Thursday, January 22, 2009
Screenreaders and the site
We now feature the full text of most of our magazine pages on the site. While this means that screenreaders can now read the page out loud, we haven't yet streamlined the page navigation to make it easy for users to go straight to this content. That's a project for this week.
I've been testing with FireVox which does a great job of reading the site content, but highlights a few areas which could be improved:
- Better structural markup - we should be using more heading elements than we are to break the page up.
- Skip links? This is related to the first point but there should be a straightforward way to skip the toolbar/navigation links when reading the page aloud. I think fixing the first point may take care of this.
- Form elements don't always have an associated label.
Looking around the web at the current state of page navigation for screenreaders - I was aware that css now featured aural and speech media types but it looks as if this is not widely supported.
Skip links seem to be one of the last areas for browser hacks. Approaches include marking them as display:none (which it seems most readers will ignore anyway, as you might expect) or positioning them offscreen, making them 1-pixel transparent images or tiny text. None of these approaches really appeals.
Current plan of attack is to improve the structural markup and see if that gives enough information for FireVox to allow users to zip around the page. Then ensure that form controls are marked up correctly.
T
Labels: accessibility, projects
- posted by Tim Bruce @ 6:13 PM
