Re: Screen reader invisibility

This is a serious user agent issue in my opinion, one which TV Raman looks
at in his book, Auditory user interfaces. The key issue surrounds the way
that screen readers deal with applications. By simply reading the screen
as is, screen readers are attempting to adapt visual styles for PwDs
rather than create(or use) more meaningful audio styles.

What _should_ be happening is they should be looking at the underlying
structure of the code and working out what should be read themselves. I
will admit that in proprietary applications that this is not possible
unless the manufacturers use an API to enable the screen readers to talk
to the application at a level before visual presentation. Emacs speak is a
great example of this, and as such is the only 'speaking browser'
(although it is much more than that and encompasses the entire Emacs
desktop) which gets this right. The issue that I have with the user agents
is that unlike interacting with software which requires the screen readers
to provide an API and the software to use it, web tech is set up in such a
way that screen readers can just access what they need to render it
correctly inherently.

That is of course not to say all web sites comply to the relevant
guidelines, but currently the screen readers are not giving the level of
support to the technology which _would_ make them better that they should.
If they wish to use Internet explorer, Mozilla, XPCOM or any other similar
technology to interface with HTTP or parse the DOM that's fine, however
simply reading the _visual_ output of something when they have easy access
to the semantic source of is not.

>
> I've found this url in webstandards.org:
>
> http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ScreenreaderVisibility
>
> and this the "point of view" of Joe that suggest to keep all them
> visible:
>
> http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter08.html#h4-2020
>
> ...but with problems for small screens:
>
> http://macedition.com/cb/resources/handheldbrowsercsssupport.html
>
> How will we approach to this?

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2003 07:21:27 UTC