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How to create content that works well with screen readers

• GOV.UK blog post by Léonie Watson, 2017. Screen readers read things in different ways: some will read out all punctuation, whereas others omit common punctuation and insert human-like pauses instead. Some words require different pronunciations depending on context (tying a “bow” vs taking a “bow”); screen readers vary in their effectiveness at handling these. Acronyms such as DLA (Disability Living Allowance) are sometimes read out like a word, being pronounced as “dlah”. You could work around the issue by inserting full stops or spaces, or off screen text with the preferred phonetics (e.g. “Dee El Eh”) but these “fixes” cause issues for other users. It is better to use correct punctuation, spelling and grammar, and standard conventions for abbreviations. Screen reader users are used to making allowances for the quirks of their screen reading software.
• Aside: we recently had a bug report that “GOV.UK” was being read out as “Governor UK” in JAWS. We’d seen it in VoiceOver before, though that was fixed as of iOS 12.2. There’s not much we can do except report it to the screen reader maintainers.

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