A few months ago at Upmystreet we commissioned a screenreader user to review the site and tape his experiences of doing so. It's an interesting process, and really drives home how ticking checkboxes and following guidelines is a very poor way to really deliver accessibility.
We have implemented most of the recommendations he made, but some points still stand out really clearly:
- screenreaders read punctuation out loud.
'stef's going down' is stef-apostrophe-s-period going down
whereas
'stef is going down' is as is. Basically this means that informal speech can be very painful.
- Although Adrian deliberately slowed down the screenreader for my benefit, it is still a very slow way to browse.
In the same spirit of openness and community improvement that lead to the BBC's still sadly not-html BBC Accessibilty report, I've got permission from the boss to publish an extract (4Mb, about 15 minutes) of it. If people make this available via whatever is their p2p filesharing app du jour, I'll be quite happy.
I hope people find it useful.