pathfinder playtest accessibility screen reader

Read over Are inline elements (see list) marked up correctly? and Scott O’Hara’s article, Inclusively Hidden, for a better understanding of how the later two techniques can be implemented.

Adding an icon with appropriate alt text.

Adding text that CSS then hides so it only is read out to people using screen readers.

Updating the text for all users (such as adding the word “Important:” to the front of the emphasized content).

If the emphasis of the text is critical to understanding (and only if it’s critical), we should plan to add additional text to the page for people using screen readers. (See Why does it matter if our HTML is semantic? for more on this topic.) We should still use semantic HTML so that if screen readers pick up this functionality in the future we don’t have to remediate our sites. (Some have settings to turn on, but they’re not easy to locate.)

Unfortunately, today, screen readers don’t express these elements by default. HTML contains semantic elements for emphasis and strong text: and. Know what screen readers don’t read Emphatic elements It’s a good idea to listen to a page on a screen reader to understand how your content will be read. Common punctuation marks such as periods or question marks, on the other hand, are read as a person would. Most screen readers read important punctuation, like the symbol in a email address, by default. See Accessible Names for more guidance on what determines the accessible name of an object on the page. Link.” Don’t tell the user what they’ve focused on. Screen readers generally announce the type of element they’ve got highlighted, as in “George Washington. Don’t provide them unless the situation requires it. When it comes to title fields or “tooltips”, less is more. For example, if we had both alt text of “Home” and a title of “Home”, on our Home menu item, a screen reader could potentially read “Home Home Home”.

One frequent offender on the web is title content. Note that this also doesn’t just apply to icons or images. In the Trees example, we intentionally did not label the font icons on the menu items except for Accessibility, where we added an aria-label to the anchor tag. Accessibility, opens in a new tab.”ĭepending on the implementation this can be done in a number of ways. When we look at this set of icons, we see that the only one that adds important information to its menu choice is the last one, which indicates that the Accessibility link will go to a new tab. Neither of these descriptions are particularly useful. If instead we described the icons by their presentation, our user would hear something like “House. If we were to describe each of these icons in turn to users, we’d sound either repetitive or confusing.įor example, if we described the icons by their purposes, our user would hear something like “Home. In most cases, the icon and the text have the same intention, and the icons themselves are provided for easier scanning and visual emphasis. On our Trees example site, the global navigation text is accompanied by an icon. The second rule of writing for something that will be read aloud is don’t repeat yourself. In other cases, we can create the text and hide it visually while leaving it available for screen reader users. In the case of icons and images, we can use alt text or titles to describe the content. This doesn’t mean the text alternative must be visible on the page. Anything that’s visual or unclear, whether it’s the layout of a table, a chart, the purpose of an interactive element, should have a text alternative provided. This doesn’t apply just to icons or images.

If we don’t provide alt text on the icons to indicate their type, people using screen readers would be unable to differentiate between the severity of the two messages. Information messages use the same structure, except visual cues in the form of an icon and a color change indicate that they are different from warnings. The first rule of writing for something that will be read aloud is to ensure that all of the content on the page is accounted for, even if it’s not written content.įor example, the warning messages on this site display an icon indicating that they are warnings. Make sure all content is accounted for – even if it’s not written. Instead, they will hear (or read) the output. Writing for screen readers means writing instructions with the assumption that your reader can’t or won’t see the screen. Most people who use screen readers have Visual Disabilities (although not all people with visual disabilities use screen readers and not all screen reader users have visual disabilities). Screen readers are assistive technology (AT) that read the content on the screen aloud or present it on a Braille display.

Pathfinder playtest accessibility screen reader