LessFussDesign blog

Posts Tagged ‘JAWS’

02 Nov 2009

WebAIM screen reader users follow up survey

Last week the WebAIM team published the results of their latest Screen Reader User Survey [external link] (a follow up to the last one carried out at the end of 2008). As with the first WebAIM survey [external link], the results confirm that many of the things we have assumed are problematic for screen reader users (e.g. Flash – or rather how developers implement Flash – is a massive pain in the backside) are true. They also reinforce that just as there’s no typical web browser user, there’s also no typical screen reader user. Continue reading »

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11 Aug 2009

Web form help text & accessibility

In the last piece I did on accessible web forms, I mentioned that in Forms Mode the JAWS screen reader won’t announce any content in a form that isn’t marked up in a form HTML tag. 90% of the time you can make forms more accessible by using labels for each field, but sometimes you want to provide more information than can fit nicely into the label (e.g. some extra help text) without making a meal of the layout and styling. Here’s a way of styling content in an HTML label tag so it looks like it’s separate from the label, but will still get read out by screen readers. Continue reading »

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25 Jul 2009

Screen readers and radio buttons: using HTML fieldset and legend

You can go a long way to making a web form accessible by making sure every input field has a label. But with a set of radio buttons this ain’t enough. Use labels for each of your radio buttons and the various options will be read out, but how does a screen reader user get the question they’re supposed to be answering? Easy. Use fieldset and legend HTML tags, a simple – yet underused – way of getting your forms to make sense for screen reader users. Continue reading »

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21 Feb 2009

WebAIM accessibility survey results

WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) have published the results of a screen reader user survey they did at the end of 2008. Some of the results confirmed what many of us assume (or are led to believe) about screen reader user behaviour, but others were a bit of a surprise. The full results and some analysis is published on the WebAIM website [external link], here’s my list of the main points of interest. Continue reading »

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