University of Washington Team Develops Internet-based Screen Reading Tool called WebAnywhere

WebAnywhere has been initialized and is now ready to use.

WebAnywhere is a non-visual interface to the web that requires no new software to be downloaded or installed.It works right in the browser, which means you can access it from any computer, even heavily locked-down public computer terminals.WebAnywhere enables you to interact with the web in a similar way to how you may have used other screen readers, such as JAWS or Window-Eyes, before.

For quick access to WebAnywhere type wa.cs.washington.edu into your browser.

The system works best when a recent version of Adobe Flash is installed but will also work with embedded sound players, like Windows Media Player and Quicktime.The current release is an Alpha release, which means WebAnywhere may not always work as expected.We're working quickly to fix bugs and add features, so you should expect rapid development in the coming weeks and months.Because WebAnywhere is released right on the web, you'll always have the latest version when you visit this site.

Using WebAnywhere

You interact with WebAnywhere using the keyboard. A selection of keyboard commands that are currently supported is listed below. Pressing SHIFT in combination with them reverses the direction of the search, searching backward from the current cursor position instead of forward from it.

• CTRL-L - move the cursor to the location box where you can type a URL to visit.
• Arrow Down - read the next element on the page.
• Arrow Up - read the previous element on the page.
• CTRL-H - skip to the next heading.
• CTRL-I - skip to the next input element.
• CTRL-R - skip to the next row by cell when in a table.
• CTRL-D - skip to the next column by cell when in a table.
• Page Down - read continuously from the current position.
• Home - read continuously, starting over from the beginning of the page.
• CTRL - silence WebAnywhere and pause the system.

http://cnib.ca/en/news/archive/webanywhere.aspx

WebAnywhere:
http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/wa.php
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/webanywhere-a-tool-for-blind-people-to-get-online-anywhere/
http://webinsight.cs.washington.edu/papers/webanywhere-html/