A Study on Navigation in Screen Readers for Accessibility Users

Project : Standards for Navigating in Screen Readers

Areas: Humanities, Software Architecture

Description: Screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and ORCA (on Linux) are available to visually challenged community. These screen readers read out the text on the screen and enable navigation through the web pages, word documents and OCRed documents. There are specific keys that will allow you to read a letter, or a word, or a paragraph. However, each screen reader specifies its own set of keys to perform the same functions. This becomes more difficult for Indian Languages. This project deals with researching the existing standards/guidelines and keyboard mapping of the screen readers and come up with a set of guidelines or unified standard (if possible).

Expected Outcome: Standards of keyboard mapping for screen readers, interfacing for Indian languages, appropriate software tools, a publication (if possible).