John Slatin was a leading light in the field of web accessibility, which is a passion of mine and my area of work. He co-authored Maximum Accessibility – a book on web accessibility – was co-chair of the WCAG Working Group for a time and led accessibility research at the University of Texas at Austin. Sadly, John passed away in March after a three-year battle with leukaemia.
I never met John, but along with many other accessibility experts, I’m taking part in the John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project to help raise money for John’s wife, Anna, to honour John and to promote his cause; accessibility.
The project aims to raise money to help his family with the medical expenses incurred during John’s illness. Volunteer accessibility experts are matched to companies that want to have their web site checked over for accessibility issues. In return for a brief accessibility audit, the web site owners contribute a minimum of $500 to the John Slatin Fund.
More than 70 accessibility experts have volunteered their time to the project; now we’re looking for companies to take part too. If you work for or know of a company that would be interested in taking part, please point the appropriate people to the project information for companies or contact me directly.
I ran some tests a couple of years ago that looked at how mathematical character references are handled by screen readers, specifically using default configuration in JAWS and Window-Eyes.
Jason Kiss of Accessible Culture has recently published a comprehensive set of results from his testing of how a variety of characters are dealt with by recent versions of JAWS and Window-Eyes: JAWS, Window-Eyes and Character References.
Analysis
A web author may expect characters such as the minus sign – a proper − or − as opposed to a simple dash – would be read out in an appropriate way by a screen reader. However, the most prevalent screen reader, JAWS, does not announce the character and the next most popular screen reader, Window-Eyes, reads it as “dash”.
Using JAWS, the results seem to be consistent even when you change the verbosity level, the punctuation level or the synthesiser used. It’d be interesting to know if anyone has managed to get a screen reader to announce these characters using the more advanced settings.
Personally, I’d like to see (or hear!) screen readers announcing additional characters; it would add to the character palette we can draw from when writing content, which I would expect to be even more important as the Web embraces internationalisation and localisation.
In the meantime, Jason provides a convenient table of results comparing the speech output from JAWS and Window-Eyes.
Update: Having posted about Jason’s work on Accessify Forum, I thought I’d add that some characters that do get spoken are not announced as one might expect:
- Both JAWS and Window-Eyes read a square root symbol (√) as the letter v and pi (π) as the letter p.
- While Window-Eyes makes minor tweaks to its speech output to make it a bit more user-friendly, it doesn’t always do what I think it should. As mentioned above, it says “dash” for the proper minus sign character.
- Window-Eyes announces quite a lot of characters as “question”. Presumably Window-Eyes hasn’t understood these characters so it is announcing the character as it would a question mark, which users may realise it means that Window-Eyes hasn’t understood. However, saying “question” is probably worse than simply not announcing anything at all.
I’ve been coerced into stripping off in aid of CSS Naked Day for another year, but I’ve also changed my behaviour.
What’s CSS Naked Day all about?
The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol [sic] play on words. It’s time to show off your
<body>.
It’s a nice way to exploit the viral nature of the Web to promote web standards and good design, and it works well because it has visual impact. The huge number of CSS design galleries are testament to the fact that the Web grew up to be a place to show off talent for visual design.
Where next for viral evangelism in web standards?
When it comes to separation of CSS and JavaScript from our plain old semantic HTML, CSS Naked Day has it covered. What about raising awareness of using progressive enhancement to implement JavaScript features? In a time when the Web is an application playground fuelled by Ajax, I’d like to see people paying more attention to making sites work both with and without JavaScript.
So, today I’m removing not just my CSS styles, but my JavaScript as well. Perhaps you’d like to do the same?
Hello, I'm Jon.
I’m the founder and Managing Director of As It Should Be, a UK consultancy helping digital teams design and build more accessible and sustainable digital products and services. I’m passionate about making the digital world better for all people and for our planet, running an ethical business, and practical approaches to accessibility and sustainability.
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