Getting Online Low Vision: Exploring the Browser

I'm Vikki Vaughan and today, we'll learn how to get on the web by opening our web browser and exploring the different parts of a web page. We'll use Google Chrome as our browser. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

Let's start by locating the Chrome icon on our desktop and selecting it. It looks like a red, yellow, and green circle. Now if you don't see the icon, you can also open Chrome from the start menu by pressing our Windows key and then typing in the word Chrome, we bring up our search results. We see that Chrome is here at the top of our list and all we have to do is select it to open it. Pretty easy, right? Chrome is one of several browsers available to us. Others include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Now, basically a browser is software that comes installed on our computer that takes us to the internet. Many of us use the internet or ribs, just search for information. When we open our browser, we land on a website. Many websites are made up of multiple web pages and we interact with elements on these web pages. Those elements might include text, images, videos, and other multimedia. We usually move between webpages using something called hyperlinks, often referred to simply as links. Let's have a look at the different parts of a web page. We'll use the NLS website as our example. At the top of our page, we see the address bar. Here, we see an edit field where we type in the address of the website we wish to visit. Now, you may have heard of a web address such as www.something.com. A web address directs us to a specific website, just like a letter with your address goes to your mailbox.

Below the address bar, we find our header. Here's where we usually find a company's logo or tagline. We can see that the NLS header contains their logo in large font. Headers contain information that's usually repeated on every page of the website, like their logo and contact information.

Below the header, we see the main menu. When selected, this navigation menu provides us with links to other pages of interest. We'll talk more about link soon. Menus are often presented in a list form like we see here. By separating information into chunks, navigation menus help us find exactly what we're searching for without having to look at every item on a website.

Below the header, we find the main content area of the web page. The content area can take many and it changes from page to page. Some contain mostly text while others have lots of videos and graphics. Many webpages have multiple headings, presented as blocks of color with a variety of font sizes. These visual features help draw our attention to points of interest.

At the bottom of our page, we find the footer. This is where we find contact information and links to the organization's social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. In general, the visual style of a footer is very simple. The information typically appears in plain text. We can see that the NLS footer consist of texts with no graphics. This simple design helps us quickly locate needed information such as their phone number and related websites.

Today, we learned about opening a web browser. We also talked about various parts of a webpage. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Getting Online.