
How to create content that works well with screen readers - open-source-ux
https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/08/advice-for-creating-content-that-works-well-with-screen-readers/
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open-source-ux
By the way, the author of this blog post, Leonie Watson, is herself blind.
She's well known in the accessibility field for her conference talks on
accessibility (there are many on YouTube). A few years ago she wrote a
personal piece on her blog describing how she lost her sight and how she came
to accept such a change in her life. It's well worth a read:

[http://tink.uk/losing-sight/](http://tink.uk/losing-sight/)

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robin_reala
I’ve been lucky enough to work with Léonie and would echo that she’s a massive
resource of practical accessibility knowledge. The blog post above was on HN
and generated some discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10324480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10324480)

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localoffice
As someone with low vision, every time I try to read a long article (like this
one) I have to make a text color white, a background color black, and text
size bigger to make it easier to read. In lucky cases, Firefox's Reader View
works rather well. (Although I needed to write a user style so that the
contrast would be higher) In cases where Reader View doesn't work or I need to
read other parts of a page, I have to write a user CSS with Stylish. It's so
frustrating to do this for numerous times. My routine is like this: First,
test if `body {color: white !important; background: black !important;}` works.
If not, I would right click on a text, select Inspect Element, and look for
the CSS rules affecting colors, after which I would write a user CSS to
overwrite the rules found. Occasionally the CSS of a page is complicated and
it would take me a long time to figure out which CSS rule I should overwrite.

Having done this for countless times, I started thinking as to why I need to
do this (obviously given my condition). Why do I have to write a user CSS?
Because like Firefox's Reader View, computers could do heuristics at best and
when they fail a human has to tell computers which part of a page is text. Why
does someone have to figure it out? Because HTML does not contain that
information (except for pages that adapt HTML5 semantic tags).

I wish HTML were a bit more restrictive and a page couldn't be designed
arbitrarily. For example, if the "Hyper Text" were a lightweight markup
language like Markdown or reStructuredText rather than HTML, my life would
have been much easier. Some people might say it would be too restrictive. But
I have to point out that the standard way of transmitting text, which is by
encoding a character to a code point with some character set, is already
restrictive when compared with handwriting. We abandoned the freedom to draw
characters arbitrarily for communicating machine- (and thereby visually-
impaired-) friendly. Because we use character codes to transfer text, we can
use any font we like almost everywhere with little effort. I just want the
same thing to have happened in the Web.

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sedachv
Until version 12, the Opera web browser had a menu with a big list of CSS
override styles that worked like Firefox's Reader View. Some were for page
development/debugging, some emulated small screen devices, and a lot were
there to improve readability. I have good vision and used the Opera CSS
overrides and still use Firefox Reader View frequently because many web pages
are poorly accessible even for people without disabilities. When Opera went to
the WebKit rendering engine the CSS overrides were removed. I still miss them.

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mwcampbell
The text-to-speech engine that I normally use with my screen reader on my PC,
ETI-Eloquence, is surprisingly good at choosing the correct pronunciation in
ambiguous cases. It got the handful of examples that she mentioned correct.
I'm sure it's not perfect at handling these cases, but it does try. And that's
a synthesizer that was implemented in the mid to late 90s and abandoned in the
early to mid 2000s. I'm sure they could do better today.

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RubenSandwich
If you're looking for a quick summary about web accessibility best practices,
my team put together a web accessibility guide: [http://web-
accessibility.carnegiemuseums.org/](http://web-
accessibility.carnegiemuseums.org/).

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deckiedan
Is <abbr> etc. Used by screen readers? I kind of thought that was the point...

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holri
look at it with a terminal based browser like lynx.

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mlinksva
> So the best answer seems to be: don't write content that works specifically
> for screen readers, write content that works well for everyone. Use correct
> punctuation, spelling and grammar, use standard conventions for acronyms and
> abbreviations, and use words that are appropriate for your audience.

