[HN Gopher] WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #9
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WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #9
Author : d4kmor
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-05-07 12:58 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webaim.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (webaim.org)
| codeofdusk wrote:
| I'm totally blind and use a screen reader. Was surprised to see
| this on HN as I normally see this sort of thing just in
| accessibility spaces on Twitter or similar! Hopefully more
| mainstream coverage will mean that accessibility gets on the
| radar of more developers.
| willio58 wrote:
| I'm a firm believer that web accessibility should and will
| become more mainstream. I don't see web accessibility laws
| becoming less stringent.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Is there a way to contact you? I would have hundreds of
| questions that come to mind on how you use the Web.
|
| I'm building a web browser [1] that tries to make the semantics
| of the web automateable, so its goals are kind of aligned with
| blind people in regards to semantics and extraction.
|
| My knowledge of how blind people use the web is kind of
| outdated, though. Is JAWS still a thing?
|
| (My web browser is far from being stable, lots of things don't
| work yet and there's a ton of work left)
|
| [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
| miki123211 wrote:
| I'm also a (totally blind) screen reader user. My email is
| just my HN username followed by @gmail.com.
| codeofdusk wrote:
| JAWS is still a thing although it is definitely declining in
| popularity. My email is my HN username at gmail dot com, and
| I'm also my HN username on lots of other social media sites.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but you can contact me if you like; my email
| is in my profile. I'm not totally blind, and I don't use a
| screen reader exclusively. But I use one a lot when browsing
| the web. Also, I worked on the Windows accessibility team at
| Microsoft for three years, and I wrote a Windows screen
| reader and a talking web browser before that.
|
| Edit: To answer your other question, yes, JAWS is still
| maintained and widely used, but it's not as dominant as it
| once was. On Windows, the NVDA open-source screen reader is
| quite popular, and the built-in Narrator screen reader is on
| the rise (though of course I'm biased, since I worked on it).
| iOS with its built-in VoiceOver screen reader is also quite
| popular among blind people, at least in the US.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I've taken a look on the WebAIM surveys from the last years
| and have seen that NVDA is on the rise. It's so nice to see
| that JAWS finally loses their market share.
|
| I was asking because back around 2008 when I was more
| involved with Accessibility on the Web, we built a website
| that had a legal requirement to be as accessible as
| possible. So therefore we were trying to generate
| accessible double-paged PDFs, voicing over DAISY books and
| all. And doing so was so much work. We spent thousands of
| man hours just on document conversion, even when the
| underlying source format for the documents was RTF which is
| at least theoretically easy to parse in regards to
| layouting.
|
| Every time we tried to make things compatible with JAWS, we
| realized that JAWS was just a pile of dirty Trident hacks
| that wasn't integrated as nicely as someone would expect
| such a software to be.
|
| It was before the rise of AI/CNNs so therefore converting a
| vectorized PDF back into a semantic one was totally
| impossible. These days tesseract seems to make huge
| progress, but is still unusable for the task in practice
| due to its high failure rate in recognized words that you
| cannot fix with tricks like a Levenshtein distances or
| dictionary statistics.
|
| Eversince I've been more on the Linux side of things,
| though. Here the ecosystem is so bad that I cannot even
| start to describe it. Most TTS engines are literally from
| the last millenia, and projects like Orca aren't made for
| anything serious when trying to embed it into your software
| to give users more access and control.
|
| Maybe you have also some hints here? Are there better
| alternatives that I'm not aware of?
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > Every time we tried to make things compatible with
| JAWS, we realized that JAWS was just a pile of dirty
| Trident hacks that wasn't integrated as nicely as someone
| would expect such a software to be.
|
| I know what you mean. Those hacks were the state of the
| art for all Windows screen readers from the late 90s
| through the mid to late 2000s; I did similar hacks
| myself. But now that Internet Explorer is finally dead (I
| think), we can leave all that in the past. These days,
| web browsers implement documented accessibility APIs
| (there are still a couple of competing APIs on Windows),
| and screen readers consume them. Of course, between the
| web application, the browser, and the screen reader,
| there's still room for misinterpretation of the
| standards, but the situation is better than it was back
| then.
|
| As for Linux, I dislike the Orca screen reader simply as
| a user. I hope to do something about that before too long
| (after my non-compete with Microsoft expires). I haven't
| yet studied the Orca codebase deeply though.
|
| Blind people have strong feelings about speech
| synthesizers. One of the most beloved speech synthesizers
| among blind power users was developed mostly in the mid
| to late 90s and last updated in 2002; unfortunately, it's
| closed source. I'm actually pretty comfortable with
| eSpeak, or more precisely the espeak-ng fork, and I know
| I'm not the only one. Many of us value consistent
| pronunciation and intelligibility at high speeds over how
| human-sounding the voice is.
|
| Document conversion is something that my new company is
| working on. I might do a Show HN on that sometime.
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