for our second fund a feature I visited

LC industries a company located in

Durham to talk with bond LC industry

serves an important role in the

community

I'll let Vaughn explain so the mission

is

to create meaningful employment for

people who are blind or visually

impaired and I think that's just just

it's great because I mean I know it's

really hard getting a job as a blind

person and I'm talking with other blind

people before and even they agree so

it's not just my experience it's also

what other people say and so you know

being here and having this ability to

create jobs potential jobs for people

who might be interested like we're doing

technology services and technology is

big field right now it's really trendy

and a lot of kids growing up they're

going to be into this whole technology

thing so creating jobs for them so that

they have the option to to come here as

a person who is blind Vaughn uses a

screen reader in Adele see industries

she wears a few different hats my

official title I guess is

the digital accessibility analyst it's a

mouthful but um but that's essentially

like I do digital accessibility testing

I'm kind of doing it and I'm in charge

of executing and doing the reporting

compiling all of that together so so

that's what I'm doing but I don't I'm

also helping out with building this

department so you know that we are just

starting out it started about a year ago

I believe and nobody see since I got

here I got here in April and I've been

helping out with some of the business

development piece I've been helping out

with some of the training so so you know

my my position is one thing but I've

been doing quite a lot of different

things as well Vaughn agreed to meet

with me to talk about what it's like to

use the internet with a screen reader we

began by talking about what a screen

reader does and how it works so I use a

screen reader actually two screen

readers jaws and NVDA so I use both of

them okay um not not together but when

Jobs failed

I'll go to

or vice-versa sure for those in the

course who may not be familiar with

screen readers can you describe what it

does or how it works yeah so essentially

a screen reader is what it's not like it

it's the software that will read the

screen to you except it can only read

textual information so how do you get

jaws to work how do you operate it so

it's primarily operated with the

keyboard so you can't use your mouth but

you can there are some just for some

some ways you can incorporate the mouse

into it but that's tricky so primarily

it's the keyboard when Vaughn says that

she primarily uses the keyboard that

makes a lot of sense someone unable to

see a computer screen would have little

use for pointing and clicking with a

mouse so instead in order to navigate

websites and documents keyboard commands

or keyboard shortcuts are used to tell

the screen reader where to focus I was

curious about how Vaughn used her screen

reader to find her way around a website

let's see though when you're on the

internet with whether you're on like the

Chrome or Firefox that are a set of

keystrokes that you can use to get

around and it can be as easy as the

letter H you just press H and it'll move

you from heading to heading if you press

L it'll move you from one list to

another and then if you press shift with

one of those letters it will move you

back so let's say if you press shift H

it'll move you to the previous heading

and usually there are a lot of

keystrokes but your primary go-to will

probably probably be the headings

because it's primarily used for

structuring content on a web page I was

glad Vaughn mentioned structure in

module 2 you'll learn about how to

structure content so that it can be more

easily navigated by screen reader users

as well as other students in your class

but I was curious about what it was like

for Vaughn when she comes across content

that hasn't been structured excessively

um yeah so most documents I've come

across they're usually not tagged with

headings or anything like that they're

just they're usually just straight out

the text so I just use the arrow keys

for that okay or you can move from page

to page and there's a she commits

command for that as well do you find

that you have a preference when were the

other if there's headings present versus

no headings present I like the headings

honestly and you can definitely

structure your Word documents do you

have headings as well with the screen

reader you you move it's a it's a linear

process right it's not like you can scan

across the page so it's kind of like

moving down it was interesting that

Vaughn called the experience linear

essentially when a new web page loads or

when Vaughn access as a document the

screen reader automatically starts at

the top of the page this is where the

keyboard shortcuts come in handy Vaughn

could listen to the whole page from the

top to bottom but that ends up being

very time-consuming so it's very helpful

essential even the digital content be

structured so that a screen reader user

can skim the page primarily

semantics though things like headings

make sure to put those in there

especially if you have a larger webpage

I appreciated Vaughn sharing why

structuring digital content is so

important a valuable takeaway from my

talk with her is acknowledging that when

content is structured it becomes more

navigable for everyone we'll continue

our conversation with bond in the next

module