YUI Theater's newest video is a 27 minute Introduction to Screen Readers by Victor Tsaran, an engineer here at Yahoo! and our Program Manager for Accessibility. He begins by showing us the core functionality of screen readers and how they interact with the desktop. In the second part he demonstrates how he uses them to explore and understand web sites, how sites are "linearized", and how using semantic markup to build sites supports accessible navigation and usability.

If you haven't had the opportunity to play with a screen reader firsthand this video is must-watch stuff. And for everybody, don't miss the closing minutes of the video when Victor resets the screen reader's voice setting from the super-slow (necessary for us mere mortals to understand) back up to the impossibly-fast (that he uses everyday).

Related URLs

• YUI Theater — Doug Geoffray: "From the Mouth of a Screenreader"

Technical Notes

A downloadable and iPod-compatible MPEG version of this video is available for download. The .m4v file format we've used for this video (and many others in the YUI Theater) signifies that it is an MPEG-4 file with video; if you're not downloading to view on an iPod, and/or are using a system that doesn't recognize the .m4v extension, try renaming the file to .mp4.

An alternative link to the video via YouTube is here.