Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites

Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers - Report

[mattur]

Worthwhile article from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology advising how to make a site usably-accessible to people using screen readers. Interesting points on content and use of keywords in links and headings that IMHO tie-in nicely with general usability and SEO principles.

We describe insights gained from our observations and we present guidelines that can help designers and developers both meet the letter of the law and actually make Web sites usable to people who listen to screen readers.
...
Guideline 1. Write for the web. Write in short, clear, straightforward sentences. Use bulleted lists. Put the main point at the beginning of a paragraph. Write links that start with keywords.
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Guideline 22. Encourage authors to use many headings in their content and to be sure that those headings are clear, meaningful, and parallel. This guideline is critical for both sighted users and screen-reader users.
...

[redish.net...]

[tedster]

That's a rally informative read - thanks for the link, mattur.

I've never seen such detailed usability information for screen readers. The JAWS issues are particularly informative - the potentially mispronounced words like 'homepage', 'content' and so on.

The paper's opening point was very helpful and reinforcing for the Best Practices I am currently working to enforce with a writing staff:

Most blind users are just as impatient as most sighted users....
They "scan with their ears," listening to just enough to decide whether
to listen further. Many set the voice to speak at an amazingly rapid rate....

Where a sighted user might find a keyword by scanning over the entire page,
a blind user may not hear that keyword if it is not at the beginning of
a link or a line of text.

[pageoneresults]

Great find mattur!

Our participants desperately wanted to not listen to the navigation each time they got to a page. They wanted to get right to the content. But only half of our participants knew what "skip navigation" means. Some ranted to us about the problem of having to listen to the same "stuff" on each page, but they did not choose "skip navigation." Some jumped to the bottom of each page and scanned back up the pages to avoid the "stuff" at the top.

I guess my use of CSS-P addresses the above issues as all of my navigation elements come after the main content. ;)

[benihana]

I guess my use of CSS-P addresses the above issues as all of my navigation elements come after the main content

AFAIK, with only a brief use of JAWS.

you might want to check this. JAWS ties closely in with IE, so the browser renders it, and then JAWS speaks whats on screen; i.e. source ordering doesnt matter.