How to get screen readers right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to screen readers is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
The reason this keeps coming up
Test with one and the theory becomes obvious. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Correct markup does most of the work
- Announced changes need live regions
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Announced changes need live regions. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Making it stick
In practice
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about screen readers before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Announced changes need live regions — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.