Léonie Watson, a blind accessibility expert, writes about screen readers, keyboard navigation, semantics and web standards.
HN commenters treat her as an authority on accessibility, noting she is blind and a well-known conference speaker, and cite her views on screen readers.
The following phrase from the linked article by Léonie Watson [1] jumped out at me:
> blind people, particularly those who once had sight (and that's most of us)
I wonder if those of us who have been blind from birth tend to forget that. I'm pretty sure I do. And while I don't have data on this, my guess is that the largest proportion of blind people who are active in advocating for accessibility have been blind from birth or early childhood. That's certainly true of most, if not all, of the blind people I know online.
BTW, while I'm legally blind (i.e. can't drive), I'm not totally blind. But while I can read text up close, I seem to have very little ability to make sense of pictures even up close, presumably because I was never trained to do that at a young age; my parents and teachers were probably satisfied that I could read print. So I'm certainly unaware of any emotional content I might be missing in an image, and that's why I classify myself as blind for the purpose of this discussion.
[1]: https://tink.uk/text-descriptions-emotion-rich-images/
Most accessibility shops and devs tend to use the free NVDA screenreader[0] for accessibility testing because of the costs associated with JAWS.
There are differences between the two (and the other well used screenreader VoiceOver) but NVDA is a damn good product with a decent user base that certainly helps in finding potential hiccups in complex frontend applications. Usually this happens when one of the screenreaders hits something on a webpage that triggers 'interaction mode'[1]
Edit: Interestingly the most recent data I found[2] seems to indicate that NVDA has passed JAWS as the most used screenreader, so might be worth using as the default for testing
[0] https://www.nvaccess.org/about-nvda/
[1] https://tink.uk/understanding-screen-reader-interaction-modes/
[2] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/
There is. The problem is that automatically attached alt-text isn't particularly useful.
You don't know what the intention is of an image. Is it of a banana? A specific banana? The sticker on the banana?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/should-you-embed-alt-text-inside-image-metadata/
And, no, this isn't something which AI can help with.
https://tink.uk/thoughts-on-screen-readers-and-image-recognition/
By the way, the author of this blog post, Leonie Watson, is herself blind. She's well known in the accessibility field for her conference talks on accessibility (there are many on YouTube). A few years ago she wrote a personal piece on her blog describing how she lost her sight and how she came to accept such a change in her life. It's well worth a read:
http://tink.uk/losing-sight/
Not with keyboard interaction: they’d have to add :focus rules and tabindexes to the parent.
Screen readers sometimes read out generated content. Léonie has more info: http://tink.uk/accessibility-support-for-css-generated-content/
I bet this person is from a different culture than you? I'm American raised in the states, and this read like a Brit. The author's domain is .uk (https://tink.uk/) so I suspect that's true.