RE: how do people normally configure their screenreaders

There is indeed a trade-off between verbosity and speed, which users can optimise for their own needs. However, verbosity reduction is only one strategy for increasing speed. Others include only listening to the first part of each fragment the screen reader reads (unless it's interesting or relevant enough to warrant listening to the whole fragment). Another is using headings and other semantic structure to skip past content. All of these increase the chance that the user will miss something important.

However, web browsing is painfully slow if you don't use these strategies, so almost everyone does to some extent. If you don't use these strategies, you miss out on the content you don't even have time to start reading.

Anecdotally, through my involvement with screen reader users in user testing and various discussion forums for the visually impaired, I would say that most people use the default settings, which tend to be fairly verbose. For instance, I believe that JAWS' default verbosity setting for punctuation is Most (the other options being None, Some and All).

The most experienced and proficient users often customise the verbosity settings. They acknowledge that this might cause them to misunderstand some content occasionally, but it's a price worth paying for the extra speed. I don't know what proportion of people do this, but I don't expect it's high - perhaps 30% or so.

In quoting such a number I am wary of selection bias. People who are least proficient are least likely to customise their settings, and they are also least likely to participate in user testing, discussion forums and screen reader usage surveys. As such, my figure of 30% mentioned above might well be too high. I have no idea how you would survey a large enough representative sample of screen reader users.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: bryan rasmussen <rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com> 
Sent: 08 July 2021 16:35
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: how do people normally configure their screenreaders

I tend to think of the configuration possibilities of screenreaders as being of two sorts - disciplined or relaxed. Disciplined settings make things more verbose as the screen reader tries to give all context, relaxed tends to lose some things - for example with the verbosity settings in voiceover.

Has anyone noticed any particular pattern of how people configure screenreaders - sighted users relaxed? expert users relaxed? etc,.
etc.

Are there any usability studies that track this?

Thanks,
Bryan Rasmussen

Received on Friday, 9 July 2021 11:18:04 UTC