6 items tagged “screen-readers”
2025
Why are my live regions not working? (via) Useful article to help understand ARIA live regions. Short version: you can add a live region to your page like this:
<div id="notification" aria-live="assertive"></div>
Then any time you use JavaScript to modify the text content in that element it will be announced straight away by any screen readers - that's the "assertive" part. Using "polite" instead will cause the notification to be queued up for when the user is idle instead.
There are quite a few catches. Most notably, the contents of an aria-live region will usually NOT be spoken out loud when the page first loads, or when that element is added to the DOM. You need to ensure the element is available and not hidden before updating it for the effect to work reliably across different screen readers.
I got Claude Artifacts to help me build a demo for this, which is now available at tools.simonwillison.net/aria-live-regions. The demo includes instructions for turning VoiceOver on and off on both iOS and macOS to help try that out.
2024
Guidepup. I’ve been hoping to find something like this for years. Guidepup is “a screen reader driver for test automation”—you can use it to automate both VoiceOver on macOS and NVDA on Windows, and it can both drive the screen reader for automated tests and even produce a video at the end of the test.
Also available: @guidepup/playwright, providing integration with the Playwright browser automation testing framework.
I’d love to see open source JavaScript libraries both use something like this for their testing and publish videos of the tests to demonstrate how they work in these common screen readers.
2023
The anatomy of visually-hidden (via) James Edwards provides a detailed breakdown of the current recommended CSS for hiding content while keeping it available for assistive technologies in the browser accessibility and render trees. Lots of accumulated tricks and screen reader special cases in this.
2022
WebAIM guide to using iOS VoiceOver to evaluate web accessibility (via) I asked for pointers on learning to use VoiceOver on my iPhone for accessibility testing today and Matt Hobbs pointed me to this tutorial from the WebAIM group at Utah State University.
2019
Using the HTML lang attribute (via) TIL the HTML lang attribute is used by screen readers to understand how to provide the correct accent and pronunciation.
2007
I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.