This one is to all of you screen reader manufacturers. I'm not sure if it's of any use as it kind of feels like asking money hungry pharmaceutical corporations to start giving a shit and make their life-saving meds cheaper for countries that can't afford them, but still. Let's give it a shot.

Accessibility matters. I'm sure most serious web developers will agree with me on this statement. So we read, we learn and we try to stick to all best practices we know about. It's common practice for web developers to test their sites in a wide variety of browsers including IE, Opera, Safari, Firefox etc. etc. but there's one big, ugly, dark gaping hole: screen readers. The best we can do is test our sites for accessibility by running them through a validator such as cynthiasays and hope for the best. However I'm pretty sure there's lots of subtle possible enhancements we're all missing. And why? Because none of us developers have access to screen readers, unless we buy one. A good example is the issue I personally missed when doing my little Google experiment. Teddy Zetterlund pointed out in the comments that there was room for improvement in my search form. With access to a screen reader I would have discovered this right away at the first test run!

Screen readers cost a ridiculous amount of money while almost all normal web browsers are free. Some of them cost even more than a whole new computer. This (in my humble opinion) pretty much sucks but I suppose the creators of these products need to make a living as well. However I feel they could help make the web a better place by offering free copies of their software for web development purposes. I'm pretty sure it would be a huge eye-opener (or should I say ear-opener?) for developers to experience what their creations are like for people who can't see. It would most likely result in a huge increase in awareness among people who build websites but also among business managers who think this whole accessibility thing isn't all that important.

Having to pay at least $895 for JAWS (for example) probably doesn't make sense for most developers because they don't NEED it. After all they're not blind. Yet I'm sure a lot of us would incorporate screen reader testing into their workflow if it were possible, just like it is with all the various normal browsers. In my opinion this seriously hinders development of properly accessible websites. So here's to the creators of JAWS and other screen readers: Come on guys, help us developers improve the web by allowing us to use your software for free to test our creations! Like this, we don't have to 'guess' anymore what a screen reader would do with a certain piece of code but we'd KNOW. What a world of difference this would make...