Working with screen readers

This is an absolutely brilliant article: Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users who Work with Screen Readers. It provides some fantastic insights into how people actually use screen reader software. I've played with JAWS and WindowsEyes myself but never for very long but the good people at the National Cancer Institute have sat down with 16 blind users for 2 hours at a time and conducted an accessibility survey of various US government websites.

The article contains some little gems...

Don't use 'skip navigation' because it isn't clear what it means. Fine - makes sense, which is why I use 'skip to content'. The kipper there is that JAWS treats the word 'content' as an adjective if it isn't properly qualified and mispronounces it! Apparently 'skip to main content' is the way to go.

Repeating words are irritating - no surprises there.

Make sure link, heading and paragraph's key words are close to their start because screenreader users scan very rapidly. [This actually compares very well to the Eyetrack III findings for sighted users.] More specifically, the paper suggest not starting link text with repeating phrases like 'read more about'.

There were a few of the expected hints for forms, like always use labels, but their explanation of WHY is very interesting. In edit mode, JAWS doesn't read non-form text so anything not in a label will get lost. Another more general tip was to make sure that forms weren't on pages with lots of other text, so that users can find the form easily.

Many thanks very much to Mary Frances Theofanos of the National Cancer Institute and Janice Redish of Redish & Associates for making this public...

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