Microsoft Windows Narrator
So out of all of the options, I decided to go with Windows Narrator for the sake of simplicty and since I already am a Windows user I wouldn't really need to download anything else to narrate for me. I have used Narrator before, so I had some idea on how to use it. So in terms of how my experiences went with using Narrator, even if I was a blind student who wanted to search for classes to take this fall and needed to use Narrator to do it, I could sum it up in one single word... pain. Every time I tried to do something, Microsoft Zira would just say a multitude of words on top of each other, cutting herself off and not narrating certain things properly. It was quite difficult for a bunch of reasons besides that however.
According to my notes, some of the "surprises" and "frustrations" that occurred was one: the program continually shifting to other areas on the web page, such as scrolling to the bottom to read totally unrelated text to what I wanted it to read for example. I also found that traditional text like how I'm typing this cannot traditionally be read by Narrator, even when highlighted, but text on little widgets like at the bottom of the ICC website can be read by it, which was incredibly confusing to me. A lot of the time, Narrator would only read the specific coordinates on the page, such as how much I've scrolled, where the text I'm listening to is presented at, and the overall browser preferences, but most of the time it wouldn't read the actual text I selected despite having it set to highlight text with my cursor to read it. Every time I would try and use one of the drop down tabs, Narrator would automatically close it to read something else totally unnecessary, which was incredibly frustrating. In terms of the first thing I heard when I clicked onto the site, it referred to the banner that said, "Questions? Ask Cosmo".
I want to say that I couldn't even find the 'search for classes' link, and by proxy couldn't find a course I wanted to take. I couldn't search for it either, as Narrator shut down my keyboard, so I couldn't type anything. If I could suggest three ways to improve the design of the web page, I would say the first thing is to make sure all of the text is compatible with Narration programs for those who require them. The second thing I would suggest is to possibly add in their own narration feature, possibly like what Google Translate has as a built in system for an in-house narration format. Lastly, I would suggest that they make it so that all of the links can be accessed without Narrator automatically moving from one area on the web page to the next. Overall, I think that Narrator is something that I never really want to use again unless I absolutely have to, as I felt it was way too difficult to work with.
