I Used the Web for a Day Using a Screen Reader | Hacker News Reader

I Used the Web for a Day Using a Screen Reader

smashingmagazine.com

34 pointsindysigners15 comments

3 Paragraphs into this article on accessibility there's 2 giant... I'm not sure what to call them... ads I guess... that totally break up the article in a way that makes it seem to end. It took me a minute to figure out where the rest of the darn article was. For a magazine about design and an article on accessibility, this seems like a good example of poor design and I can only assume it's not accessible.

That being said, this was an interesting read.

Smashing Magazine has become unpracticable with their last redesign. They wanted to focus on paying readers so I hope at least those have a good experience, but I almost totally cut reading it.

It's time screen reader tech moved towards automatic OCR.

It's a losing battle trying to get every technology and web service to put in all the right aria tags - imagine imgur for example - there is no way you could make those all those animated gifs and mspaint memes properly accessible - instead, a neural network should look at the screen like a human does, and describe it.

The screen reader should say "There is a gif of a squirrel falling off a shelf, and it has a share and an upload button"

Facebook automatically creates alt tags for images and describes them with text such as "three people outdoors with a tree." As someone who's blind I found it interesting for five minutes and have not visited Facebook again. I have been totally blind since birth, and I don't think any amount of textual description will make me interested in scrolling through a photo stream. I could see this being different if you lost your sight later in life. OCR in it's current state is a bad idea as a primary way to get information when using a computer. My screen reader allows me to use OCR to find out what's on the screen. It works OK for specific situations such as an inaccessible installer with a couple controls. It falls down if I were to try and use OCR to read Java code.

I'm sympathetic to the GP's point. Every time I read about yet another custom GUI toolkit, I want to scream, because I know it might lead to more applications blind people can't use. If screen readers could really see the screen for themselves, instead of having to be spoon-fed accessibility information, then custom toolkits with no accessibility support wouldn't be an issue anymore.

But, as you said, OCR isn't perfect. I'm not surprised that it still has inaccuracies when recognizing code in particular. Also, computer vision takes a lot of computing power. I'm going to be sad if someday it ends up taking a powerful GPU, possibly running on a remote server, to enable a screen reader to do the things that a 90s computer could do without breaking a sweat via programmatic accessibility APIs.

I'm curious if there are any blind programmers who prefer OSX to Windows when it comes to screen reading software. I used to own a Mac and found Voiceover easy to get started with, but not very efficient compared to Jaws for Windows. I'm not sure if this is because I didn't use it enough or if Jaws and possibly NVDA are better for experienced screen reader users who want all the easily accessible shortcuts.

Like you, the blind programmers I know generally prefer Windows. As one anecdote, Tyler Spivey was so dissatisfied with the way VoiceOver worked with the terminal that he wrote his own terminal screen reader [1] for the times he had to work in that environment.

[1]: https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr

I got the Macbook air 6 years ago because it was the best windows ultrabook you could get at the time. Once WSL came out I rarely used OSX. WSL has drasticaly increased my productivity and basically made Windows 10 a completely new OS.

> when using a screen reader, it’s almost impossible to listen to music at the same time as browsing the web!

Not true for Windows screen readers and VoiceOver for iOS. There's a widely implemented feature called audio ducking, where the OS turns down the audio of other applications while the screen reader is speaking. So the music may be quietly in the background, but it's still there. Does Mac not have this feature?

ON windows I always manually set the volume of itunes much lower then the system volume. I assume you can do this on OSX. I find this a lot better then using audio ducking. It's jarring to have the music volume increase when I am thinking through a problem instead of doing something on the computer that causes my screen reader to speak.

I tried to read the article about using screen readers with a screen reader! That was a lot of hard work, I am also feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken me so long to give a screen reader a go. I was using ChromeVox and it took me a long time to get it to read the page, it was reading other tabs at first and there was no easy way to control it, even with eyesight.

I think that accessibility can improve considerably with HTML5 and CSS grid. There is no need for pages to be a sea of divs, the document structure can be dome correctly so the page looks good with no styling, then the CSS grid layout engine can be used to make it look pretty for the sighted folk.

I think that document outline is really important, and to ask yourself the question of how you would present something if it was typed up, Word document style or like a formal letter.

There is no excuse for developers to not be using the correct tags, so that means header, main and footer, with articles and asides. The nav tag can be used for anything that is navigation and structured in a list. Pictures with figures and figure captions can be used too. All these elements can be targeted with CSS to be styled, there is no need to have documents have 17 nested divs each of them with many meaningless class tags when there are perfectly good elements to style. You can take a document and get the structure right and then use the elements as a skeleton in SCSS to style it. If structured properly these need not go '17 deep'. I think that if people had div-less and class-less markup and were used to styling it that way with SCSS generating the CSS then it would seem absurd to go to the unmaintainable sea of divs and class tags that passes for normal today.

There does need to be more work done with HTML5 to get the perfect outline, I do use outline tools already but that is a fine art.

Back to the article, the BBC do actually have people that use screen readers, I met one recently and how he used his iphone was a sight to behold, just playing with it more like how Jimi Hendrix played the guitar.

Since the author works for the BBC and with the BBC being so vast he might not know the screen reader community that work there.

I have suggested to people I have worked with that we get an actual partially sighted person to test web pages for accessibility. I got a 'why would you want to do that' attitude. However, I think that this is a service that should be offered to clients.

A sea of divs is not a problem if you use role=presentational correctly.

Deep nesting of divs is not a problem for the screen readers I'm familiar with; they'll flatten the representation of the page regardless. If a screen reader does have a problem with this, IMO, that's the screen reader's fault, not the web developers. So there's no need to put role="presentation" on all your divs.

To be clear, though, there's another abuse of divs that is a problem: using a div with an onclick event handler and no ARIA role where a simple button would do. Don't do that. I'd suggest using an actual button tag if possible, so you get both keyboard and screen reader accessibility for free. But if that doesn't work with your CSS for whatever reason, at least put role="button" on that div.

> feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken me so long to give a screen reader a go

Just today I tried using a screen reader to surf the web, for the first time ever. It's a completely different experience, requiring a lot of patience. Many websites were too difficult and frustrating to navigate. And I've been working in web development for years.. It's a shame that I hadn't deeply considered accessibility, and I've vowed to become more familiar with it, to incorporate and apply it at work.

Is there any screen reader for the web that works more visually with some intelligence?

(and the OCR part could probably easily be matched with the source code to get perfect error correction)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com