Piece written by Mandy Michael, Hireup Senior Software Engineer
Testing for screen reader accessibility can bring up some really surprising issues, and fixing them isn't always as difficult as you might think.
Every month we host a session with some of our users to test accessibility across different parts of our website. During one of our recent sessions, we discovered a problem with some placeholder text. When we ask the question “What language do you use?”, the placeholder said: “eg: Mandarin or Auslan”.
We discovered that when JAWS and Voiceover read the text, it pronounced the “eg” as “egg”, as in the chicken and the egg (oops). The screen reader was reading it in full as: “egg: Mandarin or Auslan”. Rightfully so, our users had a bit of a chuckle but inferred that it meant “e.g.” or in other words; “For example”.
1. Little mistakes add up.
No matter how small, little mistakes can build up frustration for users and make someone’s experience generally unpleasant
2. Writing “eg” instead of “e.g.” is technically incorrect.
A sighted user might read it as “eg” because they have a lot more context. They can see the whole sentence at once, it’s faded out, they can immediately infer that it’s “example” text. This is not obvious for users with screen readers or if the design context is missing
3. It’s extra effort to have to think about what it means.
This might be fairly automatic for people whose first language is English, but for everyone else it might not be as obvious and further increases the effort needed to understand what we want someone to do
4. Your site/document/presentation will be simply evaluated based on what you have provided.
Not everything that consumes your page is going to be able to infer what your intentions are. Whether it’s a screen reader, or a bot like a search engine, if we want our content to function as expected across different technologies we have to make sure we follow the systems that are in place for the languages we are supporting. Otherwise we’re creating misunderstandings.
So what’s the fix?
It’s really simple. Don’t forget the dots! We updated our placeholder text to read “e.g: Madarin or Auslan '' and now, thankfully it reads out as “For example: Mandarin or Auslan.'' The bonus is no matter who is using our site, it reads correctly for everyone!
It’s always good to remind ourselves why correct grammar and punctuation is important, typos are common and it’s easy to miss, but don’t egg-nore the small stuff. The more of these “small” issues you have, the harder you are making things for the people who use or need your product or services, and that’s bad for everyone.
