WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: screen reader versions for testing

for

From: Mallory
Date: Nov 2, 2016 3:11PM

We (my work) may have to start testing ChromeVox because we make
education products and it seems in the US, Chromeboxes are becoming
popular:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outsold-macs-us-idc-figures

On Sun, Oct 30, 2016, at 09:40 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> The reason I have not encouraged testing with ChromeVox is that it is
> very rarely used.
> According to the latest WebAiM screen reader user survey:
> http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey6/
> it is the primary screen reader for 0.3% of correspondants, while NVDA
> is in the 15% range (and much higher if you take secondary screen
> readers into acount).
> Sadly it is not enough to make sure the webpage code conforms to
> standards, it needs to be tested with at least one assistive
> technology, usually a screen reader, and that usually means learning
> and implementing some workarounds to address the qwerks of that
> particular screen reader.
> If I am putting an effort into that, I want to make sure to use a
> popular screen reader, so those workarounds are noticed.
> Of course screen reader usage pattern changes, and we all should keep
> a close eye on the WebAIM survey (and other usage statistics if they
> become available).
> A thumbs up for WebAIM for taking the initiative to carry out this
> survey. It is incredibly valuable when recommending and formulating a
> corporate accessibility testing strategy, management wants
> justification and numbers behind all recommendations.
> The Android/Talkback development is exciting and I am keeping a close
> prosthetic eye on it, in case it surpasses Voiceover use on responsive
> web in the near future, it could maybe do that, seeing as Google is
> doing good while the latest Apple upgrades are a bit underwhelming
> (well, in my personal opinion that is).
> -B
>
>
> On 10/30/16, Kevin Chao < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > I've been doing lots of a11y testing using ChromeVox Next
> > <http://www.chromevox.com/next.html>; and TalkBack
> > <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.marvin.talkback&hl=en>
> > with
> > Chrome. I've found it to be comparable to/better than Mac/iOS VoiceOver. In
> > the past half year, there have been lots of excellent improvements to
> > Google's screen readers and browsers, so strongly recommend for these to be
> > factored in AT test matrix.
> >
> > On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 4:20 AM Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
> > <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> >
> >> We generally test with NVDA (current - 1) with Firefox (current -2).
> >> NVDA is free, open source (so available to the general user at no
> >> cost), has good visual tools to help developers and does not hide
> >> accessibility issues like Jaws does (I appreciate Jaws trying to fill
> >> in the gap for the end users but it makes it a bad tool for testing).
> >> Since I am heavily involved in development and testing of contet, I
> >> sanity check it with Jaws and IE, and we try to file bug and work
> >> around the most critical problems we see occurring in that
> >> combination.
> >> For responsive web, we use iOS, latest (because upgrading is easy),
> >> iPhone 6 in portrait mode (testing in portrait and landscape on phone
> >> and tablet adds a lot of overhead very quickly).
> >> Generally, banks recommend that users upgrade to latest versions of
> >> browsers for security reasons.
> >> We are looking into testing at least key pages with screen
> >> magnification and speech recognition as well.
> >>
> >> Of course we focus primarily to make sure our code validates and that
> >> our ARIA, when we use it, is correct.
> >> Cheers
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On 10/29/16, JP Jamous < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> >> > Here we test with the latest versions of JAWS/Internet Explorer,
> >> > NVDA/Firefox and Voiceover/Safari.
> >> >
> >> > It makes it a bit hard to find the happy medium as all 3 screen readers
> >> > render HTML markup differently. To achieve the happy medium, we try to
> >> focus
> >> > on proper semantic whenever we can. Sometimes that is not possible and
> >> > we
> >> > notice that NVDA and Voiceover tend to behave similarly, but JAWS is
> >> > different since it drills deeper into the markup.
> >> >
> >> > We do test every now and then with older versions of the 3 screen
> >> readers in
> >> > case we run into an issue. As a good example, aria-describedby and
> >> > aria-labelledby were not supported with Voiceover on iOS 10. We tested
> >> our
> >> > code against iOS 9.4 and found that it worked fine. That was when we
> >> > realized that it was a bug on behalf of Apple.
> >> >
> >> >