I read an article this morning in the Wall Street Journal about-website access lawsuits. The number of lawsuits filed in federal court on behalf of impaired readers reached 2,250 in 2018.
This was an increase of three times the 814 lawsuits filed in 2017.
Does anybody know what features we need to have in place to make “screen reader” tools effective that read the contents of a site aloud.
How would you go about describing a jpeg image to a blind person?
Is this feature available as a stack or plugin somewhere?
Have a search around for accessibility tools, the W3C has a fairly good list of sites/software that will let you know where to improve. Some are free some are paid.
For jpegs Alt text is the important one to look for, use it to give a short snappy description as this will be what screen reading software will read back to some one visually impaired.
Some themes/stacks have some great support for Aria roles (a good feature which helps describe a page layout to a screen reader, i.e. this area is the nav bar, this is content, this is a button which does this etc.).
I know Will Woodgate’s themes from theme flood have a lot of good aria markup in them. Also Joe Workman’s Foundation suite of stacks have Aria support and scored quite well for accessibility, though some of this will need a bit more input from you to get setup due to its free form nature.
Can’t speak for Elixir’s Foundry framework or Weaver’s Kingdom’s UI Kit framework as I don’t have either of them.
a lot of the WAI-ARIA( Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) stuff deals with user interface components like navigation and dynamic content like CMS and is probably more the Theme maker, CMS system or Frameworks builders responsibility.
There are a number of tools available to test a site.
A good one to start with is WAVE. They also have browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome.
Another good (more technical) resource: