What to ask your agency about screen readers

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on screen readers, these questions are worth asking early.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Test with one and the theory becomes obvious. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Announced changes need live regions. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about screen readers before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Correct markup does most of the work — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.