Testing with a Voice or Text-only Browser

If you don't have handy access to a voice browser, you can use Lynx, a free text-only browser, or Delorie's online Lynx Viewer, for preliminary testing. For comprehensive testing, the W3C recommends testing with a text-only browser and a voice browser. (W3C, Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility, Web Accessibility Initiative, W3C (November 14, 2002).)

Check that web site navigation is available and works properly

If your web site uses images—including image maps—for navigation purposes, text hyperlinks should appear in their places (via <alt> attribute text, and possibly also in the <title> attribute text, if needed). If you use Flash or Java applets for navigation, your site should include alternative text navigation links to help ensure accessibility.

Helping Everyone get Around
Keep in mind that this approach also helps search engine bots to crawl and index your web site. For more on optimizing your web site for search engine crawlers, see Chapter 11, Web Site Optimization.

Check all hyperlinks

Check that decorative images don't appear in text-only browsers and aren't read by voice browsers

As we discussed above, all decorative images, such as bullets and design-related images, should have blank <alt> attributes so that text-only browsers and voice browsers ignore them.

Check that the information is presented in a way that's comprehensible when read serially

Lynx allows you to simulate serial access, so that you can make sure the information you've presented is understandable to users of voice and text-only browsers. (Joe Clark, Building Accessible Websites (Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 2003), 236.)

Test form controls

Figure 14.3 depicts the testing of an accessibility-friendly form with Lynx 2.85

Figure 14.3. Testing a form in Lynx