OT: People who use Screen Readers

Ian said:

Been working on a freelance project during the day over the last couple of weeks before work, which has been pretty time-consuming and that's why I've been a little scarce here recently. But it's been quite eye-opening, with this particular project focusing on improving the experience on a site for screen readers. It now has me taking a long look at some things here, as I'm pretty shocked and blown away at what people have to deal with.

I'd like to know if anyone here is visually impaired and is forced to use them, along with what I can try to do to make the experience here better. I'd also like to know if you've found any sites extremely well done when it comes to that, as I'd like to get a feel for what features or methods might be helpful that I'm not aware of. I'm still really getting my feet wet with this and would love any insight people might be able to provide.

All I've learned the last few weeks is that the internet is mostly a miserable place for visually impaired people. So I'm going to make a push this offseason to try to make this place better from that standpoint, and would appreciate any feedback from anyone on here who deals with this, and hopefully make life a little easier here.

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UGAPatsfan said:

Good on you Ian. Something I never considered. You mentioning it prompted a few emails to my team to audit our websites.

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Ian said:

It's horrible. Go on YouTube and look at how visually impaired people are forced to surf the web on phones. I put my phone in that mode to test it and had a heck of a time getting my phone back out of that mode because the way they have to navigate is not at all easy. Neither is finding what you're looking for, cycling through links, etc. It's absolutely brutal.

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