[CEUD-ICT] WebAIM Screen reader survey results

[Dónal Fitzpatrick]

Mark,

Apologies in advance this is a rather long mail.  You are forgetting that
the "skim reading" capabilities are not present in most screen readers.  So
if one visits an unfamiliar home page, even if one knows that a link (such
as those you describe) are present it is not always apparent where it is.

So in this instance several strategies exist:

1.  read the whole page.  This, while on the face of it may seem to be the
slowest means of assimilating the content, is in fact (as Tim suggests) the
best way.  the reason is that on a return visit one is far clearer as to the
structure and content of the page.

2.  Use either the browser or screenreader search facility.  This can be
useful.  However, (to take your example) if one were to search for "route
map", one might encounter lots and lots of occurrences of the phrase.  This,
from experience, can often lead to a time-consuming and often fruitless time
on a home page and frequently necessitates a return to "1" as described
above.

3.  If specific information is being sought, then the features of _some_
screen readers can be employed.  So, once again to use your example, one
could:
A) use either jaws or Windoweyes features to bring up a list-view of all
links on the page and see if "route map" were there;
B) use the Mac OSX VoiceOver's "item chooser" menu which will, once again,
bring up a list of all items on a page.  If one then starts to type in the
phrase "route map" it will, through incremental search, reduce the page to
only items containing this phrase.

>From my own anecdotal experience, I should probably say that this last
method of navigation is only one I use when I am familiar with the page.
For example, when I navigate to BBC Five-Live, I use the OSX "item chooser"
menu to find the "listen live" link.  This is because I know it to be
present, and can use this incremental search facility to go straight there.
Also, this is not an exhaustive list of the navigational strategies employed
merely a sample.

Various methods have been tried to provide either automatic summaries of
pages or indeed to provide alternative "views" of the pages.  The work of
Mary Zajicek at Oxford Brookes in the late 90s is an interesting example of
summarisation of pages.  I was involved in participating in user-trials of
the Brookestalk browser, and found her techniques to work very well indeed.
Mary's work used linguistic techniques to summarise pages.  In terms of
providing alternative views of pages, I would definitely recommend looking
at the work of Esmond Walshe which was carried out at DCU a few years ago.
Built on top of Emacs, this research enabled very very rapid navigation and
exploration of pages.  Again I saw quite a bit of this work, and after only
a few minutes training, I certainly found that the techniques used worked
extremely efficiently.

The point behind all this rambling is to ask a question I've been thinking
about for quite some time; one on which I would be most interested to hear
the thoughts of other contributors.  Do screen readers, such as those in
popular usage today, actually provide the kind of access to pages that makes
their navigation and exploration either efficient or (to use another word)
enjoyable?  The one feature of Esmond's work which I thought was superb, was
to highly customise the view of pages.  I have long held the view that
generalised screen readers do not, in fact, provide the kind of access that
the ever-evolving internet need...

Thanks,

Dónal