to browse the Web. To facilitate nonvisual browsing, web sites must be made accessible to screen readers, i.e., all the visible elements in the web site must be readable by the screen reader. But even if web sites are accessible screen reader users may not find them easy to use and/or easy to navigate. For example, locating the desired information may require a tedious linear search of the webpage that involves listening to a lot of irrelevant content. These issues go beyond web accessibility and directly impact web usability. Several techniques have been reported in the accessibility literature for making Web usable for screen reading. This chapter is a review of these techniques.