Electronic Accessibility: United States and International Perspectives Deanie French Director of Healthcare Human Resources Southwest Texas State University, USA dfrench@swt.edu Leo Valdes Managing Director Vision Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. lvaldes@visionoffice.com Abstract http://elearn.hr.swt.edu/nutshell.htm Bruce Coonce, shown above, is a visually impaired Student Development Specialist employed at Southwest Texas State University. In the link given below his photo, Bruce presents several audio clips describing typical problems encountered by people who use a machine reader to provide voice descriptions from web sites. When reading an inaccessible site, a machine reader rapidly sounds out the complete web site address (the URL) repeatedly before stating the file name for each graphic image. In contrast, on an accessible site, the machine reader states the URL only once and then reads aloud the alternative text descriptions of the images (supplied by the web designer). For example, the file name of Bruce’s photo above is Bruce.jpg. Since this site is designed to be accessible, the machine reader will state the URL only once and then sound out the descriptive title - a blind man. Note that when you place your cursor on Bruce’s picture, the words "a blind man" appear. If this were an inaccessible site, Bruce.jpg, would have appeared instead.