Browse Aloud at www.mbha.org.uk

Margaret Blackwood Housing Association is one of the first housing associations in Scotland to improve the accessibility of their website by adding a new service - Browsealoud.

Browsealoud is a tool that reads the written content of subscribing websites out loud. It is particularly useful for web visitors who have a visual impairment, dyslexia, reading difficulties, a learning disability or those who have a limited use of the English language or whose primary language is not English.

To use Browsealoud, users simply download a small plugin onto their PC. This is completely free of charge. A link to the plugin download page can be found on our home page.

With the plugin installed, Browsealoud can then be switched on when required to read the  content of the MBHA website and any other Browsealoud-enabled sites, including those of the BBC, Comet, BUPA, the NHS and UEFA to name but a few.

Browsealoud colour-highlights text on screen, in colours selected by the user, and then reads the web content in a voice that can also be user-selected from a voicebank available as part of the plugin package.

This tool will make surfing much simpler and more accessible for a whole host of web visitors and will go a long way towards meeting the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act. Since October 2004, the DDA has put a legal obligation on site owners to ensure that their sites are as inclusive and usable as possible to disabled web users.

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