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In Experiment 1, I tested common web elements that have existed for a long time (such as headings, lists, images, buttons, and links).I tested the performance of VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS, and TalkBack, on major devices (desktop and mobile), operating systems (macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android), browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera / Opera Touch, and Edge), and reading modes (continuous reading, where you allow the screen reader to “run on its own” and controlled reading, where you use keyboard or touch shortcuts to “tell” the screen reader what to announce next).
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If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of how screen readers work, how I designed the experiments, and what kind of results I got, feel free to read my 2020 article, “ The troubled state of screen readers in multilingual situations“. Putting my science degrees to good use, I devised some experiments that could help me elucidate what exactly was going on with these language bugs. After a while, I began to notice minor patterns, until I finally decided it was time to properly study this phenomenon. Googling didn’t help much neither did asking my peers and mentors at Wunder. The first few times I thought the developers must not have properly declared the language however, when I looked at the code, everything seemed correct. If the wrong voice is used, you can end up listening to Finnish text being butchered in an English accent (or vice versa).ĭuring that early internal assignment, I was testing website after website, and noticed constant mismatches between the language of the text and the voice synthesizer used to announce it. In multilingual situations, screen readers are supposed to figure out the language of each text portion from the code, and then choose the correct voice synthesizer accordingly. This is what I will henceforth call “a multilingual situation”: when the language of the screen reader and the language of the content are not the same. As a result, my work computer and screen reader were in English, but I had to test a lot of websites that were exclusively in Finnish, or in Finnish as well as other languages. I did speak Finnish back then already, although not fluently enough to use it at work.

This, of course, included screen reader testing. One of my first internal projects involved assessing the accessibility status of many services developed by Wunder.
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Nowadays I can comfortably use VoiceOver on Mac and iPhone, NVDA and JAWS on Windows, and TalkBack on Android.
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For example, they can inform the user about special kinds of text (like headings and links), read out text alternatives for non-text content (like images), and explain how to use a complex web widget (as long as the necessary ARIA attributes are present in the HTML code).Īlthough I had learned the basics a while back, I only became a frequent screen reader user once I joined Wunder as a UI developer and accessibility specialist. Screen readers speak out text content, and they also provide information that is otherwise only available visually or, in some cases, programmatically. Screen readers were initially developed to help blind and low-vision people interact with computers, although many other users (such as people with dyslexia or people who are unable to read) can benefit from them as well.
