A while ago I spent a weekend learning to use Jaws (screenreading software) with the monitor switched off. I’m very interested in accessibility in terms of the practical benefits you can put in place for your users. Unfortunately it often boils down to people attempting to conform to a set of guidelines in order to claim some level of credibility. I think, although this is necessary, it makes it very easy for people to see this as a very dull, compulsory step in development, when in fact it’s a fascinating way to make your content available to everybody.
I think most Jaws users develop different patterns and ways in which they use the tools, but I found by far the most frustrating thing was trying to get random access to a particular part of a page without listening to the whole document. When a page loads you visually take in a whole load of information and pointers about where to focus your attention depending on what you’re looking for. This is very difficult to do if you have to sequentially listen to each piece of content in turn.
One of the features I was using the most was hitting ‘h’ to cycle through the headings in the document (and also the headings dialog which lists the headings on the page). Pages that used proper heading markup were so much easier to navigate. You could then locate the section you’re looking for, then listen to the content.
Something I’ve started to do since then is ensure that I have a strong heading structure for my content regardless of what appears onscreen. For example, if there’s a list of navigation lists I’ll include a heading element of ‘Site Navigation’ whether or not this is included in the visual design. This improves the structure available to users cycling through the headings on your page. To find the navigation section, you can just hit ‘h’ repeatedly until the correct heading is reached.
One point to note is that depending on how the heading is hidden onscreen, Jaws may or may not be able to detect it. Using display:none is bad - Jaws will not pick it up. Using position:absolute; left: -5000px will mean that the heading is not visible onscreen but is still available to Jaws users. I don’t particularly like relying on this kind of arbritrary styling, but until there’s a decent way to style for aural consumption, it seems like a practical step that can be applied right now.