Betsie is a web parser for viewing web pages. When a web page is passed through Betsie, all images and formatting are removed, returning a text-only web page. This can be extremely helpful for giving the webmaster an understanding of what their page will look like to those using a screen reader or other assistive device that is not a conventional browser.

When you get your resulting page back from Betsie, scroll to the bottom and you can change some settings such as font and background colors.

Unfortunately, Betsie does not work on a Web Auth site, will not run JavaScript, and only works with Brown web pages.

To see what your page would look like in Betsie, it needs to be on the Brown web server, and you simply point your browser to it with this address:

http://cgi-user.brown.edu/cgi-user/betsie/betsie.pl/www.brown.edu/<your full url here>  If your site has an alias, you can not put that in the path for betsie, your site will not get found.  An example is below:

Try it out and see this page in Betsie:
http://cgi-user.brown.edu/cgi-user/betsie/betsie.pl/www.brown.edu/webmaster/webpublishing/betsie.html

One note:  When passing a URL to betsie, it can not end in a directory name, it must end in a file name.  Such as the example above, it ends with "betsie.html".  If you want to look at an index file, you will need to explicitly add the index file's name and extension in the URL.

If you don't like how your page looks in the Betsie screen reader, our page on accessibility can give you tips on how to improve. (Go there!)