WebReader: a screen reader for everyone, everywhere

Abstract

With the goal of creating an accessible digital world, software as, but not limited to, screen readers have been developed to help users with disabilities of various types in performing tasks with a computer, a smartphone, or similar devices. Projects like VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS allow every day billions of users to use software installed on these devices, to access information, and connect with other people. Two of the main constraints of screen readers are portability over other operating systems and their need to be installed on the user's machine. To overcome these issues, at the price of providing less features, alternative approaches such as cloud-based solutions have been developed. In this paper, we briefly describe WebReader, a free and open source client-side library built "with the Web" and for the Web. It takes the best of cloud-based solutions to help users with disabilities in interacting with web pages. WebReader implements a subset of the features provided by classic screen readers. It is built on top of technologies integrated in most browsers, can be integrated in any web page, and does not require any software to be installed on a user's machine, except for a browser. The project is available at the URL https://web-reader.digital-detox.co.uk.