Creates a complete text version of your website 'on the fly'
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Creates a complete text version of your website 'on the fly' |
| BACKGROUND: To comply with current disability legislation, webdesigners now need to take accessibility into account. It's a time-consuming but necessary part of the job. Trouble is, websites designed before legislation came into effect - and we'd estimate that it's the MAJORITY of sites - didn't do this. What happens to all those sites? Well, ideally they'd need a complete overhaul, but in many cases it's impractical.  As an alternative, you could create a version of every page using pure text. This would allow surfers with disabilities to read the information without hassle, but would need to be updated whenever the main pages are edited. What if there was a way to accomplish the task automatically and quickly? There is - it's name is 'Betsie', software developed by BBC Education and the RNIB, which 'transcodes' standard pages into text-only information on the fly. Although it's not as comprehensive as designing a website with accessibility at the top of the agenda, it can certainly go a fair way to making an existing site useable by blind or partially-sighted users and therefore comply with current legislation (as well as being genuinely helpful). WHAT IT DOES: Take a look at the software in action - click this link. The new window which opens will run a Perl script on this site which translates any page it's called from into a text-only version. It strips graphics and Javascript content from the page and rearranges the plain content into easily-read chunks with all the hyperlinks intact. It even lets you know whether links are to other pages within the same site, or external. Not only that, it also allows the user to alter the text size, font and even the text and background colours to help people who a need high-contrast display. Because the software works by transcoding the page it's linked from, it always displays the latest information without you having to edit two versions of your page. What's more, it can be used in the same hyperlink format on every page of your site - no complicated setting up or variations for every page. You can find out more on the technical page. HOW WE CHOSE THIS SOLUTION: We originally decided to seek an accessibility solution for our own website design clients. The sites we had designed for them dated back to around 1998 - well before accessibility legislation - and many of them were still in use. We evaluated a software solution from an American company who also make accessibility products which plug into a well-known website design program. The price, at around £600 per domain per year, was extremely high - too high for our clients to be expected to pay. Then we found 'Betsie' which worked in a very similar fashion. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to run the software successfully on the Windows-based hosting we used. From this experience, it also became apparent that other website owners might need a way to use the software independently of their existing host. We therefore set about looking into a way to provide that facility, using the Betsie software in a cost-effective manner.  Betsie
is a free-to-use script, so there are no site-licenses to worry about. You
are also free to download the software from the BBC Education site and install
it on your own server. But for website owners who don't have the experience
to do this, or the technical facilities to be able to run the script, we
can supply the software pre-installed and configured to work on your site.
All we charge is a standard installation fee (we pre-program the software
to work just with your domain) and an annual charge to cover server resources
and bandwidth.Find out some technical info next... |
