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Read aloud and accessibility

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From: David Farough
Date: Oct 14, 2022 12:06PM

Good afternoon;
Recently we had a complaint from a user who was using Read aloud to review an application she had submitted using our recruiting application.

When she was using the next button to move to the next paragraph, read Aloud was moving passed some information on the page.
It seems to me that this tool cannot be relied on to sequentially process everything on the page.
Are there things that we can do to improve accessibility for those that use this type of application to access our content?
Do these applications use the DOM to process the web content?
This person does not have low vision but may have some other learning disability that makes using Read aloud beneficial for her.
She does not want to have to change her way of doing things particularly if as she feels, that Read aloud can provide her what she needs.

If I understand her issues correctly, the problem may be about how Read aloud handles soft returns.

Can anyone shed some light on this?
Is there something we can do to help these users?
I am assuming that Read aloud is not actually considered to be access technology.

Thank you in advance for anything you can provide to increase my understanding of this issue.
David Farough
Application Accessibility Co-ordinator,
Corporate IT Management
Public Service Commission of Canada/ Government of Canada