robert hahn

a darn good web developer

November 16, 2006

The Irony of Me Using Screen Readers

I have made no secret of the fact that I’m hearing impaired. Recently, the discussion around making YurtCMS accessible reminded me of the last time I played around with the Mac OS X screen reader.

If you’ve used a screen reader before, then you know that it’s a piece of software that’s designed to read the contents of your screen. The way the readers work is that they speak whatever text they come across, and maybe add some context (ie: if it ‘sees’ a Submit button, then it’ll say something like: “Button: Submit”).

So this is pretty cool and all, but I was having a tough time making out what the screen reader was saying while I was using it to test my web pages. So I hunted around, found, and toggled the caption feature.

So then I was able to read what the screen reader was saying while it was reading my web page.

Ponder that one.