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Thread: Read aloud and accessibility
Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)
From: David Farough
Date: Fri, Oct 14 2022 12:06PM
Subject: Read aloud and accessibility
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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
From: Steve Green
Date: Fri, Oct 14 2022 12:32PM
Subject: Re: Read aloud and accessibility
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I have not used Read Aloud, but the reviews make for interesting reading. The Firefox extension has an average rating of 4 stars, which sounds good, but 15% of reviewers give it one star. Many of the individual reviews refer to it not reading parts of the content.
The Chrome extension also has a four star rating, but 11% of the first 100 reviewers gave it one star and there were quite a few two star ratings. Again, individual reviews refer to it not reading parts of the content.
I am going to have a play with it, but I am not particularly hopeful of learning why such a significant number of users have these problems.
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
From: Duff Johnson
Date: Fri, Oct 14 2022 12:53PM
Subject: Re: Read aloud and accessibility
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Quite simply, ReadAloud does not use the tags tree; it reads content as encoded by the software, not the *logical* content order as read by humans (and as defined for PDF processing purposes by the tags tree).
Often the order in which content is encoded and the logical content order coincide, especially with simpler documents… but often they do not.
Duff.
> On Oct 14, 2022, at 14:32, Steve Green < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> I have not used Read Aloud, but the reviews make for interesting reading. The Firefox extension has an average rating of 4 stars, which sounds good, but 15% of reviewers give it one star. Many of the individual reviews refer to it not reading parts of the content.
>
> The Chrome extension also has a four star rating, but 11% of the first 100 reviewers gave it one star and there were quite a few two star ratings. Again, individual reviews refer to it not reading parts of the content.
>
> I am going to have a play with it, but I am not particularly hopeful of learning why such a significant number of users have these problems.
>
> Steve Green
> Managing Director
> Test Partners Ltd
>
>
>