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Testing with Screen Readers (was RE: Wai Aria how useful?)

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From: John Foliot
Date: Jul 27, 2010 5:21PM

Interesting thread, and some thoughts:

There is a real tension between building standards compliant sites that
work with all technologies versus 'testing' with one tool, and building in
hacks and other 'repair strategies' to support bad software. Just ask
those unfortunates who must still support IE6. If you really must test
with a screen reader, then test with more than one: you test with more
than one browser, right?

The other point that must be considered is that to really be able to
'test' with any screen-reader, you should be a daily screen-reader user.
The problem we have is developers who want to do the right thing, but are
not competent with using Adaptive Technology, so really, all they are
doing is listening to their site read aloud: they are often missing out on
much of the interactivity daily users apply to using their software. For
production class developers, they are often better served by asking (and
paying) daily AT users to do the testing for them, rather than pretending
that opening up NVDA, or the time-crippled JAWs eval copy (which is
illegal, but...) and listening to a site read aloud and calling it
"testing".

Finally, as a very real question, what exactly are you testing *for* when
using a screen reader? If a developer is testing to find holes, I would
suggest they are approaching the problem from the wrong angle: you should
be testing that solutions implemented work as desired. So the developer
should be thinking about the problems and solutions long before they get
to the functional testing stage, and there are plenty of developer tools
out there that can confirm if your code is moving in the right direction
(understanding how a DOM inspector works is crucial); achieving real
accessible content means making some decisions at the foundational stage -
it's architectural. Waiting for a walk-through using AT to find problems
is almost certainly a recipe for ensuring there will be problems to
find...


As always, IMHO

JF



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