As a developer it is important to have a feel for what the user is getting out of your site. I found a good way to use a screen reader on any operating system (OS) without paying a dime. I am using Fire Vox. It utilizes the integrated screen reader application of any OS (Windows, MAC and Linux) and functions on your Firefox as an add-on. I tested it on a Windows XP and it worked pretty well. I got some choppiness in the sound but this is probably due to my old hardware. The only downfall for me is that I cannot easily turn it off. I would have liked to have this feature in the Fire Voxes options, but instead I have to go to the add-ons extensions list and completely disable it. Oh well, I’ll live

Although Firefox Accessibility Extension has similar features than the Web Developer add-on, it’s still pretty sweet. Not only does it give the user a toolbar, but also an extra heading on the menubar, between Tools and Help, which I personally prefer rather than having a bunch of toolbars taking up space on my browser. The greatest feature of this extension for a web developer is that you can validate your web page for accessibility. Its FAE Rule Set is based on Functional Accessibility Evaluator 1.0.1 developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

FAE on the menubar

If you have any mistakes these are listed in a window with a description of  the error. Obviously there’s a learning curve where you have to know the terms that the report is referring to, nothing a little research won’t solve. These rules are very straightforward, but not exhaustive. This tools gives you a simple and fair reading of your page and this is already a very good starting point.