dai11y 14/05/2021

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

What Is It Like to Use a Screen Reader?

• Anthony Vasquez shares some things you may not know about how some people use screen readers. The article is a follow-up to a Screen Readers in the Wild seminar. Some video demonstrations from the seminar are linked below:
  • Using JAWS to find a video on YouTube
  • Using NVDA to find stock information on Google Search
  • Using NVDA to customize an order on See’s Candies’ website
  • Using VoiceOver to order from Coffee Bean iPhone app
• “Often, developers go too far treating images as decorative”, (perhaps because it’s easier to specify an empty alt="" attribute than to come up with good alternative text? ~Chris), leading Anthony to feel he’s missing out on something, and to try to derive context from the surrounding content. Anthony praises The Atlantic for getting alt text right, with a good mix of short and long descriptions.
• Anthony mostly navigates pages using arrow keys, which can “reveal important information” that is otherwise missed by tabbing. However, computer science student Su Park – who also demonstrated in the webinar – navigates mostly with tabbing and shortcut keys. Anthony says it is important to test both interaction styles.
• The article finishes with a little detail on what refreshable Braille displays are.

Prefer longer newsletters? You can subscribe to week11y, fortnight11y or even month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.