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A developer's perspective: the problem with screen reader testing

70 pointsby jacobtraceyover 4 years ago

13 comments

mwcampbellover 4 years ago
&gt; Sadly, there’s not currently any way for a developer to identify the type or version of a screen reader that is being used<p>That&#x27;s at least partly because there are some vocal blind people who don&#x27;t want websites to be able to know that they&#x27;re running a screen reader at all, for fear of discrimination. I believe that stance is misguided. I&#x27;ll illustrate why with a story. A few years ago, my best friend, who is blind, was trying to do something on PayPal, and couldn&#x27;t complete the task with his screen reader. I tried to do the same task, with the same screen reader, and didn&#x27;t have any problem. So I figure we got caught in an A&#x2F;B test or phased rollout. And it occurred to me that PayPal would never know that he failed to complete the process because he was using a screen reader. If we allowed websites to know what screen reader a user is running, they could collect useful data that could help them improve. And frankly, the problem that we actually have with accessibility is not willful discrimination, but indifference.<p>P.S. It was a weird feeling to hear the name of a product that I developed from the ground up in the &quot;What about ...&quot; section heading. Yeah, I&#x27;m talking about System Access, the most obscure (and perhaps poorly named) screen reader mentioned in the article. No offense taken though; I understand where the author is coming from.
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miki123211over 4 years ago
One interesting fact to note, that WebAIM doesn&#x27;t reflect at all, is the recent rise in usage of Chinese screen readers. ZDSR for Windows is still an insignificant and meaningless minority, but I&#x27;m not sure how long it&#x27;s going to remain that way, considering it hasn&#x27;t been available outside of China for very long. However, Commentary for Android is getting some significant usage, particularly in poorer countries where Android is the only thing most people can afford. It offers superrior experience and performance to Talkback, and isn&#x27;t prohibitively expensive, so it&#x27;s getting some popularity.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t worry about testing with those screen readers for now, as there still aren&#x27;t that many people using them, but it&#x27;s something worth looking out for in the future.
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miki123211over 4 years ago
&gt; According to the latest WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey, when it comes to desktop screen reader usage, JAWS and NVDA are practically equal in usage, with around 40% of respondents reporting that they use one or the other.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t take this data too seriously. The WebAIM user survey is only available in english, and usually filled by tech-savvy blind users who are part of the blind community and are told about it.<p>At this point, JAWS is mostly used in corporate environments in the United States, mostly due to the number of scripts already written for it, a business-friendly (non GPL) license, and easy enforcement of restrictions given by IT, which are features that NVDA doesn&#x27;t provide. Some countries give out JAWS for free to their blind residents, so the number of JAWS users there is probably going to be pretty significant too. However, in most parts of the world, NVDA is the screen reader most people use. As a person living in eastern Europe, with many friends from around the world (including the U.S.), I know exactly two people using JAWS as a daily driver.
matsemannover 4 years ago
My biggest problem when using a screenreader for testing, is that my usage isn&#x27;t the same as a blind person would use it. I mostly press &quot;next sentence&quot; or tab and am really slow. My testing is also biased by the fact that I know how it looks (what is on each page, which part I&#x27;m trying to reach).<p>When I visited a blind person to test for us at a previous workplace, I was astonished about what we found. It was very different from our own attempts. His voice-speed and navigation was so fast that the parts we felt were sluggish just took him a second to navigate through. He had other issues, however.
DoreenMicheleover 4 years ago
FYI: There is a small, low traffic group for blind developers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;blind-dev-works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;blind-dev-works</a><p>I&#x27;m one of the co-owners.
User23over 4 years ago
I’m absolutely certain there are plenty of NFB members who will gladly provide free screen reader accessibility testing for apps they use if the developer is responsive to feedback.
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bramdover 4 years ago
Before doing screen reader testing on complex web components, what I see as some kind of lack box testing where you test your whole screen reader + browser stack, it is useful to have a look at what the browser passes to a screen reader. Especially Firefox has a very nice accessibility tree panel in the devtools these days. In my experience, the more visual tree that is shown there is also easier&#x2F;faster to read for users that are not blind and are not that quick when using screen readers.<p>Also, keep in mind that something that technically works correctly with screen readers is just the beginning. User testing might reveal lots of issues you wouldn&#x27;t think of yourself. And yes, I know that resources are usually limited and there is not much room for user testing, especially testing with screen reader users and other groups that have some kind of disability. I recently worked as the accessibility lead of a mobile COVID exposure notification app that had a very simple UI and a hard accessibility requirement. We had the luxury to do extensive user testing and even in this simple interface we found lots of small changes that improved the experience for screen reader users.
