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Re: Google Chrome Frame for Screen Readers?

for

From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Jun 26, 2015 2:22PM

Thanks, all, for this interesting discussion.

I'll make a few last points, at least based on my fifteen years of
experience in this field, both as an end-user and an active
participant in many activities to move the field forward. I actually
do more than simply post links to email lists <smile>.

As I suspected, Robert and I are talking about pretty different
things. And my idea isn't really possible, right now.

Thanks, Bryan, especially, for making that altogether clear to me.

But I will reiterate my point that I don't think the current paradigm
of having developers *have* to learn how to use screen readers is
working very well, in terms of the wide adoption/correct
implementation of ARIA. It's too much knowledge to be able to scale,
in my experience. Just turning on ChromeVox or VO, and arrowing
through (or tabbing through) a page (never having seen an end-user
use a screen reader) is not working out very well, based on the
results I find, daily, in the "real world," of an end-user i.e. I
don't mean when I'm being paid to test.

Heck, we have seen this issue on this list for years -- sighted
people get bogged down in screen-reader issues that *they* perceive
as issues, but that really aren't.

As I see it, the unfortunate outcome of the integration of VO into
the Mac (less so with IOS, I believe) and ChromeVox into Chrome is
that it gives folks who've not seen end-users the sense that they
actually understand that experience. And I don't find that to be the
case, unfortunately.

Robert, I'm not sure I actually understand what you're aiming at that
would help blind people, unless, perhaps, it'd be a standards-based
training tool so that then, pblind people could provide feedback to
vendors about how they should change what they're currently doing.
But I don't see the blind audience being very significant for such a thing.

Also, not many blind folks use ChromeVox, based on this:
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey5/

Personally, I'd like to see a vendor agnostic tool (not by Google, or
anyone else), but rather, build a *collaborative* tool to which *all*
browser vendors would contribute, as well as AT vendors. It'd be a
great learning experience for these folks to work actively together,
but of corse, I imagine in dreamland.

Finally, in case this may help somebody, here's this FF toolbar that
does look for ARIA, though I'm not sure whether Gez is maintaining
it/whether it will be updated when ARIA 1.1 comes out:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/juicy-studio-accessibility-too/


Maybe somebody should propose this project to the $20 million
challenge Google's got going; I suppose Google-centric would be
better than nothing. Go for it, Robert!:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/google-challenge-disabilities_n_7469866.html

Best,
Jennifer