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Re: Screen Readers as a Development Tool for Web Developers

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Jul 17, 2015 7:23PM

> I continue to believe that expecting folks to learn how to use screen readers is not going to scale. And it too often takes people down rat holes that are not important. I find that this is especially so when folks have never seen real people who use a screen reader. Using a screen reader is not like using a browser.

I agree. And while I believe that watching a screen reader user and trying to use one helps with empathy and understanding it is unrealistic to expect developers to be up-to-date screen reader users.

What we really need are
* Tools that can inspect the accessibility properties beyond what tools provide today and give developers assurance that what they have implemented is valid, correct, and will be consumed correctly by assistive technology
* Screen readers that operate in standards compliant modes
* More APIs such as text and JavaScript accessibility APIs so we don't have hopelessly complicated and unsupportable methods of exposing accessibility, e.g. methods that Google Docs uses for rich text areas.
* Accessibility training for developers and accessibility in the secondary school and university curriculum
* Tools such as authoring environments that make it easy for people to create accessible content
* Frameworks that build accessibility in at the beginning, e.g not like Angular

Jonathan
--
Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
<EMAIL REMOVED>

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