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detaroover 4 years ago
In addition, I wish screenreaders had a text mode, where they print what they say and maybe provide cues on possible actions. Actual screenreader users work with astonishing speaking speeds and great memorization of commands, but without the experience a bare-bones but more visual interface would likely be easier to use.
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jscholesover 4 years ago
&gt; When it comes to screen reader version fragmentation, there is very little in the way of either documentation or support for developers. Fixing issues often comes down to a case of trial and error, retesting and hoping for the best.<p>The author may be interested in the ARIA-AT project[1], which aims to thoroughly test assistive technology support for WAI-ARIA and HTML constructs. It&#x27;s still a relatively young effort, but the community group is open and always happy for participation.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;w3c&#x2F;aria-at" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;w3c&#x2F;aria-at</a>
Vinnlover 4 years ago
There are a number of browsers that run in Docker and that I can remote control (using Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer or whatever) in my CI systems to run at least some smoke tests, making sure that basic features are available.<p>Does anyone know if something like that is available for screen readers - at least for a free and open source one?
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mwcampbellover 4 years ago
Forgive the second top-level comment, but I have some thoughts on Narrator and Edge. Disclosure: I worked on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft during the transition from EdgeHTML to Chromium, and as a third-party screen reader developer before that. But I won&#x27;t divulge anything confidential here.<p>It probably comes as no surprise that EdgeHTML and Chromium have completely different accessibility implementations. Narrator always had the best support for EdgeHTML. I was a third-party screen reader developer when EdgeHTML first came out, and for us third-party developers, EdgeHTML was a drastic change from IE. For over a decade, we had provided access to IE by injecting code into the IE process (yes, Windows lets you do that) and accessing the IE DOM in-process using COM. We did something similar for Firefox and Chromium, but using the IAccessible2 API (also COM-based). To improve security, old Edge disallowed this kind of injection; it could only be accessed through the UI Automation API. Narrator was built for this; the rest of us had to adapt after the fact. And since we could only access UIA through inter-process communication, not in-process like we did with the IE DOM and IAccessible2, there were performance problems, even with Narrator. (Luckily, I got to help solve those problems during my time on the Windows accessibility team.)<p>With Chromium (in both Google Chrome and the new Edge), screen readers can still inject code in-process and use the legacy IAccessible2 API. And NVDA, JAWS, and System Access (which I developed before joining Microsoft) do that. These third-party screen readers access Chrome and new Edge in the same way, at least inside the web content area, so if you&#x27;re testing with one of these screen readers, it probably doesn&#x27;t matter which browser you use. The situation with Narrator and Chromium-based browsers is more interesting. Narrator uses the UI Automation API to access all applications. Chromium has a native UIA implementation, largely contributed by the Edge team, but while that implementation is enabled by default in the new Edge, it isn&#x27;t yet in Chrome. So Narrator accesses Edge using UIA. But for Chrome, and other Chromium-based apps (e.g. Electron apps), Narrator uses a bridge from IAccessible2 to UIA that&#x27;s built into the UIA core module. So in corner cases, there may be differences in how Narrator behaves in Chrome and Edge.<p>So, should developers test with Narrator and&#x2F;or Edge? Well, I may be too biased to answer that. But I think it&#x27;s likely that Narrator usage is on the rise. While I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft, we heard from time to time about praise that Narrator was getting in the blind community. (Naturally I can&#x27;t take full credit for that; it was a team effort.) Moreover, since Narrator is the option built into Windows, there will come a point (if it hasn&#x27;t come already) when it&#x27;s good enough for many users and they have no reason to seek a third-party alternative. Also, there are some PCs where Narrator is the only fully functional screen reader, specifically those running Windows 10 S (the variant that doesn&#x27;t allow traditional side-loaded Win32 apps). I&#x27;d guess that an increasing number of students and users of corporate PCs are saddled with that variant of Windows. And while I can&#x27;t say anything about future versions of Windows, one can make an educated guess based on the broader trajectory of the industry.<p>As for whether it&#x27;s worth testing with Edge as opposed to Chrome, I don&#x27;t know. Fortunately, browser usage data is readily available.
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vagab0ndover 4 years ago
Is there some software library that turns websites into text, that these screen readers all use, or do they implement their own?
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forgotmypw17over 4 years ago
If you design your website simply, you don&#x27;t need to know that the user is using a screen-reader, nor what other strange situation that you&#x27;d never even imagined or accounted for may be happening. They&#x27;ll be able to use it either way, because you made it universally accessible, rather than covering certain classes or cases individually.