Reading Your Site With the Screen Off

Why an audit report does not change anything

A list of thirty technical issues, each with a reference number, reads as a compliance document.

It gets filed, prioritised behind everything urgent, and revisited never.

Ten minutes of being unable to use your own site does something a report cannot, which is make the problem yours.

Businesses that actually do this exercise fix things afterwards, and businesses that merely receive the report generally do not.

The exercise

• Turn on the screen reader your device has.
• Turn the screen fully off.
• Find your contact page.
• Complete the form.
• Note where you got stuck.

The second is the part everybody skips and the only part that matters. Listening while watching the screen tells you nothing, because your eyes solve every problem before your ears notice it.

Getting it started

Since the tool is already on the device.

Every phone and computer has a screen reader built in, under accessibility in the settings, and it takes about a minute to enable.

Learn the two or three gestures or keys for moving to the next item and for activating something, which is genuinely all you need for this.

Then turn the display off entirely, or close your eyes and keep them closed, which is harder than it sounds and works.

Give yourself ten minutes and expect to fail, since the first attempt almost always ends in giving up somewhere.

Do not look at the screen to check where you are, which defeats the whole exercise and is very tempting after about four minutes.

That failure, and exactly where it happened, is the whole finding of the exercise.

What you will hit

Predictably, since these are the same on most small business sites.

Images announced as a file name, or as nothing at all, where the photograph was the content.

A menu that reads as a long list of unlabelled items.

Form fields announced as edit text with no indication of what they want.

A button called click here, repeated eleven times.

And an error message that appears visually and is never announced, so you submit the same form three times without knowing why it failed.

A worked example

A business owner tried this after two years of ignoring an audit report.

He could not find the telephone number, could not tell which field was which on the form, and gave up after eight minutes.

The audit had listed every one of those problems and he had read it as technical detail.

He fixed the form labels and the link text that week, personally, without being asked again.

The report had not changed his behaviour in two years and eight minutes did.

That is the entire argument for doing this rather than commissioning something.

Do the whole path, not one page

Which is where the real problems live.

Start from the home page and get all the way to a submitted enquiry, as a stranger would.

Individual pages are frequently fine and the path between them is where somebody gets lost.

A menu that cannot be navigated, a step that requires seeing where you are, or a confirmation that is never announced.

Testing a single page passes and testing the journey fails, which is why audits of individual pages miss the thing that actually loses the enquiry.

Do the telephone number too, since for many trades that is the real conversion.

Have somebody else watch

Which makes it more useful and considerably more persuasive.

Somebody watching you struggle with your own site takes the point immediately, without needing to try it themselves.

That is the fastest way to get a decision made where the person paying is not the person testing.

Record it if you can, since two minutes of somebody failing to complete a form does more in a meeting than any document.

Keep it short and let it be uncomfortable, which is entirely the point.

Nobody watching a two-minute recording of somebody failing to submit a form asks for a business case afterwards.

This is not a substitute for real testing

Worth saying clearly, since the exercise can be overclaimed.

You are a sighted person fumbling with an unfamiliar tool, and somebody who uses a screen reader daily is far more capable and will find different problems.

So this finds the obvious barriers and misses the subtle ones, which is a genuine limitation.

Where accessibility matters commercially, particularly for public sector work, proper testing with actual users is the standard.

This exercise is for building the will to act, and the real testing is for knowing what to do.

Do it again after any change

Since accessibility is not a state a site reaches and holds.

A new page, a plugin update, a redesigned form, or a supplier adding a booking widget can each reintroduce every problem you fixed.

Repeat the ten minutes after any significant change, and once a year regardless, at the same time as the link check and the other annual items.

That is a short enough exercise to actually happen, which is more than can be said for commissioning an audit annually.

Keep a written note of what you fixed and the date you fixed it, so that a problem reappearing is recognised as a regression rather than investigated from scratch.

The counter-case

It can produce the wrong conclusions.

Struggling with an unfamiliar tool leads people to blame the screen reader rather than the site, which is the opposite of the intended lesson.

There is also a risk of treating a ten-minute exercise as an audit and concluding the site is fine because you managed.

And for some it is genuinely uncomfortable in a way that produces avoidance rather than action.

Turn the screen fully off, complete your own form from the home page, note where you gave up, and fix those things first.

The ten minutes

1. Enable the built-in screen reader.
2. Learn two gestures.
3. Turn the screen fully off.
4. Start at the home page.
5. Try to submit the form.
6. Note where you gave up.
7. Fix that first.

Step three is the whole exercise, since with the screen on your eyes quietly solve every problem before you notice one exists.

The practical version of this is covered in testing with a screen reader for the first time.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.