Wanda's site on screen readers brought back memories of when I tried using one for my 2nd graders a few years ago. They were very basic compared to the Jaws program in her article. The voice was flat and mechanical and the students became bpard with them very quickly. Reader Rabbit was a bit better as it attempted to use the charachter's voices but not by a whole lot.

Accessibility has become a hot topic as increased awareness and growing requirements demand that applications take into account the needs of all potential users. Accessibility covers not only the Web application, but document, desktop application and hardware, and so on. In the Web application domain, making static Web pages accessible is relatively easy.