Testing With a Screen Reader for the First Time

You already have one

No purchase is required and nothing needs installing.

Every current desktop operating system includes a screen reader, and so does every phone. There is also a well-regarded free option on Windows that many blind users prefer.

Which means the barrier to this has never been cost. It is that turning one on for the first time is disorienting and most people give up in the first two minutes.

Expect that, plan for it, and it becomes a half-hour exercise rather than an abandoned one.

The first two minutes are the worst

It will start talking immediately, faster than you expect, describing things you did not ask about.

Your instinct will be that it is broken or unusable. It is neither. It is a tool designed for people who use it every day, in the way a text editor with keyboard shortcuts is not designed for casual visitors.

Learn how to stop it and how to turn it off before you start, so you are never trapped, and slow the speech rate down for your first session.

Then accept that you are a beginner using expert software, and that your difficulty is not evidence about your site.

Learn four commands, not forty

You do not need to be proficient. You need enough to move around.

• Start and stop the screen reader.
• Read the next item, moving through the page.
• Move by heading, which is how people navigate.
• Move between form fields and links.
• Silence it without turning it off.

Each has a documented shortcut for whichever reader you are using, and five minutes with the documentation is enough to begin.

Do not look at the screen

The part that makes it useful and the part everybody skips.

Listening while watching lets your eyes fill in everything the audio failed to convey, and you will conclude the page is fine.

Close your eyes, or turn the monitor off, or use your phone with the screen curtain feature that blanks the display entirely.

Then try to do something specific rather than browsing: find the phone number, find the price of one service, or complete the contact form.

The gap between what you know is on the page and what you can actually reach is the finding.

What you will hear

The problems are consistent enough to predict, and hearing them is different from reading about them.

Images announced as their file name, or as nothing at all.

Form fields announced as edit blank, because there is no label attached.

Link after link announced as read more, with no indication of where any of them go.

A heading structure that jumps around, so moving by heading skips content or lands somewhere unexpected.

And buttons announced as button with no name, usually icons with no text alternative.

A worked example

A firm ran an automated check that reported nine issues and considered themselves in reasonable shape.

The office manager spent half an hour with the screen reader on her own laptop, with the screen off, trying to book a callback.

She could not complete it.

The form fields were announced as edit blank, so there was no way to know which was the name and which was the phone number.

The submit control was an icon announced as button, with nothing indicating it would send anything.

And the confirmation, when she guessed correctly, appeared visually with no announcement at all, so there was no way to know whether it had worked.

None of those three appeared in the automated report. All three were fixed in an afternoon.

Silent success is the one nobody catches

Worth singling out, because it is invisible in every other kind of testing.

When a form submits, an error appears, or something is added to a basket, the page usually shows a message visually.

If that message is simply drawn on screen without being announced, a screen reader user receives nothing at all, and has no way to tell whether their action worked.

The result is somebody submitting a form three times, or abandoning it, having done everything correctly.

This is a genuine defect that no automated tool will report and no sighted tester will notice, and finding it is one of the strongest arguments for doing this at all.

Test on a phone as well

Both major phone platforms include a screen reader, and the interaction is entirely different.

Navigation is by swiping rather than by keyboard, and a page that works on a desktop reader can behave badly on a phone, particularly around menus and anything that opens over the page.

Most of your visitors are on phones, so if you only have time for one, do that one.

The screen curtain option, which blanks the display while leaving the phone working, is the easiest way to test honestly, since it removes the temptation to peek.

What this does not give you

Half an hour makes you a beginner, not an expert, and the results should be read accordingly.

You will find genuine faults. You will also struggle with things that are fine, because you do not know the software.

The way to tell them apart is whether the information exists at all. If a field is announced as edit blank, that is a fault. If you cannot work out the right shortcut, that is you.

It also does not replace testing with actual users, who navigate differently, faster, and with expectations you do not have. If your site matters enough, paying somebody who uses this software daily for an hour is the most informative thing available.

The counter-case

There is a way this goes wrong, and it produces bad decisions.

A beginner finding a page confusing and concluding the site is a disaster will sometimes commission a rebuild that was not needed, because their difficulty was with the tool rather than the page.

Equally, a beginner who gets through a task and concludes everything is fine has proven very little, since they knew what the page contained before they started.

Use it to find specific defects: a missing label, an unannounced confirmation, an unnamed button. Those are concrete, verifiable, and fixable.

Do not use it to form a general judgement about how usable your site is for somebody who has spent ten years with the software.

The half hour

1. Find how to turn it off before turning it on.
2. Slow the speech rate down.
3. Learn four commands from the documentation.
4. Turn the screen off or close your eyes.
5. Attempt one real task, not a browse.
6. Write down what was announced as blank or unnamed.
7. Repeat on a phone if you only do one.

Step five is the whole exercise, because a task either completes or it does not and there is nothing to interpret.

Writing the descriptions it reads out is covered in describing an image for somebody who cannot see it.

Frequently asked questions

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