

The Screenreader Experience Part One: What Twitter.com Sounds Like - petercooper
http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2010/10/15/web-accessibility-the-screenreader-experience-part-one/

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bnycum
I once worked for a company who had to maintain 508 compliance (accessible to
people with disabilities) for their flagship product as many of the clients
were government agencies or agencies with government grants. Unfortunately
this is exactly what our product was like with a screen reader, probably
worse. Basically everything just needed to be accessible correctly, couldn't
use a clickable div/span for whatever crazy reason just anchor tags. It's sad
that the blind have to live with crappy software, I always felt bad for them
when hearing from our managers to check for compliance a few times a week.

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zbanks
Are there any screenreader software packages that can output a transcript of
what they're reading aloud?

That'd make it infinitely easier for web developers to test pages...

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bphogan
There's a Firefox extension called Fangs that I use, but it's not that great.
I plan to have some posts soon that talk about tools.

JAWS for Windows gives you a 45 minute trial. All you need to do to restart
the trial is to reboot your machine.

But like I said in the article - it's not gonna be a checklist that gets the
job done, it's gonna be about testing it in real screenreaders. I haven't seen
any emulators that behave like the real ones.

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petercooper
Pardon me if this is an arrogantly undisabled thing to say but.. perhaps
rather than making sites better, we could be making better screenreaders?
Interpreting the truly important information on a page programatically isn't
the easiest task but it's hardly a freakishly crazy AI problem either.. Any
startups in this field? :)

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bphogan
I don't know how I can answer this. I suppose I could make a comment about how
we don't even have browsers for the sighted that can understand the code that
some developers throw up on pages.

Or I could say "Find 10 pages, and quickly determine, from only the HTML
markup, what the main content is." and then do that for the top 1000 pages on
the net. See how hard the problem is. If you solve it, you'd be a hero.

On the other hand, you could use accessibility patterns like UJS, alternative
text, skip links, ARIA roles, better semantic markup, and make your site about
80% more usable in about an hour :)

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petercooper
_On the other hand, you could use accessibility patterns like UJS, alternative
text, skip links, ARIA roles, better semantic markup, and make your site about
80% more usable in about an hour :)_

I agree, but sadly it remains easier to solve even hard technical challenges
than seemingly easy social ones where, if you're lucky, perhaps 20% of
developers will cooperate.

As a developer I find accessibility _interesting_ , which is why I submitted
it, but unless I'm being forced to implement it by law or context (e.g. a site
with a high demographic of people using screen readers) I haven't the
inclination or motivation to _focus_ on it (though skip links, alternative
text, etc, are good ideas _anyway_ ). It's a bit like dealing with IE5 or
WebTV in that regard.

There are lots of ways in which we could make the world better for disabled
people, I'm sure, but typically we've built technology to make life easier for
them instead of changing the way the world already operates (with the notable
exception of building codes enforcing the installation of ramps and disabled
access systems). I'm not saying that's always a good thing but people are
notoriously slow to change en masse (y'seen the average quality of HTML out
there?).

It shouldn't be too far fetched to significantly improve the usability of
screen readers even on the hairiest of pages - most _regular_ browsers do a
stellar job at interpreting horrendous markup. Half of the stuff that your
recording comes out with isn't even _visible_ on the screen.. do screen
readers pay full attention to CSS and states enforced and controlled by
JavaScript? If not, that's probably step one to making things better.

I suspect the problem is that there's little money, fame, and too few people
looking at the technological aspects of this problem, whereas inventing a new
"standard" and sitting on some W3 fancy board looks great on the old résumé.

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dugmartin
I was part of a small team contracted to build the screenreader for Vista
(Narrator). It's a tough thing to get right. Once we had a working version I
tried finding and starting Visual Studio and building a simple Winforms app
all with the monitor off. I didn't get very far.

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derefr
I imagine you wouldn't get very far drawing a picture in MS Paint, either.
Some tasks are inherently visual (like laying out controls in a 2D plane.) Do
you think you could have managed to build a CLI app?

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kyro
Not sure if this exists, is feasible, or even possible, but: What about some
sort of framework or markup for converting a webpage to speech?

Edit: <http://www.webtospeech.com> is free btw.

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Groxx
You mean (WAI-)ARIA?

HTML / browsers are entirely capable of handling websites easily for blind
people / other needs. The problem is that nobody builds their pages to use the
tools already in existence - even _really_ high profile pages are generally
atrocious.

Similarly, take a peek around the web (or at most applications) and consider
if you couldn't tell the difference between red/green or yellow/blue. Most
people just don't consider it if it isn't shown to be a problem, and yes, it
does take more time to develop for those edge cases.

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Vivtek
Speaking as a colorblind browser, as long as I don't try to play Flash games I
really never have a problem.

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Vivtek
This is just fantastic - I've never heard what a screen reader sounds like. I
think I wouldn't make it five minutes trying to get sense out of that.

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_delirium
Maybe I'd get used to it, but the computer voice really bugs me and feels hard
to understand, making it hard to even get enough sense out of it to get to the
point of being confused by the content. Is this what typical screenreaders
sound like? To my ears, the vocal synthesis in espeak is considerably more
pleasant (<http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>).

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vyrotek
Can I ask what plugin is being used on the page? Every time I click it my
Chrome tab crashes.

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bphogan
That's unfortunate. It's using videojs, from <http://videojs.com>

Can I ask what OS you're working with?

The full video is at
[http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenrea...](http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenreader.mp4)
or
[http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenrea...](http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenreader.webm)
if you want to watch it.

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filosofo
I'm experiencing the same issue with Chrome 7.0.517.41 beta on Ubuntu.

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zbanks
Worksforme on Chome 8.0.552.0 dev on Ubuntu

(edit: It worked for me even before the vimeo switch)

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drewse
As posted by a commenter on the original article, this website may help:
<http://www.AccessibleTwitter.com/>

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bphogan
The point of the article was not to pick on Twitter. While using a tool like
AccessibleTwitter is great for that particular example, it's not fixing the
real problem - people will run into problems with modern websites, and simple
things can make that experience better.

I hope I didn't make a mistake by pointing at Twitter.

