Mindy - 2:50 pm on Mar 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

Anything which automatically refreshes is really bad for someone using a screen reader because the screen reader will probably keep jumping back to the top of a page and starting over reading it. Apart from being incredibly annoying, it is actually really confusing, especially if you're just getting to know your screen reader and don't feel very confident with it.

If you're talking about redirecting to another page, it can be confusing as well unless you leave a long enough gap so that the user can hear that he's being redirected. The screen reader will start by reading the title bar. Depending on how the user prefers to navigate he can jump paragraph by paragraph or heading by heading or just have the page read in full. In any case, unless he has time to get to the point where he's told that he's about to be redirected he may get confused as he'll hear a title read, start to navigate and then hear another title read and won't know what's happened or how he got to the page he's on or what happened to the page he thought he was on.