Welcome to this repository dedicated to examining the interaction between screen readers and web content. Here, you’ll find insights and findings from this experiment, shedding light on the intricacies of accessibility in digital environments and how screen readers (SRs) navigate them.
In June 2020, Xurxe Toivo García, an Accessibility Specialist, published the article “The troubled state of screen readers in multilingual situations”. The article clicked with us so much that we decided to dive deeper into his experiments. We shifted our focus to not just see how well or poorly SRs handle different multilingual HTML elements, but to really understand how SRs interact with both the content and the software involved (like browsers and speech synthesizers). We wanted to figure out how they can be set up to work in a multilingual context and why they produce speech output in one language or another for each block of information.
We chose our SRs and browser combinations based on the latest SR usage survey (WebAIM 2024). To keep things manageable, we only used one browser with the two mobile SRs (TalkBack and VoiceOver) and with VoiceOver for Mac since these are the most common setups. Here’s the full list of combinations we used:
Here’s a quick summary of what we did:
We are currently in the process of finalizing an article that will provide a comprehensive overview of our research. Once it is published, we will update this README with the link for those interested in delving into the details. Thank you for your patience!
Álvaro García-Garcinuño (Universidad de Salamanca/Universidad de Puerto Rico)
Jesús Torres-del-Rey (INICO, Universidad de Salamanca)
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
First published: May 27, 2024
Last updated: September 3, 2024