This post is the second in a three-part series about how screen readers obtain what users need from applications and operating systems.
A Deep Dive into Accessibility APIs, Part 1 — Knowbility
In this first Deep Dive into Accessibility APIs installment, we'll start from absolute scratch and recount the widely available basic story. It's written for beginners, but the fact that I describe web accessibility in the broader context of software accessibility might offer a different twist for current practitioners as well. Parts 2 and 3, on the other hand, are more technical. Although those discussions may largely be of interest only to "inquiring minds that want to know", understanding the history and variety of the specialized protocols at the heart of this process sheds light on why screen readers sometimes perform differently in the same application or on the same web site while also providing a glimpse of a likely future.
Your Browser May Be Having a Secret Relationship with a Screen Reader: A Deep Dive into Accessibility APIs, Part 3 — Knowbility
The final installment of the three-part saga on the technical details of how screen readers communicate with other software.
Ubiquitous Accessibility for People with Visual Impairments: Are We There Yet?
Ubiquitous access is an increasingly common vision of computing, wherein users can interact with any computing device or service from anywhere, at any time. In the era of personal computing, users with visual impairments required special-purpose, assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to interact with computers. This paper investigates whether technologies like screen readers have kept pace with, or have created a barrier to, the trend toward ubiquitous access, with a specific focus on desktop computing as this is still the primary way computers are used in education and employment. Towards that, the paper presents a user study with 21 visually-impaired participants, specifically involving the switching of screen readers within and across different computing platforms, and the use of screen readers in remote access scenarios. Among the findings, the study shows that, even for remote desktop access—an early forerunner of true ubiquitous access—screen readers are too limited, if not unusable. The study also identifies several accessibility needs, such as uniformity of navigational experience across devices, and recommends potential solutions. In summary, assistive technologies have not made the jump into the era of ubiquitous access, and multiple, inconsistent screen readers create new practical problems for users with visual impairments.
recommended techniques for accessibility champions - A11y Toolkit
An open-source library of techniques to avoid the most common accessibility failures.
An introduction to screen readers
A screen reader allows people who are blind or visually impaired to use their computer. This factsheet provides an overview of the main screen readers available for people to use with their computer
Digital accessibility is real and tangible
A workshop using real-life examples and first-hand experience of how assistive technology works can result in a deeper understanding of accessibility needs
Rethinking the human-readability infrastructure
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Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments
The Department of Justice published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on July 20, 2023 explaining how we propose updating the regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to add more specific requirements about web and mobile application accessibility. This fact sheet gives a plain language summary of the technical standards that state and local governments would have to follow to meet their existing obligations under Title II of the ADA.
brief history of browser accessibility support
Author: steve faulkner The Paciello Group contact: [email protected]
Substrates via Accessibility
The social model of disability holds that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — that when software fails to accommodate a person’s needs, the environment is disabling them. We argue that the dominant organization of computing produces such interaction mismatches structurally: the commodity form of software requires a standardized consumer, and everyone whose needs diverge from this imagined subject is disabled by the software environment. The substrates research community has identified properties — disclosure, composability, malleability — that would address this, but the commodity form actively selects against these properties because they dissolve the boundaries on which exchange value depends. This raises a question: how can infrastructure organized against the grain of commodity logic be made durable? We find a precedent in accessibility infrastructure — sustained not by patronage but by the organized counter-power of disability rights movements. Through Allio, a system for cross-application augmentation built on accessibility APIs, we illustrate both what this foundation makes possible and where its limits lie. We argue that the accessibility case reframes the substrates programme’s central challenge as political-economic: the question of who sustains substrate infrastructure, and through what social mechanisms, is as important as the question of what properties it should have.
lukeslp/awesome-accessibility
Curated list of accessibility resources, tools, and best practices for creating inclusive digital experiences
Usability/UX/Accessability Research? · Issue #819 · w3c-fedid/FedCM
I'm curious if this work has any usability, UX, or accessibility research that supports the designs here? Are there non-goals, or handling of failure case scenarios that have been envisioned an...
React component for screen reader accessibility • Josh W. Comeau
A convenient component for contextualizing visual content for screen readers
Library Guides: Accessibility Toolkit for Open Educational Resources (OER): Home
Accessibility guide for creating OER
To elaborate, assistive technology tend to necessitate rich and open representations to capture authorial intent that can be interacted with in multimodal ways. HTML is the canonical example. For example, every application having to manually script with a screen reader doesn't scale.
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The intersection between accessibility technology and malleable software seems under explored.