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Re: screen reader announcing clickable

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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Sep 15, 2016 10:00AM

I personally think they should just remove the feature or turn it off by default.

If I recall correctly, when JAWS and other screen readers initially added the feature, it was in response to situations where developers were adding click events to spans and divs to have them behave like buttons and links. However, when developers started creating more complex widgets with javascript (like treeviews,) they started using the technique more frequently where the event listener was placed on the parent element (instead of adding event listeners to every element inside the parent element.)

I suspect screen reader users hear "clickable" so much now (and it so frequently doesn't mean anything) that the information just adds to the noise of the page. It would probably be better just to remove the feature while providing screen reader users a feature that allows them to click on whatever element the screen reader is focused on. Most of the time, the spans and divs being used for something like a link or button provide some indication that they are actionable through their wording. That still isn't as good as explicitly providing a button or link. However, it is understandable that AT vendors would want to add features to their AT that help users with the large amount of inaccessible content that is out there.

Thanks,
Tim