Accessibility first steps: screen reader compliance [on hold]

We have been mandated with making our sites WCAG 2.0 compliant. This is very new to us.

I'm ready to move into implementation and testing. At this point, I think I need to do a first test with what we've built against a screen reader, so I've added the ChromeVox extension.

It doesn't seem to behave at all as expected. For example, my "skip to main content" link physically works (clicking on it will jump to the main content), but the screen reader simply repeats 'skip to main content' and then 'visited'. I would have expected it would start reading the page from the new point.

I am not sure if this is because I've built it wrong, or if it's because i'm testing it wrong. I want to figure what the first, best method might be to "smoke test" the pages. Is ChromeVox an adequate smoke test of accessibility compliance? i.e. if it fails miserably there, I don't really need to run it through a read screen reader?