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Re: Google Chrome Frame for Screen Readers?

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jun 24, 2015 3:20PM

I wish you the best of luck if you want to attempt this, but it's important to note that screen reader usage varies unpredictably based on the user, not just the browser.

For example, if you were going to emulate a screen reader like JAWS or NVDA, you may get users who use standard line by line navigation methods via the single up/down arrow keys, or paragraph by paragraph using ctrl+up/down, or quick navigation keys like 'h' or shift+h to jump between headings, or l or shift+l to jump between lists, etc, or internal structure navigation commands such as JAWS' commands for ctrl+shift+up/right/down/left for navigating between the cells of a data table and the announcement of all associated headers (if the markup is correct), and so on.

If you wanted to make all of this available within an emulator without JAWS actually running, you would basically have to duplicate everything that is already programmed within the screen reader, and even then, if ARIA wasn't properly supported in the browser, it wouldn't provide the same feedback for a sighted developer expecting that this is what a JAWS user would hear when navigating the product.

On the other side, if you had a non-sighted WE user who went to a website and if it provided an NVDA/Firefox mode, it still wouldn't work correctly if Window Eyes didn't properly support ARIA, because the lack of support would exist within the screen reader regardless.

I may be misunderstanding the purpose, and if so I apologize, but it's not a good practice to program any web technology specifically for individual AT and browser combinations; providing different content for each, because there are too many variables to account for.

Like I said, I may be misunderstanding, so please let me know if I am.