A day spent using a screen reader

Wow. Spending a day on the ol’ JAWS screen reader does wonders. It’s amazing what little tidbits of accessibility tweaks you can get, even from browsing sites you’ve built with aspirations of true accessibility.

Some unofficial suggestions:

Use emdashes ? not hyphens ? to pause in a sentence.

Hyphenated words are awkward, because the dash is read out loud.

If you use an icon to denote the type of link, don’t use brackets or parentheses in the ALT tag. It’s looks nicer in text browsers, but sucks in speech.

Using the same text for both the ALT tag and caption of a photo is awkward, because it reads the same thing twice in a row. Suggestions? Email me.

Use labels and link titles to their fullest extent.

Good grammar and punctuation is crucial, such as putting an apostrophe when referencing eras/decades (like the 1990’s.)

Ben Tesch

A day spent using a screen reader

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