IBM Home Page Reader Tutorial

Using Home Page Reader

Home Page Reader (HPR) works great for demonstrating what a screen reader is and how it is used. Pricing begins at $129 and there is a 30-day trial version available (with the most recent version, this trial now only works on a few web sites, making the trial version a poor alternative for basic testing of your own site).

Like other web browsers, HPR has a title bar, menus, tool bar, address bar, and web site viewing area. However, unlike traditional browsers, HPR is able to read through web pages like a screen reader. The default settings for the HPR browser consist of four areas. These four areas include the history list, graphics view, text view, and information panel.

The Home Page Reader display is divided into 4 distinct sections. The top section displays the menus, navigation buttons, and address bar. The area to the left of the screen is the History and it displays all the web sites visited recently using HPR. The main, central area displays the web page you are currently viewing. As Home Page Reader reads content from the page, the content currently being read is highlighted. Finally, the area toward the bottom of the screen displays a text-only version of the content that is being read.

HPR reads links within the page in a higher pitched voice. All other content, including alternative text for images (as long as the image is not also a link), form controls, and plain text are read in a lower pitched voice.

The text-only display at the bottom of the page provides a text only display of what is being read. Alternative text for images displays within brackets. Links display underlined. Normal text will display unformatted. The content that is currently being read will be highlighted in both the text-only display and in the graphical display above.