"AI can help by providing mostly accurate descriptions of images on web pages. This can be especially helpful when the image has not been provided with an text alternative, but is visible on the page."
What is the best way to offer you text-to-speech in my video game? Should I build it in myself? Or should I somehow make the text available to external screen reading plugins you already have installed?
What is the best way to enable text-to-speech? I'm trying to imagine how a blind person would find the toggle in a settings menu they can't see. The only way I can think of around that would be to enable it by default and have an option for users who don't want it to disable it at the beginning, but that sounds cumbersome. Is there a better middle option? Is there a commonly-used keyboard shortcut I can enable or something?
Sometimes, you might think that previous #accessibility wisdom has been superseded by new "facts". Maybe someone told you that #screenReaders don't work well with a particular design pattern, but you tested #ScreenReader X and it seemed to work fine. Perhaps you heard that an interactive HTML input doesn't persist with forced colours styling, but you tried a High Contrast mode in Microsoft Edge and it seemed to be there.
There are three considerations usually missing here:
How are you defining and evaluating the working state? Do you have a functional, accurate understanding of the #accessTechnology or accessibility feature you are asserting things about?
You tested one thing in relation to a statement about multiple things, e.g. a statement is made about screen readers, plural, and you only tested with #VoiceOver (it's always VoiceOver). Beyond posting on the web-a11y Slack, how do you propose testing more broadly, if you plan to at all?
Possibly the most critical at all: is this question worth its overheads? If answering it conclusively would require me to test ten screen readers with 45 speech engines, or seven browsers with 52 permutations of CSS properties, maybe following the advice is "cheaper" than determining whether the advice is still completely relevant.
Important disclaimer: this relates specifically to cases where following the advice would not actively make things worse for users.
TL;DR: when you know doing a thing won't make things bad, doing the thing is usually quicker than evaluating whether not doing the thing is also bad.
@jscholes This is one of the most infuriating thing. “Do this much simpler thing!” — “But what if I want to do this really complicated thing? This should be easier!” — “Do the simple thing!!!”
To what degree does NVDA actually have support for TUIs? When I look at TUIs (terminal user interfaces) for tools like Joplin, Vim, practically anything that requires using arrow keys/tab within a terminal, it almost always is a horrible experience. Are there things TUI developers can do to better accommodate NVDA? @NVAccess@tspivey
Do terminal-first tools like TDSR in a WSL2 shell improve this at all? #nvdasr#screenreaders#accessibility
@tspivey@zersiax@NVAccess We really need ARIA for terminals. This is totally doable with TTY escape codes, just like we have images and clickable links now. Terminals are supposed to be so accessible, but no access to semantic information for screen readers just kills the whole concept.
This isn't just for traidtional TUIs, software that puts "2024-04-12, 23:42.6857 CET, warning: /a/very/long/path/to/the/software/src/utils/helper.py: warning:" before every log message would also benefit from this.
@zersiax@SunDial79@NVAccess@tspivey At some point I was using a music player whose name evades me now, to arrange playlists on a Linux machine over SSH. I remember setting something in the config so that the cursor always lands in the currently selected line and that seemed to do the trick. Not sure if that helps.
@SteveFaulkner
Hi Steve,
Thank you for this great overview! Yes, it is useful.
Some features are marked as "implemented interoperably (across multiple browsers)". May I ask which browsers have been tested here?
Thank you!
Asking people who use #screenReaders: what is the best way to add #AltText to a QR-Code? Are the screen readers clever enough to recognise it as such and offer to read the contents or follow the link? Does putting the content of the QR-Code in the alt text help? or would it make it worse, especially if it is an URL?
boosts are welcome
(the whole point of the post that prompted this question was posting a QR-Code, so no, I couldn't have just posted the URL)
@yatil@aardrian@notabene@pixelate I feel like I remember the folks at WebAIM encouraging people to take it as long as they use a screen reader for any purpose, even if it's not for a disability. I guess in some cases it's kinda interesting to see the comparisons, but I'd also prefer if they filtered people out of the survey if they only use it for testing purposes.
@kaveinthran@mastoblind Thanks so much for testing daily! The best place to bring these issues up is in the TopicBox for Daily testers, which is here: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/daily - there might be a delay from MZLA folks since it's the weekend and it's FOSDEM, but they're active there!