BETSIE Text On-The-Fly Pages

Create accessable pages, on the fly! This is done by BETSIE (BBC Education Text to Speech Internet Enhancer). BETSIE is available on the homepages, www, and www.rso servers. BETSIE will not work for pages located on the secure versions of those servers.

Using BETSIE has several advantages:

You only have to maintain one version of your Web site. The text only version is created everytime someone clicks on the link you place in the upper lefthand corner. You maintain your actual page only.
The user can configure BETSIE to display the text-only version in one of several color schemes, type styles, and sizes. This can accommodate a wide variety of disabilities ranging from dyslexia to vision impairment.
Links to Web sites outside of your Web site are labeled "External Link" so the user can avoid Web sites which are not "BETSIE enhanced."

In order to make your pages display best for persons using screen readers, which read from left to right, top to bottom, you may have to do a bit of reworking. Specifically coding to skip navigation on pages where you provide a left navigation bar. You may be able to do that by Alt tagging a transparent gif image--it doesn't show in the normal page, but the BETSIE'd page displays "Skip Navigation", and clicking that takes them to the actual content (defined using an Anchor tag) of the page.

To use BETSIE, simply link your "Text Only" to: http://www.rso.wmich.edu/cgi-bin/betsie/parser.pl/url (where url is the url of your page, for example http://www.rso.wmich.edu/cgi-bin/betsie/parser.pl/www.rso.wmich.edu/weavers/. Note: you may omit the URL after the parser.pl. BETSIE will still create the page on the fly, however the page information is not shown in the location bar, only parser.pl is shown.

For more information regarding BETSIE, visit the BBC site.