With almost a quarter of all search queries on Android devices currently spoken, here's more detail on the work we've been doing to meet the emerging needs of voice assistant users and make government more accessible.

Empathy. It’s the latest buzzword circling around the industry as more and more companies strive to improve their customer experiences. At…

This demonstrates how a screen reader reads a PDF document that has not been tagged. It is essential for PDF documents to be tagged so that screen readers know how the document is structured. If tags do not exist, the screen reader and Adobe Acrobat will make their best attempt to figure out how the document is structured.

In this case this document was created as PDF from Microsoft Word on OS X. It consists of a heading with two simple columns of text. The text of the document is as follows.

"Handout for Class

This is the most important piece of information you will receive in this class. Make sure you read every part of it and fully understand it.
 
Failure to do so will most like result in you failing the class. I cannot be responsible for your lack of preparation for my class."

In this example, the screen reader incorrectly reads the text straight across the page, jumping from column to column. Additionally, since it cannot determine how the letters are related to one another, the screen reader and Adobe Acrobat attempt to figure out how the letters should be organized. This results in numerous nonsensical words.

Instead of looking away or ignoring the situation, I had to acknowledge the freedom I experienced on a daily basis and the obstacles that impeded the experiences and basic dignity of the disabled community.

This demonstration uses the NVDA screen reader with the Focus Highlight Add-on to browse a website and use various features of both NVDA and the website.  Features used include landmark browsing and form entry.

Our blog about using a screen reader for accessibility testing: https://designspike.com/blog/how-to-use-a-screen-reader-web-accessibility/

Eighteen academic library users who are blind were interviewed about their experiences with academic libraries and the libraries’ websites using an open-ended questionnaire and recorded telephone interviews. The study approaches these topics from a user-centered perspective, with the idea that blind users themselves can provide particularly reliable insights into the issues and potential solutions that are most critical to them. Most participants used reference librarians’ assistance, and most had positive experiences. High-level screen reader users requested help with specific needs. A larger number of participants reported contacting a librarian because of feeling overwhelmed by the library website. In some cases, blind users and librarians worked verbally without the screen reader. Users were appreciative of librarians’ help but outcomes were not entirely positive. Other times, librarians worked with users to navigate with a screen reader, which sometimes led to greater independence. Some users expressed satisfaction with working with librarians verbally, particularly if websites did not seem screen reader user friendly, but many users preferred independence. Participants agreed it would be helpful if librarians knew how to use screen readers, or at least if librarians were familiar enough with screen readers to provide relevant verbal cues. Many users liked and used chat reference and many preferred Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) to learn citation style, though learning citation style was challenging. Questions such as reference librarians’ role when e-resources are not equally accessible deserve wider discussion in the library literature and in practice. Given the challenges described by the research participants and legal requirements for equally effective electronic and information technologies, libraries and librarians should approach reference services for blind users more proactively. Recommendations are provided.

Building culturally-relevant AI... and how nobody has yet.

Students who are blind rarely major in math or science, and Emily Schlenker understands why, from personal experience.A pre-med major at Wichita State ...

Companies love to get press for disability tech projects, but they often aren’t all that interested in actually putting real money behind them.

Most JavaScript libraries offer a library of client-side widgets that mimic the behavior of familiar desktop interfaces. Sliders, menu bars, file list views, and more can be built with a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Since the HTML4 specification doesn't provide built-in tags that semantically describe these kinds of widgets, developers typically resort to using generic elements such as  and . While this results in a widget that looks like its desktop counterpart, there usually isn't enough semantic information in the markup to be usable by an assistive technology.

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Blog posts and short videos on metadata, accessibility from an A/V perspective.

Karwai Pun is an interaction designer currently working on Service Optimisation to make existing and new services better for our users. Karwai is part of an accessibility group at Home Office Digital, leading on autism. Together with the team, she’s created these …

Joe majored in economics at the University of Pennsylvania, got a law degree at Harvard, worked in the legal department at Bear Stearns, became head of solutions at Barclays Wealth, and is now a private-client banker at US Trust.  Joe was born with cone-rod dystrophy.  The key to all of this is an iPhone (AAPL) feature called VoiceOver.

Introduces the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard, including WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1. WCAG documents explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.