A guide for Jaws users, written by Chorlton Workshop for hsbp.
This guide covers the part of the BBC History website which is organised by topic, and concentrates on finding and reading the articles on these pages. The home page of the BBC History website is not very accessible, so it's best to use another page as a starting point — for example, the Recent History section, which can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/history/recent/.
The BBC History website is one of the leading history websites, and contains many interesting articles. However, although improvements have been made in the accessibility of the site for screen readers, there is still work remaining to be done in this area.
This is the overall structure of most of the pages on the BBC History website:
This section describes how to navigate the part of the website which is organized by topic. The topics are grouped into a number of main sections:
Each of these main sections contains a number of topics. For example, the Ancient History section contains the topics: Egytptians, Greek, British Prehistory, Romans, Vikings, Anglo Saxons, and Other Cultures.
You can navigate these sections and the topics which they contain using the list of links in the Topics section of the navigation. The links in this list are to the main sections of the topics. If you open one of these links to go to one of the main sections, then you are taken to the web page for the section, and on this page:
To navigate to one of the topics, it's probably easier to use the nested list of links, as described in the next section.
As an example of how to navigate to a topic page, the following instructions describe how to get to the World War Two topic, which is contained in the World Wars section of the Topics.
The title of a topic page is BBC - History - “name of topic”. This is an outline of the main content section of a topic page:
Because there is material before the first heading of the main content section, it's best to navigate to the main content section using the skip to main content link at the start of the page (access key 2), rather than using the headings.
The main content section of a topic page contains links to various types of resources: articles, photo galleries, timelines, movie clips, etc. For sighted users, before each of these links there's a small icon which indicates the type of resource. Unfortunately, there is no alternative text for screen readers. You can only be sure that a link is to an article by opening it and using the known structure of an article page to determine whether or not it's an article. Only article pages contain a “Print entire article” link, so you can just check whether such a link is present on the page. In fact, this “Print entire article” link will be used for reading an article, as described in the next section.
The title of an article page is BBC History - “article title”.
The articles are quite long, and to minimize the amount of scrolling for sighted users, the article is spread over a number of pages, with each main section of the article having its own page. When you open a link to an article, you are taken to an article page which contains the first section of the article. At the bottom of a section there's a next link which takes you to the next page. The page also contains a series of links which can be used to navigate directly to all the other pages.
This is an outline of the main content section of the first article page:
Reading an article which is split over a number of pages isn't very convenient for screen readers. If you're reading using “read all”, then you have to listen out for the “next” link, and then backtrack and open it to move to the next page. You then have to navigate to the article on this page.
Fortunately, a printable version of the article is also provided. This is a single page which contains the whole article. This is far easier to read than the version spread out over a number of pages, and a description of how to use the printable version is given in the next section.
To read an article using the printable version: