ERS aims to make documents on its World Wide Web server accessible to the widest possible audience, including persons with visual disabilities.

ERS web pages are generally accessible for persons using screen-reading devices. A description of the elements of accessible web pages is found in The National Federation of the Blind's Guidelines for Web Page Accessibility and the Trace Research Center of the University of Wisconsin's Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines. Yahoo has a listing of companies that provide adaptive computer technology, including screen-reading software.

Many of the documents on the ERS website are in HTML or ASCII (plain text) formats. These formats are generally accessible to persons using screen-reading software. We also have a large number of documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) format and this format is not compatible with most screen-reading software.

1. The user's browser can be configured to use this service as a helper application, so that every time they click on a link to a PDF document, this document is automatically sent to the Access server and returned as a web page.
2. The user can go to the Access.adobe.com server and fill out a form. When this form is submitted, the server will retrieve the PDF document, translate it, and return it to the user.
3. The user can send an e-mail message to the Access server, giving the address of the document to be translated. The server will then get this document and translate it to either a web page or a text (ASCII) document. Note that this is the only one of the three options that also gives the ability to produce a text document from the PDF file.

If PDF files are not on the Internet and the user doesn't want to submit the files as an e-mail attachment for translation, Adobe Access is a free downloadable accessibility plug-in for use with the latest versions of the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT. This plug-in converts PDF files on a user's local system into plain text, which can be read by screen reading programs. For systems with Internet access, Adobe recommends using the forms-based Access translation service instead.

For other PDF tools, see the PDFzone web site.

web browser support
The ERS web site is designed for use with web browsers which support HTML 4, which includes Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x and above and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x and above. Many pages function best with Javascript enabled, and some pages will only work with Javascript enabled.