[Accessibility] Screen readers and WCAG - current state of art

James Teh jamie at jantrid.net
Wed Sep 2 15:47:33 PDT 2009


Hi Alexey,

I am one of NVDA's primar ydevelopers. It'd be great if you could 
provide more specific information about exactly what code on the web 
sites was not supported by the screen readers. Based on the information 
in the post you referenced, it would seem that the big complaint is that 
text that should not have been read was read and that text specifically 
designed for the blind was not read.

To be honest, I'm not very familiar with WCAG 2.0. (I know of it, of 
course, but have never read it in detail.) However, I am a big believer 
that text designed specifically for the blind is generally a bad idea. 
There are of course exceptions - alt text for images, for example. 
However, in my opinion, the interface should be designed so as to not 
require a virtually "separate" interface. If the site needs to hide so 
much text from screen readers, this would seem to indicate a core flaw 
in the site's design.

In any case, I'd love to hear more specific information about the 
problems encountered.

Btw, for those that are interested, here is a link to the post using 
Google translate to translate it into English:
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=y&u=http%3A%2F%2Fcommunity.livejournal.com%2Fifap_ru%2F13520.html&sl=ru&tl=en&history_state0=

Jamie

On 3/09/2009 12:04 AM, Alexey Khoroshilov wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> My friends from "ICO Information for All" [1] have spent significant
> efforts to make their web-sites friendly to people with disabilities
> according to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 [2]. But as they
> report in [3], the efforts almost had no sense, since the leading screen
> readers NVDA and Jaws does not support standard instructions especially
> introduced for such kind of software.
>
> Is it a correct understanding of the current state of art?
>
> [1] http://www.ifap.ru/eng/index.htm
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
> [3] http://community.livejournal.com/ifap_ru/13520.html (in Russian)
>
> --
> Alexey
> _______________________________________________
> Accessibility mailing list
> Accessibility at lists.linux-foundation.org
> https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility

-- 
James Teh
Email/MSN Messenger/Jabber: jamie at jantrid.net
Web site: http://www.jantrid.net/


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