busybee fluffy rambles Notes

Manuel Matuzović shares a thought-provoking experiment: the sample page accompanying his article “Accessible to some” has been optimized for screenreader software only, making it a hellish experience for users using the visual interface with a mouse.

The example website would be a clever illustration, except that it doesn’t actually work with VoiceOver on macOS (on Safari it just reads the visible text, and while Firefox does a bit better it stops after reading the first chunk of text and doesn’t proceed), nor with the built-in screen reader in macOS Safari.

Using aria labels to override the text is a poor approach to making plain text documents screen-readable; a better approach would have been to do all of the obnoxious stuff purely through CSS, which would also allow this page to work in, say, lynx | say or the like.