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Re: Another example of role="alert" not being read by NVDA

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 16, 2013 1:24PM

I largely agree with Lucia, but if you put in enough effort you can develop a very good understanding of what screen reader users will and won't be able to do. There is a wide variety of skill levels among screen reader users so I would not get too hung up on trying to behave exactly like a screen reader user because they are all different.

It's certainly a lot of work though. I would guess I spent a couple of weeks observing screen reader users before learning to use a screen reader myself, and much more time getting fluent in its use and observing more people since then. I would now reckon to pick up at least 80% of the issues we would find during user testing, which is often enough given that user testing itself gives variable results.

Spread across a few months, it's not an unreasonable amount of effort but it's not something you can learn in a few days. Learning all the keystrokes is the easy part. The difficult part is learning how people use a screen reader, how they build and maintain a mental model of pages and how they comprehend what they hear.

Steve Green