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Re: Screen reader accessibility to Uncertain Character Format

for

From: glen walker
Date: Jul 5, 2020 12:46PM

As far as an equitable experience, it sounds like sighted and low-vision
users will have the same experience. A sighted user will see the UCF
results and may have to refer back to the help page to understand the
special characters (if they're new at looking at the results). A screen
reader user can listen to the results one character at a time so can hear
the same wildcard type results and may also have to refer back to the help
page occasionally. People with computer science backgrounds or familiar
with regular expressions might catch on quickly.

Many screen readers won't read the special characters by default but it's
easy to change that setting or to navigate letter by letter to hear all the
characters. For example, in your sample, "Elizabeth [H_]ICA[N,R]D" is read
as "Elizabeth H I C A N R D", with the last part read as individual
letters. The brackets, underscores, and commas are not read. If I use the
right arrow key to navigate with the screen reader, I hear "Elizabeth"
spelled out and then I hear:

- left bracket
- H
- line
- right bracket
- I
- C
- A
- left bracket
- N
- comma
- R
- right bracket
- D

I'm not sure why the underscore is read as "line" but in any event I can
tell there are special characters. I can also hear capital letters with a
higher pitch than lower case letters so can tell the difference there too.
Different screen readers might read it differently.

I think the only change I would make to your sample page would be to have a
hidden hint that UCF is present in the results. A sighted user gets that
information quickly by seeing the brackets and such. A screen reader user
might hear a similar hint because they get letters read out individually
but if the letters actually spell a word, the word might be pronounced
instead of the letters, so having a hint might be helpful. For example,
hearing something like "Elizabeth H I C A N R D (contains uncertain
characters)".

As a side topic, even though help on the UCF is not too far away - I can
click on "help" then "interpret the symbols we use in names and dates" - it
might be nice to have a link to that help directly. You could even have a
link next to the UCF. But I'd have to see a results page that contains a
lot of UCF to decide if all those links would be too "noisy".

You could potentially have something that's helpful for both sighted and
low vision users such as a "contains ucf" link after the text. As a user,
it might be nice to have the UCF help directly on the results page but if
the help on UCF is extensive, that might be too much to repeat on the
results page and link to the help would be ok.

And as another side topic, the"Printable Format" table is nice that it uses
real <table> markup. Your column headers are good but it would be helpful
to have row headers too (<th scope="row"). You could make the first column
(person's name) be the row header. But if the name contains UCF, that
might make for a confusing row header.