Re: Best practices for screen readers

> ...daily users of adaptive
> technology have become accustomed to this type of "shorthand" and they get
> it....



Then again, wheelchair users become accustomed to having to get into
buildings through the back service entrance, and having to wait for the
restaurant's assistant manager to find the keys to operate the lift. That
doesn't make it right.

The variety of ways in which screen readers interpret markup is strikingly
similar to the disparity between the visual browsers back in the browser
wars of the Nineties. Has there been much movement toward intentional
standardization of screen readers, or are the existing standards mainly de
facto?

Finally, maybe the problem with breadcrumbs and screen readers isn't that
the screen readers keep reading "greater than," "greater than, "greater
than," but rather a poor choice of semantic markup. Bread crumbs are
essentially a sequence of steps, which is best marked up as an ordered list.
So the user would hear something like, "How you got here: one - home; two -
about us; three - contact us."

Chris