Signs it is time to revisit screen readers
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few signals that screen readers is due some attention.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The signals
- Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
- The answer depends on who you ask
- Test with one and the theory becomes obvious
- Correct markup does most of the work
How we handle it
Announced changes need live regions. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The short version
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
- 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
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.