I was at a conference the other week, and one of the big takeaways for me is how many people actually have some sort of disability. In the US for people aged 18 - 65 it's 10%, but for those over 65 it jumps to 37%.<p>It's easy to dismiss these statistics as 'not applicable to our customers', especially when you are a healthy twenty-something, but the statistics say that as we get older, 1 in 3 of us will have some sort of disability.<p>The talk also mentioned temporary impairments which restrict the way users can interact, similar to disabilities. What happens if you have a climbing accident and your mouse hand is in a cast for three months? Or maybe you are just on a train, holding the rail with one hand while it's swaying backwards and forwards.
To sum up: screen readers critically depend on a proper document structure for efficient navigation, So, build a correct logical structure, then style it. Do not make everything out of divs and rely on CSS to render it nicely.
I am a big fan of the viumium extension, it add easy keyboard navigation to any webpage. I'm not touching this mouse this if I can avoid it.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...</a>
Something we've been trying to figure out is how to get screen readers to play nice with a terminal emulator. We're building one as a webapp and had a pretty good solution in an old version of jQuery terminal, but the new one splits each character into its own span... So we're trying out xterm which builds out a whole aria tree, but simple concepts escape me like... How can a screen reader "scroll back and forth" between terminal output, without just redoing a terminal command and listening to the whole output all over again?
Google Chrome supports a set of rational kbd warrior controls across Gmail photos, and the like.<p>i sometimes wish they'd bullied website Devs the way they did with amp to enforce hjkl vi/Emacs motion support.