Re: Screen readers - usage stats?

> There is no clear answer from here on your issue but perhaps there
is a best
> practices somewhere.  I always look for something independant of the
at
> issues to work with becaused you are on more solid ground if you do.

I agree completely. I look to WCAG for that solid ground. My own
experience helps me to apply it, and testing helps to validate common
use cases.

> Otherwise,to be fair, you have to do a lot more testing with other
environments
> as has been pointed out.  Even if market stats claim 95 percent of
screen
> reader sales are jaws, that may not even nearly accurately reflect
what is
> really going on around the world.

True. I think the UK AT market is different from the US one in many
ways.

>You can do one of two things with regard
> to market share.  You can do your best to find out what that market
is for a
> limitted audience say the uk for instance or you can assume that
your site
> needs to work with the most challenging environment that it should
> reasonably be expected to work with.

I try to do both. I can't test in everything, there isn't time. Coding
to valid HTML, and following WCAG should give a good chance for every
AT out there. If it doesn't, then there is arguably something wrong
with the AT, not my site.

My central dilemmas are about conflicts in the quality of user
experience that arise from testing even in a few cases. You can
imagine the geometric multiplication of conflicts that would arise in
testing twenty ATs.

I do not believe in lowest common denominator as a design principle. I
believe in graceful degradation, and in following generic design
principles to ensure access for all.

There's a sliding scale of user experience, though, and this is where
the optimisation comes in. The contentious issue seems to be who to
optimise for and why.

Received on Friday, 16 April 2004 07:29:18 UTC