Screen Reader Basics: VoiceOver -- A11ycasts #07

Chrome for Developers
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2023
YouTube
127K views · 10 years ago · tutorial · intermediate · dated

An episode of the A11ycasts series from Chrome for Developers introducing the macOS screen reader VoiceOver. It shows the basics of turning it on and navigating a page so developers can test how their sites sound.

HN people recommend it as a quick starting point for learning how screen readers work and for finding the vocabulary to look up shortcuts on other systems.

“a short video [1] and some playing around can already give you a pretty good grip of common issues in 15 minutes”
Accessibility
#voiceover#screenreader#a11y#macos#accessibilitytesting

3 comments from Hacker News

a
@avtar2023 · in “We’re all just temporarily abled”
> That makes me think, how does one learn to use a screen reader? (Or alternatives for other handicaps) VoiceOver on Mac or NVDA on Windows are good, free options. There's an accessibility playlist on Youtube that provides an introduction to both: ▶ this video A more in-depth demo: link
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@Vinnl2022 · in “Aria-label is a code smell”
Yes! It's not even that much of a time investment; a short video [1] and some playing around can already give you a pretty good grip of common issues in 15 minutes. Yes, that's not enough for properly evaluating the performance of what you're working on (screen readers differ far more than browsers do, and there's many different ways of navigating), but it helps form a mental model and to quickly encouter really egregious issues that e.g. make your entire project inaccessible with any screen reader. [1] I think I used this one, to learn the general principles and to at least find the terms needed to find the shortcuts for my operating system: ▶ this video
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@Vinnl2019 · in “The Web We Broke”
A tip: the most important step you can take is to do a short tutorial on how to navigate the web using a screen reader ([1] covers the basics - it's video though, and focused on OS X, but helped as a starting point for me to do the same on Ubuntu), then use that to navigate through your own app. You just need to do that once to already have a far better feeling of where common pain points are. [1] ▶ this video
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