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Re: Web development; How to identify if a screen reader is in use

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From: Jeremy Echols
Date: May 15, 2017 10:59AM

I can't help but wonder how, technically, one could hope to track AT. By its nature, it communicates with the browser and only the browser, not the site itself. So in order to track on it, you'd need browser vendors to explicitly add something that allows you to track - or else use pattern recognition to make guesses, which would sometimes be terribly wrong. And with Firefox's privacy focus, that is very unlikely to happen without an opt-in-only situation. Tracking users in general is getting harder due to browsers making it easier and easier to block things like Google Analytics. I just don't see browser vendors purposely exposing such sensitive data.

And then I think about some of the legalities of forcing a user to expose this data. I visit a job website and submit an application. The employer cannot legally ask a great many questions about disabilities, but the website is actually being fed that information for free. Does the employer choose to use that information in an illegal way? Quite possibly. And there's no way to detect that bias because it's just one piece of data the browser is sending to all sites I visit.

Aside from all that, I kind of see this like mobile detection. A while ago everybody had their desktop site and their mobile site (and some sites still do). But the trend lately has been to build a single site that works for mobile devices and regular desktop browsers. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a big one is reduced cost. Providing a mobile site that's separate from the main site means you're managing two separate projects that need to be kept mostly in sync. Unless you design for multiple front-end experiences, this can be very expensive to maintain. Now you want to split it into AT users and non-AT users? Same problem all over again, but even worse. Now you're attempting to decide based on the use of JAWS how a user should experience the site.

But what does it mean that somebody uses JAWS? It doesn't mean they're blind. More likely, they have a cognitive disability, low vision (and like to read along with the screen reader), or minimal mouse use and simply like the keyboard shortcuts screen readers provide. Even if your entire goal is strictly analytics, as opposed to separating two sites, you don't actually have much information to go on.

Make a site that works for everybody and you have a single thing to manage.