ChromeVox browser extension

ChromeVox is a self-voicing browser extension (add-in) for Google’s Chrome browser. It’s designed by T.V. Ramen, the guy behind emacspeak.

It’s optimised for Chrome OS, at present (Google’s operating system that basically just gives you the Chrome browser as your desktop), probably because it is the only plausible accessibility story on Chrome OS for blind people, but it works fine on other systems.

You get a bunch of hotkeys that let you navigate around the page and a synthesized speech voice. The functionality is pretty geeky: if you’re comfortable with the idea that a web page is a hierarchical arrangement of nodes of different types, then you’ll fit right in. However, if you’ve already learned your many hotkeys for your screenreader to use Firefox or Internet Explorer, then you’re probably not going to find anything more useful in ChromeVox.

It’s maybe most interesting for Thunder Screenreader users, who can use ChromeVox with Chrome to give them the advanced geeky webpage navigation features previously enjoyed by JAWS or NVDA users, but can still fall back on the simpler Thunder features in Microsoft Office or WebbIE – and all for zero cost, since both Thunder and ChromeVox are free.

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