WebAnywhere – A Screen Reader On-the-Go

Several years ago I was teaching a class at a local training center. One of my students, who worked for the Help Desk department at a large enterprise in Seattle, was blind. At the end of the week the student wanted to take the exam associated with the course. This required that a custom screen-reader software be installed on the computer where the exam was installed. We called Prometric who administers the exams for Microsoft. Prometric is a company that is well-known in the Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) community for their lousy service. So it was no surprise when they said they can’t really help because they don’t know what to do. Then we called Microsoft to see if they can help us accommodate the blind student so he could take the exam. Microsoft said we need to call Prometric because they are the ones who are responsible for the exams. We eventually ended up working a solution and the student was able to take the exam. The student missed the exam by only one question……ouch! That was very disappointing. But he was the only student bright and daring enough in that class to dare take the exam at the end of the week.

So when I read about this screen reader called WebAnywhere it caught my eye. I don’t know if it would help in the situation that I described above but it seems to be a great tool for the blinds to access the Web.

WebAnywhere is a Web-based screen reader for the Web developed by University of Washington computer science graduate Jeffrey Bigham. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and enables blind people to access the Web from any computer that has a sound card.

With WebAnywhere there is no need to purchase any software. Best of all, WebAnywhere will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.

If you are looking into WebAnywhere, you might also be interested in this white paper.