Simon Willison’s Weblog

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5 items tagged “screenreaders”

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. # 14th March 2024, 4:07 am

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 screenreader special cases in this. # 11th February 2023, 12:37 am

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. # 24th April 2022, 7:35 pm

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. # 18th April 2019, 9:09 pm

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.

Ian Hickson # 4th September 2007, 12:27 pm